In today's episode we continue The Showdown, WordPress versus Joomla right here on Your Website Engineer podcast episode number 219. Hey, hey, hey, welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzier. I'm so excited to be here with you this week because we are going to continue The Showdown. We're gonna continue the comparison model between WordPress and some of those other solutions that are out there.

But first let's go ahead and dive right into any announcements. I wanna just give you a recap that last Friday I did a webinar. That was the webinar of February and we talked about editing your premium theme the right way. And if you are interested you can head on over to the webinars tab and you can watch that replay. It was about an hour long and we talked all about the different tools and things that you needed to do to update your website properly without causing it to break in the future and things like that.

I've got the March webinar all cued up ready to go and that is going to be – I haven't quite figured out what the name is of the webinar yet but we're basically going to talk about Jetpack and why Jetpack, in my opinion, is one of the most important plug-ins and should be installed first before you even really get your WordPress site set up. So we're gonna dive into some of the different modules that are in there, some of the benefits, some of the disadvantages of using Jetpack. And so if you're interested in that, that's going to be happening on March 6 at 10:00 eastern. And you can register at YourWebsiteEngineer.com/webinar.

One other thing that's in the news this week is it looks like the head lead of WordPress 4.2 whose name is Drew Jaynes. And he has announced that there's gonna be a new community initiative that's been called NUX New User Experience. And this group is made up of more than 15 members of the WordPress community who have been experiencing onboarding clients, training clients and working with new users on a regular basis.

And the main task of this group is to help users – or their task is to identify common pain points that new users may experience while using WordPress. The hope is to invigorate the conversation about the new user experience a priority in core decision making. We'll work together to identify problems and recommend solutions. So with that statement, that comment, basically what they're gonna do is they're gonna take some time to look into WordPress and how they can make it easier for the brand new viewer – the brand new user.

And I get this a lot when I am trying to help out WordPress users. When they're coming to WordPress for the very first time they have questions. And it's actually kinda funny that this week we are – my team at Automatic is actually doing live chat all week. So I get to interact with customers on an immediate basis. And when they're trying to figure out how to set up their theme or they're trying to edit their permalinker, all of these different things that you and I know for granted because we do this regularly. Those are the things it's like, wow; this really doesn't make a lot of sense.

And so there's gonna be some of those experiences that will – that make their way into 4.2 but they're gonna continue to make WordPress easier and better and without cutting away features that we know, love and are used to. So that's kinda the big thing that's happening right now that's in the development stages And I think, if I remember correctly, I think April, the end of March, early April is probably that time period where we'll see WordPress 4.2. So, got another six weeks or so of development time but they're looking to make it easier for the onboarding experience.

I know that they're making it much easier when you sign in. You install WordPress for the very first time, it asks you what language you'd like and then you fill in some details and it kinda gets you up and running. But after that then it's like, well, maybe I wanna change the site a tad or where was that? I just – I put it in on my – when I was logging in and signing up but I don't know where that is. And it's just trying to make it much more easy or much more intuitive to a brand new WordPress user.

Lastly thing that I wanna say here when it comes to the announcement section is, I've been spending some time in the last few weeks, in the last months to plan for and get ready for Word Camp Dayton. Now, last year it was right around the time that my daughter was born so – which is crazy, it's been a year almost already, but that's a different story for a different day.

But I am just really impressed with how much time it takes and how many people spend their time creating these word camp events and volunteering their time, finding speakers, finding venues, finding food, finding all of these different things, selecting speakers, all of these things that we are doing. Since I'm more heavily involved with this, it's just unbelievable how many people do this around the world to just make WordPress great. And for that I just wanna say thank you and it's really kind of exciting to see how the community comes together and makes this an awesome event.

If you're in the Dayton area or Columbus or Ohio or any of the five states surrounding and you wanna come to a word camp, you can come to Word Camp Dayton. That is March 20 and 21. And if you're interested you can purchase a ticket over at 2015.Dayton.Camp.org/tickets. And that [inaudible][00:05:17] to that in the show notes for episode number 219.

So today as we dive into the Is There a Plug-in For That Section, I really like going in and trying to find something that I may find useful or I know that somebody else would find useful. And so today the plug-in is called T Minus Countdown. And basically it displays a highly customizable flash-free countdown timer as a cyber widget or in a post or a page using a short code, which is really pretty cool.

