Joomla vs. PW

[totoff]

Hi folks,

I'm currently engaged as a consultant for a lager scale web project. I advise on strategy, information architecture, content etc. but very few on the operational side of things. Coding will be done by guys that favor Joomla as CMS platform to go.

Apart from my personal like of PW, I've never ever heard anything positive about Joomla from the community and I'm almost convinced that it is not the right choice for an enterprise-level project like ours. However, I'm lacking arguments as I have no experience with the system and everything I "know" is from hearing.

Knowing all the pros for PW from my own experience I would like to learn what are your arguments against Joomla? Glad if you could give me an idea from your point of view. Maybe there is a small chance I can position PW as better alternative or - if not - at least avoid a wrong decision and vote for an enterprise-level system like Drupal or Typo 3.

Just to clarify: this is not about bashing a competing CMS, it's about investing a significant budget wise.

Thanks.

[diogo]

I think it would be useful to get Matthew on this discussion. I will PM him, just so he knows

[onjegolders]

There is a great post (I think of Matthew's somewhere) where he goes on a big rant about Joomla, that would be a good a start.

No custom fields

Very poor security track record

Bloated code

Nightmare to template with

[MadeMyDay]

Just. Don't. Use. It.

Seriously: I worked with Joomla exclusively a while ago (around 2004/2005) and the whole concept hasn't changed imho.

The main problem is: It is by no means a flexible content management system, it is more a portal system. Let me explain what I mean:

Let's say you have a large scale company with 1000 employees. All of those employess have a name, an email, a title and a linked department. You want to display one/several employees on each page in a kind of sidebar.

The PW way:

- Create a employees template

- Add desired fields

- Create page field in your other templates for selecting employees

- You are then totally free to select employees in your template and you are able to output what you like (HTML, CSS).

- You also have the possibility to use that information somewhere else because these are just usual PW fields.

- An editor selects the employee(s) where it is needed: While editing the page

The Joomla way:

- Look if a module exists for that does this job for you (perhaps there is one, but probably not).

- even if there is one you have to add your employees in some kind of extra database, where you are tied to the output of the module (not necessarily, perhaps the script kid lets you customize it).

- But the biggest problem: Your editor will not be able to select the employees where it is needed. They have to go the modules section in the backend, have to find the module, have to identify the page they want to edit and then have the possibility to select an employee. This is a ridiculous workflow, image you have not only an employee to select but also header images, other side information and so on.

The rest of Joomla can be summed up:  

- Bloated

- poor security

- inflexible

- poor templating

Joomla totally is okay for smaller groups, clubs or where ever no technical experience is needed and where the requirements are low. Everyone can set up a site really fast and choose from a lot of plugins (mostly poorly coded though). But when it comes to comfort, flexibility for editors... it is just poor.

[MatthewSchenker]

Greetings,

This is a discussion I am glad to get into...  I'd want to know more details about what the client needs and expects to accomplish, because that would definitely help make stronger arguments against Joomla.

But up front, my main arguments are...

1. Joomla does not support custom fields in its core.  The only way to be able to have custom fields in Joomla is to add what is known as a "CCK" (Content Construction Kit), and that essentially grafts what I call a sub-CMS onto the main CMS.  Without a CCK, you are stuck with the basic fields that Joomla assumes you will use for all your pages ("articles").
2. It is extremely tricky to implement what we think of as routine JS and PHP elements in Joomla sites.  You cannot properly work directly inside your page code, as everything in Joomla is done inside "module positions" for your pages.
3. Speaking of templates, the templating structure of Joomla is extremely limiting.  Everything in your site must be placed inside those "module positions," you must define everything that goes into those module positions using a convoluted back-end, and your templates inherit all sorts of core Joomla styling and layout assumptions.  In other words, you cannot simply create various layouts and name them according to specific content types.
4. Joomla core makes numerous assumptions about how things should look and behave.  If you want to change how a blog list looks, for example, you must hack core settings of either your core Joomla install or your templates.  If you simply want to say "See Full Story..." instead of "Read More..." at the end of your intro pages, you have to hack the core code.
5. Joomla makes it extremely difficult to manipulate URLs in any kind of creative fashion.  Because it assumes you must always insert an "article ID" into your URLs, you cannot go very far with dynamic pages because you cannot know the ID of your "articles" before they are created.
6. The core installation of Joomla has a convoluted directory structure: 15 main directories and an arrangement of sub-directories that are a major challenge to follow.  Often, sub-directories are literally repeated and material of the same type (such as plugins) can end up in several different directories.  This is because Joomla is designed to be built completely in the GUI, which gets us back to the problem described above in #2.

These are just a few of the problems that plagued my work with Joomla.  But again, the real power comes when the client says, "I want this..." and you can show how much better and easier it is to do it in ProcessWire.

Can you follow up with some of the specific requirements of the client?  Then I can give you more particular arguments.

Thanks,

Matthew

EDIT:

onjegolders: yes, indeed... Looking back, I think I have actually posted a few "Joomla rants" here in the ProcessWire forums:
http://processwire.com/talk/topic/2129-justifying-diy-coding-vs-installing-modules/?p=20438

http://processwire.com/talk/topic/4143-wordpress-dominates-19-of-the-web/?p=40964

http://processwire.com/talk/topic/3952-reservations-for-hotel-rooms-and-restaurant/?p=38742

[DaveP]

Having used Joomla myself since before it was Joomla (Mambo, anyone?), MadeMyDay sums it up perfectly -

Joomla totally is okay for smaller groups, clubs or where ever no technical experience is needed and where the requirements are low. Everyone can set up a site really fast and choose from a lot of plugins (mostly poorly coded though). But when it comes to comfort, flexibility for editors... it is just poor.

