about 6 months ago, I started getting my hands dirty with Joomla, the open source content management system. after playing for a few days I got really excited about its easiness of web publishing, and I realized I could basically setup a Website in Joomla in a few hours. I like the template system it uses, and the concept of components and modules. another thing I like was that unlike Wordpress that it does not matter how well you tweak a template, it will always look like a blog, Joomla websites actually look like Websites.

So during that excitement that is like a teenage in love, I thought in the possibility of moving this blog to Joomla. but because the blog was already established on Wordpress the move was not going to be simple, that is if I wanted to keep search engines rankings, permalinks, posts, pages URLs etc. so I started looking for information or tools to help me migrate the blog to Joomla, and guest what, not a single story or tool for such migration. there were a couple of promising entries in Google of someone that did the migration, but the author was still using wordpress to host his blog, so I was not sure about his credibility. other than that, there was no information whatsoever, there is plenty information on how to migrate from Joomla to Wordpress though.

I’m glad I did not do the migration, and I understand now why such migration is foolish, and that’s because Wordpress and Joomla are two different beasts, with completely different purpose. as you might suspect, Wordpress is built for bloggers, featuring comments, tagging, and virtually everything else your blog needs out of the box. Simple. Easy. Straightforward. while Joomla is the opposite, you could use Joomla for anything but a blog. now, the reason why wordpress look like a blog regardless how much you tweak it is clear; Wordpress is designed for blogs, and nothing else. Joomla is designed for any purpose websites, but not a blog.

Joomla is a very robust system, it is designed in the concept of components and modules which make the creation of websites very easy. there are so many components for different purposes in the Joomla community that you could build a Website about anything in a couple of hours. each component comes with its own modules to help you structure the site. I built this website http://Espavideos.com for videos in spanish basically in a few hours using a component named seyret. I also tested another component named Musicbox to build a music site ( you can see that component when clicking on the “musica” tab) all those components work out of the box, so there is little tweaking of your side. with Musicbox I was able to host the mp3 files at amazon S3 and stream them right to the site. very sleek!.

So, what’s wrong with Joomla? Joomla unlike wordpress that is almost SEO friendly out of the box, I mean “almost” because in the time I have been using wordpress I have noticed and read from authority sources that Wordpress creates a lot of duplicate content, and URLs are not so friendly out of the box. but compare to Joomla wordpress is way ahead in the SEO game. Joomla out of the box comes with crappy URLs and a lot of duplicate content. even though there are very good components like sh404SEF which is the best free SEO component currently in the Joomla community to fix SEO issues, still there are problems. broken permalinks, Titles not search engine optimized etc..

I guess using either Joomla or Wordpress depends on the need you might have, if you want to have more interaction with your customers through comments and social mediums I guess wordpress is the best for you. if you want to have a more “static” website like products, tutorials, video sites, etc you better off with Joomla. like I said before, both of them are targeted to different purposes. so far, I haven’t met or heard someone using Joomla to host a blog.