Which is best for blogs wordpress or joomla?

[ericlewis107]

Hi ,

can you suggest which is best for creating blogs?

wordpress or joomla or any other...?

[Vikram Singh]

Wordpress is best for creating blogs as it is loaded with features like widgets and plugins. You can use plugins according to your needs.

[ergophobe]

Consider your needs and use the simplest solution that gets the job done.

Simple - a CMS with blogging built-in (Drupal, Joomla, ModX, etc)

Simpler - Wordpress that you host yourself

Simplest - a host solution like Wordpress.com or Blogger or many others, most of which will let you run on your own domain for a small fee.

[Robert Charlton]

Simplest - a host solution like Wordpress.com or Blogger or many others, most of which will let you run on your own domain for a small fee.

How limited is the "simplest" option? I've heard some experienced webmasters recommend this approach for some types of blogs because it relieves a lot of maintenance. The webmasters are experienced enough that I was surprised they recommended the option.

Since you have your own domain, though, I assume that at least your backlinks are portable... you can always go to another host.

Do these hosted options offer enough flexibility to allow any sort of SEO control? How about appearance of the sites? The structural options? How big a compromise do they involve?

[Aweinerws]

Wordpress is a very good CMS for blogs. It has a big pool of themes that you can choose from based on what you like and what are your requirements. It does not only give a great appeal to your blog, but also has very user-friendly interface and is very easy to manage.

[Robert Charlton]

Is that range of choice available for the Wordpress.com hosted sites? How about choice of plug-ins?

I can see how allowing much freedom to modify the site can get complicated when it's time to update.

[ergophobe]

How limited is the "simplest" option?

Aside from having your own URL, they're free to try, so the best way to see is to try one.

Theming Blogger is an art unto itself. Wordpress.com has a variety of themes, but you're limited to what you can do custom. You're also limited in terms of plugins.

And then there are places like Drupal Gardens which give a bit more flexibility and your site is fully exportable so you could move to your own server pretty easily.

The main thing is that someone else watches the site and deals with the hackers and updates and they typically have experienced engineers, often if not the same ones who wrote the base system in the first place, engineers with access to the top core developers. They do a full code review on any plugins/themes/modules before they turn them loose in the wild. The regular webmaster, no matter how experienced can't compare with that.

[Robert Charlton]

Thanks, ergo.

Aside from having your own URL, they're free to try...

Drupal Gardens evokes the image of weeping willows, and it sounded much more promising than the rest. From a quick browsing around the site it appears that you may not even need a domain... you could just build on a subdomain, but I'm not sure what their requirements are for subdomain names.

The free version of Drupal Gardens, though, very quickly runs into limitations with SEO. Basic head tag functionality (can't easily tell from the website how limited, but from the blurbs I'm guessing it's mostly just the title and the robots meta) puts one at the Professional level, at $149/year... an OK price, I suppose, considering that hosting is included. You can't touch the back end at any price level, though.

...so the best way to see is to try one.

I used to think that about software, but over the years I've come to feel otherwise. Trying out software is a big investment of time. I'd much rather have a well-written introductory help document, carefully describing functionality. No CMS I've seen appears to offer that.

This is particularly problematic with SEO considerations, as none of them seem to get SEO. I will give it to Drupal that they did add a parenthetical note that Google ignores the keywords meta tag. Interesting that their emphasis is mostly on Facebook's Open Graph meta tags. Their screen shot is too small to read.

And, even though the Drupal content is portable, you apparently can't 301 inbound links. So (grumble), it ends up that finding a low rent option for people who can't afford professional site maintenance is elusive.

[ergophobe]

Probably shouldn't go down this road with discussions of specific providers, but since you took the example of Drupal Gardens

I will give it to Drupal

Don't confuse Drupal Gardens with Drupal. These are very different things.

you apparently can't 301 inbound links.

On the test account I created, it had the Redirect module installed by default, which means that
- when I change a URL, the old URL is automatically set to 301 to the new URL
- it automatically captures 404s and presents you with a list so that you can set up 301s for them
- it lists current redirects and what HTTP status they send (301 or 302)

The only thing that's missing is that if you're migrating a site and for some reason you can't keep the old URLs (like I don't think URLs with GET params would work in Drupal Gardens, but I haven't tested it), you can't write general 301 using regular expressions and you can't just set a whole bunch of 301s in your httpd.conf or .htaccess. You would have to wait until a specific 404 gets triggered and then fix that one URL, one at a time.

Basic head tag functionality

On Pro accounts you have the Meta Tags module enabled which allows you to set

Canonical URL
Copyright
Description
Generator
Keywords
Open Graph Protocol
Publisher URL
Robots
Shortlink URL
Title
[drupal.org...]

I'm not sure what more you can expect from a fully hosted, fully managed system that has to be able to roll out updates across thousands of sites automatically.

Clearly you aren't going to have everything with one of these hosted place.

With Wordpress and Drupal, you can't be letting regular users mess with the theme layer because in current implementations, they execute PHP pretty much without limitations. So in a situation like this you'll have limitations. Also, you need to keep the complexity limited to make it scalable. That said, in Drupal 8, the theme layer will have no PHP and then you get to the point where hosted sites like this can provide full design control to users. Whether or not they do so or how much they charge for the privilege remains to be seen, but it would be administratively a lot easier.

If you want to run a full Wordpress or Drupal install, then your SEO options are essentially limitless, but now you've moved into something that requires expertise and some dev resources. But hey, if you actually are getting to that level of optimization, you really shouldn't expect a fully hosted solution to be able to cater to very specific needs.

As with anything, you can't have the best of both worlds. Hybrid road/mountain bikes suck. No ski is great at touring and great at going downhill. And hosted solutions have their place, but yes, some sites will require a team of full time developers, sys admins, SEOs and so forth.

[Sirna]

wordpress is the best