I have a client who wants to use Joomla, because they were told it was good. I’m trying to convince them that WordPress is a much more user-friendly option.
I’ve played with Joomla (and Drupal) once before, and I found the learning curve incredibly steep (probably due to their obscure terminology). I consider myself quite technically savvy, and if I found it hard, I’m sure my less technically competent clients will find it even more obscure and difficult to learn.
So far, I have yet to come across anything a client would need that couldn’t be done in WordPress, but before I tell them that, I wanted to check that this is, indeed, the case.
Is there anything that Joomla or Drupal can do that WordPress can’t (especially now with custom post types in WP 3+)?
If memory serves, Drupal’s lead dev summed things up like so last summer: Drupal is, on the UI front, where WP was 3 years ago; and WP is, on the feature front, where Drupal was 3 years ago.
My own experience with WP and Drupal are basically so:
- WP has a prettier/easier UI.
- Drupal is more robust: core and add-on devs are rarely writing code to learn PHP.
- WP is still stuck in old PHP4 paradigms. Drupal isn’t.
- WP development is still not unit-test driven. Code quality is, at best, inconsistent.
- Drupal is mostly EAV-driven. This makes things much more flexible… and slow for anything requiring complex queries. (Drupal compensates this by having built-in caching.) WP is heading in the same direction.
I can’t really say for Joomla. I dismissed it years ago because I hated the UI. But everyone here probably has a trustworthy friend who is very happy with it.
As to what I tend to use:
- For a blog or a simple brochure-like site, definitely WP.
- For a slightly more complex site, also WP — but an inner voice always tells me I should be using Drupal instead.
- For anything really complex and mission critical, a unit-test driven PHP framework (Symfony, Solar, Yii…). UI will end up so so, but I like to sleep at night.
