Can you define the difference then between what Joomla! can do that WordPress can't? From what I can tell, WP has plugins available to do damn near everything.
While Wordpress can do a lot, at the end of the day, it's a blog, not a CMS. If your goal is blogging first, and other items secondary, it'll do the job most likely.
>> I've been fairly impressed so far, but also planned on looking >> at Joomla! (with, imo, has a cooler name just because it sounds rather >> silly :)
Drupal. Xaraya, Mambo (now Joomla). All of these names are silly.
I did a comparison between Joomla! and WP and they looked fairly equal with extremely minor exceptions. Perhaps I missed something. As I said, I've been poking at WP for less than a week and was also planning on poking at Joomla! in a similar way.
Joomla's pretty. It's also easy to use, and gets a lot of newbie attention as a result. But (IMHO) the backend is very much 'separate'. Install a new function, and there is no guarantee the new functionality will mesh with the old. It's like running multiple programs that don't (always) talk to each other. (nothing against Joomla, btw, plenty of older CMSes were the same way. I hated coding for Postnuke (now Xaraya) for that reason. Take a look at (and install) Drupal 5.0. Drupal's now 6 years old, and very mature, very easy to use, and unlike the above, it's _very_ much built from the ground up in a modular manner. Its' motto is 'community plumbing', in part because of the tinkertoy manner in which you can connect pieces together. Want your blog entries to have event calendaring? Ok. Now want to add geolocation and a map? Ok. What, you want voting and promoting the best stuff to the front page, troll and spam protection, group permissions, e-commerce, image galleries, ajaxian coolness, and 50 other things? Ok. And for the most part, they all talk/interact together... and if you want it simple, you can do that too...
One thing I *really* liked about Joomla! was the downloadable user manual available in PDF. It makes for reading about it much easier when you're on the train :)
There are books (including PDFs) on all of the better CMSes. Professional bound (or pdf) books on Drupal exist (and I recommend them) but they aren't needed, as there is a nice handbook online as well as a strong community of users. Local sites running drupal you might have visited lately, and the people behind them... http://nhpr.org (running a very custom version I think at this point) coded by a local Drupal whiz Morbus Iff ( http://www.disobey.com ) Haven't met him, though we've emailed once or twice. http://www.concordspca.org coded by http://carnevaledesign.com Never met them. http://democracyfornewhampshire.com don't recall who is webmastering this now, but it's running Civicspace (a Drupal repackaging) and is a bit aged now. and on the other side of the fence, http://nhliberty.org which I _used_ to webmaster, running a slightly newer CivicSpace version. I'll volunteer right now to do a Drupal introduction at a upcoming Concord GNHlug meeting, if someone will schedule it. Seth (who spend many of his days doing Drupal developing) _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
