Had another attempt at Joomla this week as I thought perhaps I hadn’t been quite fair last time…
Slightly more success, and this time I seemed to get valid code, using the JA-purity template. From my point of view, I find it considerably less intuitive from a developers perspective, and this carries through to a non-technical user perspective.
I found adding an image rather clunky (it’s not great in Wordpress either), and was surprised to find the image form allowing me to enter hspace and vspace attributes (now deprecated). Having said that, when I entered values it had no perceptible effect. So why’s it there?
The other odd thing I thought was the menu. In Wordpress if you add a page, it adds it to the menu automatically, but in Joomla you have to manually add the menu item. I guess this is a double-edged sword, but for a non-technical user adding the menu seemed a bit clunky. What I did like about the Joomla menu is that it comes with a built in “suckerfish” style dropdown.
The code generated, however, still seemed to have an advanced case of div-itis, and an unnecessary table.
So generally a bit more positive, but from a simplicity perspective, solely from a non-techy user’s point of view, I still prefer Wordpress.