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Open Source Usability — Joomla! Vs. WordPress
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?
at the moment, the link goes to a thread with 5 posts, none of which seem to have been written by an upset person.
Wow, this article is blatantly biased. Just look at the way he writes.
For the Joomla! examples, they feel the need to put quotations around everything. 'Control Panel', 'Title', and so on. Those same words (or similar words) in the WordPress section are for some reason easier to understand, so they don't warrant quotations.
Not to mention he described Joomla!'s processes as a technical writer would (loosely) and then described WordPress' processes as if casually telling a friend.
That alone stopped me from reading the article.
Disclaimer: I've used Joomla! once, and WordPress once. Both did their jobs admirably, but you can't compare apples and oranges - which is what this article is trying to do, with a heavy bias.
I use BOTH systems for the company web site. Joomla!, lets me create and customize things like menus, download zones, galleries of images, a forum, etc. A link points to our blog implemented in Wordpress. There are blog extensions for Joomla, but WP is IMO better than those.
Joomla is both a CMS and a framework to add powerful extensions, and using just for a blog is overkill. Wordpress is a blog (and of course able to present a simple static web site), but is limited beyond that.
Note also that there are many Joomla extensions in order to let other projects being integrated in the Joomla framework. See for example:
http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/content-&-news/blog/6659/details (integrate WP with Joomla)
It's pretty obvious that Joomla will have a larger learning curve so the comparison is really pointless.
Diversity is a good thing, and we should encourage it, not worry about it.
Great in theory, shit in practice. The amount of "geeks" and/or "nerds" out there who tell me I simply must use wordpress, or I must use Joomla (or Drupal) because it is better - regardless of my own needs - is so spectacularly high that I'm tempted to just say fuck it and write my own, portability be damned. The same applies to the Apple/GNU/Microsoft argument as well. I don't care if one is easier to use than the other, for me, OS X goes to my designers, wordpress to my blogging clients, joomla to my own systems, GNU for my servers, Microsoft for once off uses. The right tool for the right damned job. The second the people writing these "Vs." articles (and threads and what not) get that through their heads, is the second everyone figures out what they really need, not what they're told they should use.
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
Both vi and EMACS seem to have taken the "fuck the users" approach to heart.
There is a difference between being easy-to-use-first-time and usable. You appear to be confusing the two.
My pics.
Some guy called Nietzsche on the line ... something about the perils of fighting monsters.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Really? Both Vi and Emacs have some of the best builtin help available. They are both modal editors so they aren't going to be easy to understand without reading the manual but is it really the fault of the programs's creator that you cannot do advanced editing without reading the manual? If you want easy there are are hundreds of other text editors that are easier to use although they can't do half as much.
Time makes more converts than reason
Blind, uninformed apple criticism gets modded troll.
my experience is that any kind of apple criticism gets modded troll regardless of the criticism's informedness standing.
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