I had a quick look this week at the possibility of using either Wordpress or Joomla as a content management system, to enable me potentially to build a website but for someone else to keep it updated. Talking about a smallish site, maybe 20 pages max, mostly static content, nothing fancy…
I started with Joomla, easy to download, easy to install, didn’t find the user interface very intuitive (so neither would a less web-savvy user). The standard installation, however, came with about 3800 files….! Don’t know which ones I didn’t need so had to FTP the whole lot onto a server to test, not ideal. Created a couple of pages very easily using the standard template, but I thought the resulting html was excessively long, and used tables throughout. It was also invalid (a <p> tag within a <span> tag, if you’re interested). And this was for two paras of lorem ipsum. Not a great first impression.
Then I tried Wordpress, much better, much smaller initial install (the logic being that you then add on the bits you want), better user interface, valid code, no tables.
No contest, then.