Joomla! or Wordpress Mu?

February 27, 2007 6:50 PM

I've started cobbling a blogging site out in WordpressMu. Today, i ran across Joomla. I think I want to switch - any ideas?

i've started a blogsite using wordpress multiple user software. i currently have about 20 bloggers/users and i hope to add 50 or more. i've got a main site - though nowhere nearly as dynamiic or cool as some of the J! stuff i've seen today. thru this main page, users create or login to their own blogs and post. the problem with WPMU is that a lot of cool functionality just doesnt exist. everything i wanna do involves relentless searching thru less-than-friendly forums, heavy hacking of my core files and/or worse: an amateur attempt at hacking a Wordpress 2.0 plugin to work with WPMU.


i'm 2 weeks and nearly 100 hours into building this WPMU site. But even adding features that should be native to ANY blogsite - like global categories and tagging - requires hacking. I'm not lazy, but I've visited over 30 beautiful Joomla! sites today and every site owner claims to have done their work in a few days. if Joomla is the more powerful and effective answer than i'll switch ASAP.my question is thus: can i use Joomla in the same way? i've combed Joomla! forums and found extensions like MyHomePage and Xaneon Extensions' that seem as though they would do the same thing. i'm not looking for subdomains, subdirectories are fine: www.mysite.com/newuser. Can i create a blogsite with 50+ bloggers in Joomla!


your advice is appreciated.

posted by Davaal to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

I really can't say much about Joomla except that I was hired at my current job 2 weeks ago or so, and I've spent almost all of that time migrating our company's online documentation away from Joomla (in the words of our infrastructure guy, "a nightmare").

That said, it might just have been a wrong-tool-for-the-job type of problem.
posted by claudius at 1:54 AM on February 28, 2007

I've had good luck with Joomla. There is a bit of a learning curve, but worth it, in my opinion. There's a huge Joomla community out there, from templates, to add-ons, to help.

My advice, see if you can install Joomla on a dummy site and play with it for a while.

Luck,

G
posted by gb77 at 4:08 AM on February 28, 2007

Of late I have been tired of mucking around and hacking Wordpress - so while it may be ok for a single user site (with basic functions, and only mono-lingual moblogging) I wouldn't recommend it perhaps for multi-user.

I haven't used Joomla much - just one site and it is ok.

Currently though I'm in love with Expression Engine - which has lots of group function and access levels built in and easy to access. But as claudius says - it's a matter of what tool you need and how much you like to play around with code vs a control panel.
posted by gomichild at 4:11 AM on February 28, 2007

I second that Expression Engine. It's dead simple and has waaaaay more functions than you'll probably ever need, ann the appeal is that most of them are native. I'm not sure about Joomla, but EE does cost if you're wanting to use it to fall capacity - but it's worth it.
posted by heartquake at 5:25 AM on February 28, 2007

Here's an article that argues why you should use Joomla instead of Wordpress.

BTW, I've been looking at and trying free content managment systems like Joomla, Drupal, phpWebsite and a few others for awhile now. I've decided that in terms of support (forums & tutorials), size and ambition of the development community, security, ease of use, the number of extensions/modules/scripts and templates there are to choose from, and a few other things, that Joomla is definitely one of the very best.

However, I just learned that the next major upgrade (2.0), which is probably at least a year off, might not be very compatible with the extensions, templates, and data formats used by the current (1.x) version. That has me a little nervous, but I have to admit that I haven't done enough research yet to really know how valid my concerns are.
posted by 14580 at 7:03 AM on February 28, 2007

In my experience, Joomla is a pain to use, and requires a significant learning curve. If WPMU doesn't do everything you want, I recommend Drupal. It's free, and has lots of themes and modules, like EE.
posted by bkudria at 10:57 AM on March 4, 2007

bkurdria: After doing two sites in Drupal, I would add (for posterity) that Drupal has an incredibly steep learning curve. Writing a module in drupal requires forgetting about objects, and instead creating methods with special names that diddle with global variables. (And if you want any level of control, you will want to write or tweak the modules.)
posted by kamelhoecker at 7:38 AM on October 9, 2007