In the past, I’ve written that Movable Type and Wordpress were on almost even footing. This is simply no longer the case. Wordpress is better, faster, and stronger. Wordpress can be setup in minutes, the admin tool allows you to use it as a complete CMS (Content Management System), and the pages are coded for speed not to be a bunch of graphically pleasing but slow loading gradients. Why Movable Type made such an unbelievably slow loading backend is beyond me. Who needs a backend or admin tool that looks great, but sacrifices efficient functionality? If you’re starting a new site, do yourself a favor and start it with Wordpress.
Now when it comes to Drupal or Joomla as a content management system, you’re looking at a big learning curve for learning how to administer your site. Not so with Wordpress. Both Joomla and Drupal will have a more features, but since you probably won’t be able to find them, you probably won’t know they exist and won’t ever use them. Since it sounds like I’m starting to bash what are actually good tools, I’ll have to stop this post and allow you to make a decision. Wordpress has just set the bar so high, others have a lot of catching up to do.
May 5th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
Those aren’t very strong points you’ve got there as to why one would choose Wordpress over Drupal or Joomla. WP and MT, and Drupal and Joomla, were originally intended for entirely different purposes. Drupal and Joomla are _whole_ content management systems, it includes blogging, it includes other content types, it includes many more features than WP and MT offer. But because of that, Drupal and Joomla have higher learning curves. Wordpress has just been diversifying and expanding into CMS-related functionality as well.
Which one works best for someone all depends on his website’s purpose. If you’re strictly just hosting your own blog, obviously you would not need to use a real CMS. But if you want to do a lot of customizations and control, or if your site is a newspaper site with tons of content types and permission types for different users, then you need to have a proper CMS. Otherwise you’ll just try to build WP or MT by hand into one that it wasn’t meant to be.
May 8th, 2008 at 10:04 am
As a professional web developer, I have worked with Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, and a number of other content management system. Uh…you need to do your homework before you write two paragraphs on a subject.
As Karen talked about, Drupal, Joomla, and Wordpress are very different animals. Drupal is for full-fledged web content system for web developers. Joomla is also designed for full content management, but a bit less developer based. Wordpress is just a blog (no matter what insanity people do with it to run full websites). WP is a very good blog system, but still is just a blog system.
Personally, I recommend drupal for developers and wordpress for personal blogs.
May 8th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
I still wouldn’t agree, and my homework is done thank you. Plugins which add nearly any functionality you’d ever want are not “insanity”, they are add ons to a nice base of a site. You should read the article on Goal Focused Design
I think what you’re overlooking is that a huge percentage of websites are personal, and brochure type. It takes less, no, far less time to install, design, customize, and learn wordpress. Once you throw in efficiency and speed, Wordpress outweighs the others immensely.
Its a wonderful starting point for a huge percentage of websites, and as you want to grow and add functionality, there’s a huge number of very nicely designed plugins to help you.