[Macrura]

joomla really is a dead end.. spent a large part of the last year converting joomla sites to processwire; IMHO i wouldn't start anything new with that, especially with all of the other options out there now.

I still have a few sites that are stuck in Joomla 1.5, because of certain components that are being used which are no longer being developed and the functionality that those offer is too complicated/expensive to replicate in processwire.

Echoing what Matthew said, the whole template override thing can get incredibly frustrating;

as i mentioned in this post: http://processwire.com/talk/topic/3671-ohmspeakercom/?p=35862 , we started that project in Joomla and spent about 1 year (on and off) trying to get it right, and in the end it proved easier to just start over with PW. I recall spending hours writing CSS to get things to go where i wanted them, overriding the joomla classes output for modules.... aargh!

[cstevensjr]

It's always interesting when someone wants to put one Open Source project against another.  First, we should be supporting, where possible, any Open Source project, especially PHP based ones. 

I honestly believe time is better spent with actual Case Studies and other technical documents that show the benefit of using ProcessWire over those systems and others..

I've used Joomla, Drupal and Wiordpress in the past. The botom line is that each and every project has it's inherent weaknesses and plusses.  Some more than others.

That's my two cents on this issue.  Good Day.

[diogo]

It's always interesting when someone wants to put one Open Source project against another.

In defense of totoff, he did say this:

Just to clarify: this is not about bashing a competing CMS, it's about investing a significant budget wise.

Edit: Still, there is Open Source and Open Source, the fact that a project is Open Source doesn't mean that it should be immune to criticism. There's no doubt that the fact that some big Open Source projects are so widely used hurts the growth of smaller and much more competent projects, and comparisons should be made to combat this, and also to make those projects be aware that they can't stop getting better. Those are my two cents...

[pwired]

A cms like Joomla still has momentum that keeps it going. Sometimes the momentum of a cms keeps building up despite having bad performance and bad architecture. It's what's happening in mainstream.

Here my 5 cts in the cms pond.

http://vschart.com/compare/processwire/vs/joomla

[totoff]

thanks to everybody who replied so far. i get a better understanding now. very helpful indeed. in particular thanks to matthew and mademyday for your profound insights.

Can you follow up with some of the specific requirements of the client?

not yet. the project is at a very early stage. but unfortunately the project lead, the person that engaged me, made some determinations before they got me on board. one of this determinations are the joomla orientated coders. my advise to her was to set up information architecture first and to make a list of features required and then to decide which cms fits best - as it would be natural to all of us.

if you don't mind i'll get back with more detailed questions once the concept has evolved and it comes to decision making.

[MatthewSchenker]

Greetings,

One other point to make here, which I hope would make the client think very carefully...

It's far more difficult to re-make a site than to make it right the first time. I always emphasize just how frustrating it is to take a site from Joomla to another proper system like ProcessWire after it has already been built up significantly.

Earlier this year, I moved a large site from Joomla to ProcessWire, replicating existing plugin functionality and data, and it was a horror. Right now, I am working on a project where the client has an existing Joomla site, but they let me start with a clean slate in ProcessWire. The second one is developing far more rapidly, even though it appears to be more work to start over from scratch.

Making this kind of "do it right the first time" argument can be a good entry point to your discussion with the client, for two reasons:

1. The client's natural follow-up question will be, "Why would it be a mistake to use Joomla?" That gives you an opening to explain the specifics.

2. You can argue on the level of time, money, and efficiency -- rather than preference.

Just some more thoughts to consider. Again, more specifics about the project can help!

Thanks,

Matthew

[Beluga]

I can confirm the inflexibility. I even translated the newest version of the extension SEBLOD CCK to Finnish and now I will never use it.. I also used Yootheme's Zoo, which was ok at the time. What's interesting is that Yootheme just announced a new CMS built with Symfony: http://pagekit.com/ It uses their front-end framework: http://www.getuikit.com/

[MatthewSchenker]

Greetings,

When I was still using Joomla, SEBLOD CCK was the component that helped me move my sites to a more flexible system.

To give credit where it is due, SEBLOD did bring some flexibility to Joomla, providing custom fields and a semi-clean API.  But the issue is that SEBLOD serves almost as a separate CMS piggybacked on top of the core Joomla installation.  For example, rather than replacing the core Joomla template scheme, it adds another template layer.  SEBLOD alters core Joomla in significant ways, and every time there is a new Joomla release, it breaks important pieces of SEBLOD.

I've always said that the only reason that SEBLOD (and other Joomla "CCKs") exists at all is because Joomla does not have custom fields built in by default.  In this regard, Drupal is a much stronger general-purpose CMS (if you can stand dealing with its template requirements).

Very interesting that the YouTheme team built a Symfony-based CMS.  YouTheme's Zoo CCK was (I believe) the closest competitor to SEBLOD.  The YouTheme developers are very skilled, and I always wondered what made them stick with Joomla when they clearly had the ability and viewpoint to develop something better on their own.

Thanks,

Matthew

[MatthewSchenker]

Greetings,

Sometimes, a single link can give you a great argument:

http://developer.joomla.org/security.html

Thanks,

Matthew