The reality of Joomla! in comparison with WordPress
It’s the fact that majority of CMS beginners fall in love with WordPress CMS over others like Joomla! or Drupal because it’s well known and easy to use. Actually, WordPress and Joomla actually have the same beginning. Both share the same programming languages: JavaScripts, PHP, MySQL. HTML and CSS, and have the same development process: creating a design, adding content and expanding features with the help of extensions/plugins. However, have you ever wondered that with the same start, why WordPress surpasses Joomla to become the most popular CMS as it does? What has Joomla! do to get interest back from users under this situation?
To the first question, it might be easy to answer. WordPress is a blogging platform with huge commodity all over the world. It’s focused on blogging platform and ease of use. Not much advanced knowledge is required, so that has given WordPress a name recognition. Let’s see the statistics below:
But how has Joomla overcome?
However, Joomla recognized the potential of rivals and started to make a big change. It’s a turning point that Joomla! version 2.5 came out in 2012 with some advanced features than its former version 1.5, but unfortunately it was not warmly welcomed by users and the long term support and short term support (LTS/STS) turned out to put more stress on user-side. Therefore, a short time later, Joomla! version 3.0 got released and did better with series of version 3.x and the latest one is 3.6.2.
If you see that WordPress now takes a larger market share, you easily understand that there’s a decline in Joomla's and some may think that Joomla! is kind of done with existing problems.
Under this situation, suggestions have been taken seriously. It was decided not to support Joomla! 2.5 and create more user-friendly and advanced versions. After that, series of Joomla! version 3.x has been shown off to the whole world.
Additionally, a new community structure has been worked out with plenty of working-groups have been founded, each focusing on their tasks independently but quickly able to merge. The Joomla! itself became tremendously active, focusing on slowly enhancing the platform and cleaning up unnecessary stuff, making it incredibly stable and reliable. It’s the fact that Joomla! focuses on YOU and listen to YOU. It’s now developed by volunteers who are willing to spend the whole life on its development, and you are always welcomed to this volunteer group.
Even George Wilson of the Production Leadership Team (PLT) explained to Joomla! version 3.6 release:
“Joomla! 3.6 is a release focused on listening to our users. We’ve listened to our administrators who said that removing uploading Joomla! packages caused issues on intranet sites. We’ve listened to developers who were having practical issues with repeatable form fields. We’ve listened to site administrators who wanted an even simpler article and category creation workflow. Finally, we’ve fixed large numbers of bugs affecting our users and administrators".
Right after release of Joomla version 3.6, production team call contributors for Joomla! version 4 which is not intended to provide a massive ground up refactor of Joomla! but intended to give us large functionality improvements with limited backward compatibility breaks. Join team here.
Eventually, hard work always pays off. Last year, Joomla! won “The Best Free CMS” prize, and let it happen again this year by voting for the best free CMS in 2016.
Do you believe in future of Joomla!? Let the world know your opinion!
Well, we have gone so far right now. This is not an article to change your mind of WordPress, or to persuade you to use Joomla, but just a reminder that there is another better and available CMS as a solution for your site, simply. Agree with me? Let me know by comments, and follow us to get updated on other news and tips !