Like I know that this would be really good, and I probably should do this for my webinar page, I could build a webinar page and then say countdown until the webinar happens and then has that countdown timer or whatnot. So that's really pretty cool. You can inform your website visitors that something cool is happening, maybe a giveaway, maybe a special event, something along those lines. I would say that you don't wanna overdo it too much by slapping these things on every page on your website, but they are pretty cool.

There are several different styles. You can customize it. You can say that it's just the countdown so you can say like 31 weeks, one day, one hour, 6 minutes and 45 seconds. Or you can say – you can just countdown for how many days, whatever. It's highly customizable and you should definitely check it out. There's a link in the show notes. It's a plug-in that's been downloaded almost 200,000 times and it was just updated a couple days ago. So it is a good one that's out there. And if that's something that's some sort of functionality that you need for your website then be sure to go ahead and check that out.

All right. We are going to take a dive in today, a high look – a high-level overview of the software Joomla. And I've just been taking some time over the last couple months to just kind of learning. And I'm not really looking for that new user experience or how we can make WordPress better, but it's kinda interesting to note some of the things that some companies do and some services do that others don't.

And so back in the late part of 2014 I took a look at some of the – like the Squarespace, the Wicks, the Weebly, the ones that are kind of hosted for you and you just basically sign up and you can start working. And now this month I'm looking at the ones that you actually have to install and configure and set up.

And so last week we dove into Drupal and again it was something that was intriguing because I haven't used Drupal in awhile. And this week we're gonna dive right into Joomla. And this is a – this was the second CMS that I ever used. So, the first one was Drupal. I used that one first to build a college website at my local university. And then my very first paying website gig was on a site that was already built with Joomla.

And I tell you what, I spent hundreds of hours probably, and I didn't charge for most of them because I was just trying to figure out how stuff worked. And I was hoping that when I came back into Joomla today, yesterday when I was setting up this configuration and whatnot, I was just hoping that yes, it has been made much better, it's easier to use and things like that.

Well, unfortunately it's not the case and I'm not gonna try to bash Joomla and we'll get to it in just a little bit, but there was a lot of things that I could not figure out. So I'm gonna highlight some of the pieces that Joomla has and some of the frustrations that I had and kind of some observations that I had while exploring the interface. And then we'll move on because we probably won't ever talk about Joomla on this show again. No offense to Joomla.

So when I logged into my hosting account, my cPanel, I set up a sub-domain because I wanted kind of a clean stall in a certain area. So I did that and then they have the – using the Soft Delicious plug-in, and that's found a lot at Bluehost and HostGator and all the hosting companies that have cPanel access. And it's the same way that you can install WordPress with that one-click install. So I went ahead and did that. And it was actually fairly simple. It was much like Drupal that you had to go in and you actually had to choose which version. So there were two versions. There was 3.3.6 or 2.5.28, either one of those. So I ended up choosing the newer one. And then you put in your site setting, so just your site name, your site description. And then you also can configure the table prefix much like you can with WordPress. And then you also can import sample data if you wanted to.

Now I might – I probably should've done that just to get a better feel for things but I ended up just skipping that. Put in my user name and password and then you put in your real name and your email address and then you're off to the races. And it goes – it looks like you're installing WordPress. It just goes through the whole process. And then it gives you those two links, the one that shows the frontend of your site and the one that shows the backend of your site. And the homepage that it generated was very generic. It was – I mean, very, very basic. It kind of looked like a – it kinda reminded me of 2015, maybe 2012 a little bit, that theme, but it was very basic. It had a sidebar along the right-hand side. And it gave me a log-in form that I could log in right on that page or I also had – it was slash administration I think, or administrator or something. And I was able to log in to my site.

When I got there I did get an error message and from my theme – or from my hosting provider and said I had to disable Magic Quotes to run this version of – or run the version of Joomla. But it seemed like everything was working properly so I didn't really dive in and try to figure out, okay, how do I disable Magic Quotes. I'm fairly certain that that's the same issue that I had last week when I tried to install Drupal. So I could dismiss the message and it was completely fine so I just went ahead with it.

