Open Source Usability — Joomla! Vs. WordPress

Posted by kdawson on Monday March 2, 2009 @10:20PM from the apples-and-orange-trees dept.

An anonymous reader writes "PlayingWithWire profiles two open source tools for Web development, comparing Joomla! and WordPress through the lens of usability. The article has apparently upset a few people at the Joomla! forum, but it does bring up a good point. Many open source projects are developed by engineers for engineers — should they focus more on usability? PlayingWithWire makes a bold analogy: 'If Joomla! is Linux, then WordPress is Mac OS X. WordPress might offer only 90% of the features of Joomla!, but in most cases WordPress is both easier to use and faster to get up and running.'" The article repeatedly stresses that blogging platform WordPress and CMS harness Joomla! occupy different levels of the content hierarchy. How fair is it to twit Joomla! on usability?

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Re:not a question by Arancaytar · 2009-03-02 23:23 · Score: 0, Flamebait

Err... no. Not necessarily.
"Usability" is another word for "safe for newbies and those too lazy to read the manual". Whether you want your software to be like this depends on your target audience. You wouldn't ask for the bash shell to become more "usable". It can be used by advanced users, and they are the only ones who need to use it. In the case of CMS and web frameworks, the target audience can be very varied: You get Ruby on Rails which only programmers use, and Joomla which is only really worthwhile if Drupal is too difficult.