joomla! or wordpress... which is better?

[dan330]

hi all...

I have this new job.. and part of the responsibility is to create a new website.

I am an IT person.. but not a web designer. Been out off the IT game for over 10yrs.

I am looking at 2 open-source ...solutions to create and manage websites.

the company is a telecom hardware seller.
and will want to do ecommerce in the near future, but for now all I need to do is create a pleasing and inviting website that clients can research hardware info.

so.. what is better for someone like me?

 

[Chidori602]

Id go with Blogspot/Blogger, been using it for 5 months and its all right. Blogspot is google owned so you know its a good option. Wordpress is a good option to, so you really cant go wrong.

 

[ElasticNinja]

Blogspot should be better, but in reality Wordpress is, even if it offers less code customability

 

[jwp1223]

Joomla, use it for most of my sites, and its easy to create templates and css for...

 

[Martimus]

Personally I find Joomla to be not so intuitive...

I helped a small business with some web updates this past summer. Their site was in Joomla. It took more time to figure out where to place the update in Joomla than it did to enter the update itself.

 

[kjac014]

Well I have been trying to load Joomla for 4 months and still cant get the darn thing working so at this point I might go look at wordpress.. ggrrrr I have heard that Joomla is fantastic but sure isn't very user friendly

 

[nkk]

Make no mistake--Joomla has a steep learning curve. You can very easily do basic stuff (choose a theme and make an article to post), but as you get deeper in, it will take a lot or work for very little gain. I used it (and will again when my site goes back up). I like it, and if you take the time to learn it it is a very powerful option.

-Nkk

 

[dan330]

I think I will go with wordpress.. for the sake of simple.
and the other current sister businesses are done in wordpress.


I have also learned that wordpress will be working hard this year to make it more powerful with ecommerce.

It looks like i can learn wordpress faster...
and the knowledge should transfer most to joomla; if wordpress can not handle our needs.

 

[FitzyOz]

Have a look at Concrete5 - it's a very versatile CMS for small or large sites. Small learning curve and ideal for WYSIWYG user contributors - various permissions available for users. See concrete5 - Free CMS | Open Source Content Management System

 

[danalingga]

For this kind of choice, I always suggest to choose it which one that you familiar enough. It is not about platform but about knowledge behind it.

 

[dan330]

^^^ that is why... although I apprecisate all the help from each poster. Some maybe better.. but the current platform is wordpress running the websites at work... and it is very simple.

I have had programming language in Highschool.. back over 20 yrs ago. And some exposure to VB in college. I think wordpress and simple XNHTML and CSS will be good for now. I have to consider my learning curve ramp-up time.

Once I surpass the current support of wordpress with more corp needs. I will migrate to other full feature platforms.

 

[mrspeedmaster]

Here is my advice.. Install VMware or VirtualBox. Go to the many Virtual Machine Appliance repositories and download a pre-built appliance with Joomla or Wordpress.

These pre-built appliances are virtual machine with the OS and app already installed and pre-configured.

Example:
http://www.turnkeylinux.org/joomla
http://www.turnkeylinux.org/wordpress

This way, you can experiment on the "platform" of each instead of dickering around with configuring/installing. This is a good and "quick" way to explore them without dedicating too much time or resource.

 

[bbecham]

Joomla has more smooth sites so I prefer Joomla...

 

[bluenova]

For starters Wordpress is designed for creating blogs, although you can add Pages and Widgets you still might find it a bit limited for your needs.

I would strongly suggest you take a look at Concrete5 if you have not already done so. It is not as well known as Joomla but is far more user friendly especially if non-technical people are going to be contributing to it. I've been using it for my sites for the past year after being a long time Joomla user and Xoops before that and it's fantastic.

 

[dan330]

ok.... I need some simple code help.
in Wordpress but it uses HTML
you can see the pic of food plates on the main page.
need to add an image, but make it bigger:
http://www.mangosnoodlehouse.com/

pic is 900x675 .. I need it to be 1200x900

current code puts the image ..centered on the page:
<img src="http://mangosnoodlehouse.com/img/Food Photos/foodgrouping900.jpg" alt= "Great food at Noodle House." />


I try:
<img src="http://mangosnoodlehouse.com/img/Food Photos/foodgrouping900.jpg" height= "900" width= "1200" alt= "Great food at Mango's Noodle House." />
I get a higher height... but the width stays the same. so the pic is stretched vertically.

I tried linking a bigger image (1333x1000)... it looks small as the original.

I dont think it is margins, because you can see the heading "Come join us today&#8230; taste great traditional Asian Cuisine." is wider.

what am I doing wrong???

 

[Mayhem]

Personally I find Joomla to be not so intuitive...

I helped a small business with some web updates this past summer. Their site was in Joomla. It took more time to figure out where to place the update in Joomla than it did to enter the update itself.

This. I used it before it was split off of Mambo. It's somewhat confusing to configure. It has a ton of things to tweak.

Don't get me wrong once I got it tweaked the way I wanted it, it was easy to maintain. It just took a lot of online references to get it where I wanted it.