...something that hasn't occurred in my development life for, well, ever.
After decades of using (personally and professionally), developing for, and advocating for WordPress, I've remade this site using Joomla!.
I've evaluated Joomla before. I've managed a major corporate site that was built in Joomla. But I've never committed to my own site being made in Joomla, yet here I am.
Wanna know why?
We all age; not everyone shows it.
WordPress is, as of the time of this article, 23 years old. Joomla! is 21 years old (Yay! You can drink now, Joomla!). If you develop in WordPress, I don't have to tell you that it looks like it was written how we used to write PHP in the early 2000's. Joomla!, on the other hand - and we're talking about the under-the-hood developer perspective here - looks like it was written by professional PHP developers. I'm a professional PHP developer, and my hat is tipped to their code.
WordPress has changed and so have I.
As someone who's been using WordPress since a couple of years after it came out, my interpretation of their philosophy on features was that, if you needed it, find (or write) a plugin... we're not going to force it on you if it's something you don't want or need. That seems like a pretty darn good idea to me, especially since I'm a performance nerd.
Joomla! comes with a few things that you might not want or (think you) need. There's some SEO stuff built in, for instance. You can make and track ads. You can create custom fields. But something I've noticed is that those things that Joomla! builds in are things I commonly need, and the fields in the menu screens remind me to add them.
In recent years, WordPress seems to have waffled on that original vision by introducing the controversial Gutenberg editor followed by "Full Site Editing." One of the most popular WordPress plugins restores the old editor. Yeah, I know, some people just don't like change! But it's been years and maybe some people just thought it worked fine the way it was. So now we have a WordPress that comes with things that result in people adding more things to disable the features they don't want.
I don't want to come across as trashing WordPress; it still has a lot going for it. I'm a developer though (among other things) and developing in WordPress is like going back to circa 2000 PHP development... it got the job done but it was rudimentary and very rough around the edges. There's a gross lack of consistency across the development environment and it's like every mistake they ever made becomes something they want to keep around for legacy support. It's just not a fun place to live if you're serious about development best practices.
If you're switching to a different CMS, why pick Joomla?
When we look at the "Big Three" (WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal), we usually see a spectrum: WordPress is optimized for ease of use and rapid deployment; Drupal is optimized for high-complexity enterprise data structures and scalability; Joomla sits squarely in the middle.
- WordPress is fast to deploy, but "Plugin Hell" is a real thing. When you rely on 30+ plugins for core functionality, you create a maintenance nightmare and security vulnerabilities.
- Drupal often requires a dedicated developer for even minor structural changes. The learning curve is steep, and the deployment cycle (Composer, Drush, etc.) is more rigorous.
- Joomla offers a middle ground. It provides more "out-of-the-box" functionality than WordPress (reducing plugin dependency) but is more accessible to a PHP developer than Drupal (reducing the need for a highly specialized architect).
Stick around and let's see how this works out together!