Content management systems (CMS) such as Joomla or Wordpress are among the most popular open source solutions when you want to design a site by controlling the technical part of your platform in order to benefit from maximum flexibility and autonomy.
CMS have two main categories of users:
- web developer: a person developing the website, creating the global layout and in charge of safely maintaining and updating the website. The web developers can be technically skilled or not, simple amateur developing his/her own website (DIY).
- content manager: the end user of the content management system, who is responsible for managing text, photos or any content efficiently in any organization.
Main differences between Joomla and Wordpress
Both platforms can be used to build any websites, but in a different way :
Joomla is a complete open-source CMS with many built-in features like :
SEO or Schema.org fields, Custom fields, Multilingual pages, Advanced user management, User actions log, Caching system, http header security, Multi-factor Authentication for login pages, Accessibility check, Redirection system, Debug tools, Maintenance mode, SMTP mail sender, Search by indexation, Guided tours, etc.
Everything is maintained in a central github.com repository where volunteers can contribute or report bugs. Joomla advanced user management system, stability and regular security updates make it ideal for managing users with different roles. Joomla sits right in the middle between a lot of CMS available for high-end development like Drupal and a lot of Website builders (Wordpress, Wix, etc.) for everyday use designed by commercial companies.
Wordpress is also an open-source CMS, but with a smaller core and a built-in page builder. In order to achieve the same sets of features as a traditional CMS like Joomla, the web developer must add plugins. The plugins system is one of the reasons Wordpress is so appealing to "web developers" or "web agencies », who can choose between different extensions to build a custom site like using pieces of « legos ».
There’s a large choice of free and paid plugins, with different levels of quality and customization. The drawback is this boon of plugins has plagued the Wordpress world with security issues especially after the developer has abandoned its plugin or the user hasn’t updated it.
Another important difference is the legal structure of those platforms
Joomla is owned and has been managed for 19 years by a non-profit organization, which makes it a long-term safe bet even though the market share might be relatively small compared to Wordpress. Like any open-source project, it might be regularly slowed by endless discussions and fights, but very few open-source projects have been around as long as Joomla.
The brand Wordpress is owned by Automattic, a commercial company, led by its CEO Matt Mullenberg. Although the Wordpress CMS is open-source and its community of users is very large, this community has no weight for all decisions impacting the parent company profitability and future directions.
Automattic has recently taken over the free version of Advanced Custom Field (ACF), a plugin of WPEngine, one of its main competitors in the platform, using a security issue as a pretext. This move has created a great turmoil in the Wordpress community. Many users of Wordpress do prefer third-party frameworks and themes like Elementor or divi to the core page builder, and they will depend upon Automattic goodwill in the future.
Security and automatic updates
Some parts of the Wordpress core, themes and plugins can be automatically updated. It certainly helps the webmaster to maintain extensions up to date. Minor security core updates work well for websites carefully built by their developer, but I have seen sites with a complicated set up using third party themes or page builders crash after simple minor updates.
Using automatic updates for major version in a complicated Wordpress website using a lot of different plugins is just an unacceptable risk on a global website making it unavailable for many hours if it does crash. Then a web developer needs to know how to fix the issue by disabling some plugin, editing the mysql database or reinstalling a previous backup potentially losing user data. Version statistics do reveal that many Wordpress sites do not update to the latest major version.
Solutions for automatic updating or global extension management exist for both platforms. But automatic updates only work if all plugin developers do update their extensions.
A professional webmaster must also read the changelogs in order to adjust new settings, read security notices or manually update any plugin if any issue occur like in the Advanced custom field case.
In short, regular maintenance is the reason a website remains secure and efficient for its owner and for the content managers who are working on it.
Ease of use
The Site Administration (backend)
Liking the Wordpress or Joomla dashboard is a matter of preferences, but in the real world plugins developers have the bad habit to clutter it with all kinds of warnings and advertisements, which make loading the Wordpress dashboard painful when the CMS is using a lot of plugins. The menu also quickly becomes cluttered when a large number of extensions are used. On the other hand, the Joomla backend will conform with the W3C accessibility guidelines. Modules and menus are completely customisable and every item can be assigned to any group of users by the built-in ACL without additional plugin.
Custom fields
In Wordpress, pages and posts are different « post-types » (~blueprints of fields). Custom fields et post-types can be created using plugins. In Joomla, « content-types » can be created with custom fields or components. For instance, the contact component allows the user to easily create new contacts without editing any layout.
Flexible post-types or content-types are important, because in the real world, most content managers of professional websites don’t have the time and the needs to become web developers. Their goal is to create content and publish articles in a safe, fast and professional way. After fixing an issue, I often get the following reply: "I feared I made a big mistake". content managers don't need the pressure a running a website in order to focus on their field of expertise.
Page builders
Page builders are tools primarily designed for web developers in order to create websites without coding. Web development is a bit more complicated than creating layouts. A professional web developer must fix any performances issues of adding various assets to the page, understand the browser developer tools in order to write additional HTML or CSS code, debug display in multiple screens size, check for SEO issues, etc. The content managers will use the same tools to update the site and if they can have more freedom to design elements, the learning curve of the interface without any web design experience can be intimidating too.
There are third-party page builders in Joomla, but Wordpress has built a page builder right into its core and Divi, Elementor are popular alternatives among many others. Classic CMS like Joomla or Drupal work in the logic of separation of content and layout in order to focus on content integrity. Although the content is stored in the database, the general design can be modified easily using external CSS or PHP files. Switching the template/theme will apply the new styles to the current HTML code stored in the database. This is a big advantage over static html pages. Exporting content is made easier: an extension like RO CSVI will allow you to transform all the content of your Joomla CMS into Excel files.
Modern page builders create static pages in a way like Macromedia Dreamweaver did in the past and web developers need to carefully craft their modularity in order to easily change or fix content on complicated websites. It might also be complicated to migrate to another page builder without rebuilding every single page. This isn’t a problem on small websites, but on websites with a large number of pages, the choice of the page builder would be very important.
SEO
The Wordpress core has very few technical SEO (search engine optimization) features integrated with the exception of a system that automatically generates xml sitemaps based on different post-types. Commercial plugins are required to set up a simple SEO title tag or meta description with a lot of extra stuff not always needed. On the other hand, Joomla 5 has built-in SEO features for most of today's needs and a better menu manager capable of creating any type of URL with or without trailing slashes. That said, the quality of technical SEO will never be automatic and will depend on the skills of the developer to analyze and resolve the optimization problems of his/her website.
Conclusion
Wordpress and Joomla are currently the most used CMS in the world, especially on small or middle-range websites. They can be both used in all kinds of websites and securely maintained by a professional or any advanced user with the right skills.
Page builders can increase the productivity of content managers as long as they are not adding any pressure to break the site/pages or interact with a complicated interface understood by the web developer only.
Ultimately, the choice of a CMS should be made based on the specific needs it addresses, which may be concretely tested, and not on general considerations.
