I checked Google Trends (trends.Google.com) to see which of the main Content Management Systems is more popular and I noticed that Joomla is more popular and it keeps growing in terms of preference.
Being a user of both platforms I like both, but we need to keep in mind that they are for completely diffferent things. Joomla is platform more suited to Portal, Community and online store websites. Although you can blog in Joomla as well, I can tell you from my own experience that when you are talking about blogging, nothing beats WordPress.
I started in Joomla and later moved to WordPress just recently, and the learning curve for WordPress is
shorter than Joomla but both are really easy to learn. Also both platforms have very active and big developer communities.
This graph does not necessarily show which one is the best, it’s just a popularity test. Also on the graph you can clearly see that Joomla appeared on Google´s radar screen in mid 2005 which is more or less the time that Joomla was born, derived from Mambo. Despite being so new it has grown in popularity at a much higher rate than WordPress.
What I don’t like about Joomla is that recently they announced that they apparently announced their desire to push the external plugin developers to be compliant with the GNU/GPL license. While at first this might sound good because it is free for users, it is not good for developers because it means they would have to give their commercial plugins for free, and it would discourage their support to the platform. Sometimes, external developers make a platform much more robust, and if there is no benefit to them there is no sense in supporting it. If Joomla keeps pushing for this, then who knows if it continues to be as strong as it is now.
This confusion in legalities is one of the reasons that made me move to WordPress, I don’t want to be in a position of having a website for several to later find that some developers are not supporting it and I have to move it to another platform. I better move now and not later.




