I’m going to start this with a little background. In the year 2000, I had set up a little lab at home running on a few Compaq Deskpro 6000’s. They were running Windows 2000 Server with IIS. At the time, I was under the disillusion that everything Microsoft was great.
So naturally, I looked at web development in asp to be the next best thing. I developed a fairly simple site running in asp, and over the next couple of years it grew in complexity as I added features that were useful to me and me alone.
In 2005, I made a physical move from San Francisco, CA. to St. Petersburg, FL. Once I got here, I started using my site for my friends back home, to keep them updated. One of my friends was a Mac User, and he pointed out the site didn’t flow the same on Safari. So I download every browser I could find. And, sure enough asp worked best in ie (that’s internet explorer).
So I start looking at revamping the site. I quickly discovered that on of the dev sites that I got an asp applet from years before had abandoned asp as well. They had their site running on Joomla.
Not being familiar with PHP, MySQL, or Apache, I decided to give Joomla a shot. It was easy to implement in a WAMP configuration (that’s Windows, Apache, MySQL, and PHP). And after initial tests, the environment looked identical across all browsers. So I was sold, even though I wasn’t really sure on what. But I had what I needed.
I ran Joomla for many years, and actually did some professional development on it for actual clients. While I was doing this, a friend approached me about his WordPress site, and told me that it needed to be migrated, from one host to another. Sounded simple, so I proceeded the way I would with Joomla. WordPress doesn’t migrate the same way, but the exposure showed me that WordPress is more dynamic than just a blog. Of course my definition of a blog at the time, was something like an old fashioned bulletin board system. But I stayed with Joomla, mainly because that’s what I had, and didn’t really want to take the time and effort to change.
Enter Solavei. Solavei offers a couple of templates for WordPress and nothing else. About the same time, I was working on setting up my Asterisk/FreePBX PBX Server (running PBXinaflash). And the two sites I frequented most for troubleshooting appeared to be WordPress.
So we registered http://www.4gphonefreedom.com and http://www.4gphonefreedom.info and set them up on WordPress. Now I’ve since learned about SEO, and discovered the simplicity of blogging. Blogging is more what I was doing on Joomla anyway. And from what I understand, blogging helps with SEO.
So with some work and some great plug-ins, I can get more visitors than I could with a static page.
But Joomla has a few things going for it. It has an established shopping cart with VirtueMart. It also has a couple of established social networking add ons, mainly JomSocial and Community Builder.
Both have a development community that develops plug-ins (as they are called in WordPress) or modules (as they are called in Joomla). And they vary from very robust to the very simple.
From what I have experienced, while both are very robust, the choice between the two more depends on the amount of time and resources available. For me, working fulltime, spending time with my family, and maintaining my site in spare time, WordPress works best for me. If I had more time or more people to maintain it, I would stick with Joomla.
But the clincher is the admin app available for Android and iOS. I couldn’t find an app for my phone that would allow me to administer the site in Joomla with the same robustness as the WordPress app.