Simon Battersby

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.

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.