Why the change? Basically we needed to spend less time on the mechanics of running the site and more time on the content and the business. Joomla has a lot of power and it is very easy to put something together quickly and be ready to run. The problem is that the inner workings and structure in Joomla are for us (not necessarily for other users) are quite rigid and developing or just modifying a template (the approach we took for the DigitalBeat theme) is quite time consuming and a lot of work. Managing this for three environments: Production, QA and Testing is also time consuming. One of our clients was having a problem with their WordPress site (network not a WordPress problem) and we took a look at their site and started playing with WordPress. We setup a test and QA environment in about an hour and then duplicated a good chunk of the DigitalBeat UI and some content in about 6 hours. WordPress templates are easy to work with (compared to Joomla) and we even generated our own custom DigitalBeat template with only a little effort – something that we never got working right under Joomla. We have a couple of plugins (All in one SEO, Addthis and quick menu) and that’s about it. Even the plugins are dead simple to use just drag and drop to the plugins folder, to add or delete the plugin and then activate it.

At the end of the day, WordPress really is very easy to setup, configure and like Joomla, being PHP and MYSQL based, makes it easy to use both for blogging and as a CMS. We don’t need to manage hundreds of topics, thousands of pages or have dozens of editors and admins – that would definately be Joomla teritory. For two or three editors and dozens of articles WordPress is fine so far. If you are primarily building a site that is NOT writing content focused; e-commerce/retailer, real estate listings, or auction sites then stick with Joomla, while I’m sure there are probably plugins to WordPress to enable some/all of these uses as well, you’re now straying away from WordPress’s core functionality and squarely into Joomla territory.

Finally, the area where WordPress really shone for us was the BACKUP and RESTORE features. This area is a black art in Joomla. We’ve tried two or three plugins and database export tools but backing up and migrating Joomla is definitely a pain and nothing that we tried worked 100% or even close and a couple of tools were complete disasters. Out of the box WordPress let us export content to a READABLE XML file and then let that same file be imported back into another WordPress system. This, as they say, is the deal maker – having an effective backup that let’s you be up and running in a completely new environment within a couple of hours – priceless.

We’re still not sure about security and both Joomla and WordPress have/need pretty regular upgrades, although we’re going to feel a LOT more comfortable upgrading the WordPress based site in the future as it is so easy to upgrade and test. Not that it matters but we’re running WordPress 2.7 part of the testing was upgrading from 2.6 to 2.7 before going live, again it was pretty easy – the only slight concern was that the admin UI had changed quite noticeably in 2.7 although once we got used to it, we found that the UI changes were an improvement.