Finally decided to migrate from Joomla to WordPress

Joomla LogoI’ve been bored utterly by the two most striking disadvantages of Joomla CMS for like half a year already, since the last winter. They were

  • lack of decent commenting system and
  • lack of decent “permalink” support

These features have never been in the core of the Joomla system, yet no adequate add-on was released to date – neither commercial nor free.

Still, I was patient to the last day fiddling with

  • phpMyAdmin MySQL interface to clean out spam comments directly within the database and
  • the OpenSEF‘s notorious “Used” option to keep the list of auto-generated “search engine friendly URL”s in a suitable state

Fortunately, I rarely added new pages lately to my main website which was “powered” by Joomla, otherwise I simply can’t imagine successful coping with the rate of automatic friendly URLs creation squared to the number of pages added.

Today I had a few free minutes so I went to visit www.joomla.org to see how’s their business and to check if they’ve got good news freeing me of the unpleasant plans of switching my other site over to WordPress.

The surprises didn’t keep me waiting.

The first one was the whole half-year of NO updates to the core Joomla.

I mean, really, it might be OK for WordPress to keep that inactive – they’ve got the ball well rollin’ long ago, but for Joomla, with so many important things on the TODO list, it’s pure stagnation.

Then I went to check my “favourite” Joomla module – OpenSEF. And here’s another surprise – the site is no more. The author mentions some issues with Joomla legal status changes and such. Joomla core team members are leaving the ship.

Next thing I checked was two searches in Google:

Notice the same keywords in both searches. The 1st one yielded 1,030,000 results, while the second – only 721,000. You do the math.


Now for me it was kinda lucky day, I have to say.

By eventually having decided to switch from Joomla to WordPress I broke free from a bunch of other follies of Joomla.

The Top 5 of Joomla weaknesses being:

  • Exactly 2 levels of categories for each post – no less, no more. It is actually incomprehensible.
  • Explicit prohibition of UTF-8. Folks, it’s the century 21st already!
  • My favourite theme using tables instead of DIV’s. Don’t know about other themes – they ain’t that plentiful as in WordPress world.

– the other two were mentioned at the start.

Of course, I’m gonna miss some really winning points of Joomla too, like:

  • Nice menu system in-core, with a nice menu builder,
  • Front page posts re-ordering also built into the core,
  • A good and fairly complete selection of modules and publishing options like show/hide toggle for many attributes selectable by-post/by-category/etc – again, in the standard installation (though not all of them are very useful)

Surely, many (all?) of these can be found as plug-ins for WordPress, but that’s gonna cost in terms of time – both of my work and of site’s unreachability, but hopefully it’s gonna be more durable in the long run.

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2 thoughts on “Finally decided to migrate from Joomla to WordPress

  1. Pingback: Migration from Joomla to WordPress + merger of two WP blogs Completed |STEREO-blog

  2. I have been doing Joomla websites for my clients for several years and didn’t have an intention to change it for another. About 3 years ago I got acquainted with WordPress for the first time – and it was really WOW for me. The sites designing has been simplified greatly and I chose WordPress for my work. Now I try to persuade all my clients to migrate to WordPress – besides, presently it’s a simple one click affair with online converters (like CMS2CMS, for instance. Here’s the resourse http://goo.gl/tVxPKD).

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