So Joomla – I'm gonna get these all mixed up today – Joomla has menus that go across the top and it has a control panel with menus that go down the left-hand side. And – but I've noticed that the top bar does not display like the black admin bar does in WordPress. And so you almost always have to have two tabs open, one with your live site and one with your development site or your backend so you can configure and set up and do different things.

And so what I wanted to do was – well, the first thing, I kind of looked through this control panel. It has the ability to add new articles and there was an article manager. There was a category manager. There was a media manager and then there was a menu manager, a module manager. And then there's a user manager. And then you had some configuration options which were global configuration, template manager and language manager, install extensions and then maintenance.

And the cool part about the maintenance, it said Joomla is up to date and all extensions are up to date, which it showed you right there from the dashboard, kind of like WordPress does but we just assume that it's always up to date unless we see the little one or the little two in the circle. Then we know that something needs updated. But this basically just shows on my homepage that says, okay, everything is up to date.

So I thought, hey, let's go ahead and go ahead and add a new article. So I clicked the add new article button. I named it awesome first test post or whatever it was and I started to – I just kinda filled in some [inaudible][00:11:52] just added some text and hit save. And when I did that I was like, okay, now how do I see this post? I could not for the life of me figure out how to see this post. I still can't actually.

Like, I'm here, I'm looking at it in the article and they have save, they have save and close, they have save and new, they have save as copy, they have versions and close. Those are kinda your menu options across the top. And then there are – there's – I don't know, there's content, publishing, image links, options, configuration screen, permission. Like, there's a lot of little settings that you can use. And then it's got the whole kitchen sink toolbar where it's got bold and italics and stuff like that. You can set a category, you can set tags, you can say it's a public access.

And then underneath at the bottom of the editor window you can add another article or image or page break or read more, stuff like that. But I cannot figure out for the life of me how to actually look at this post. I mean, maybe I have to go to my site URL slash and then whatever the alias is. But I couldn't figure it out and I still can't figure it out.

So that kinda was my very first thing that I noticed. It was like, oh, this is kinda tough. And then I was like, well, I wonder how I can just create a new page that has all my blog posts. You know how in WordPress the default way it sets up, it sets up as your homepage. It shows all your posts in reverse chronological order. So I went back over to the homepage and I did a refresh and I was like, well, maybe it'll just show up here. And, nope, it just says home. And I don't even know if I have a homepage or how to edit a homepage.

And so it's just – it's really frustrating. Like, I thought that WordPress is bad to try to figure out how to get around things. But with WordPress when you're logged in, you have that – the admin bar across the top. You can at least get back to your dashboard very easily. Once I logged in I can log right in from my homepage. But then it acts like I'm not logged in on the backend. It's almost like it's two different interfaces. You have the frontend, you've got the backend.

Drupal, on the other hand, was like everything was frontend and backend because you were able to see all the settings, the setup, all of the menus and the links. You could all see that was kinda built into your site. And so it's really – I mean, honestly I'm really honestly confused. I have no idea what's going on.

And so I'm like, well, maybe I can figure out menus. Maybe I can add a new menu item. So let's go ahead and play with that. So I went to the menu setting and I went to the dropdown at the top. And I guess once you're in the article manager I tried to click on the menus at the top and I couldn't get to it. You actually have to close out your window. It's not really a window but you have to just close out of the area where you're typing your post. You have to actually hit close to do that. And then you can go to menus.

So there's a menu manager and there's – you can add different menus. And so I tried to add a blog menu and I have no idea what it is. I tried to add a page and it – I can't figure out how to actually show that. And so then I got frustrated and I just kinda gave up. So I'm like, well; maybe I'll just go to something different and try to figure out another piece of how Joomla works.

And so I went over to the extensions. And so there's an extension manager. And I'm thinking that extensions are very similar to plug-ins. I think they might've been called modules in Drupal. But I went over there and it was like, oh well, you can upload your file from the web or you can install from a director or you can install from a URL. Or – and there was this kind of floating box over the top of it – or you can install an extension to install from the web.

So I went ahead and did this and I went ahead and took a look. And I see that there are tons and tons of categories. There are lots of little – they're almost like the plug-in cards within Word Press, but for some reason all of my images are broken so I can't see any images for these particular extensions. But they have the different categories down the left side so I can see things that are in the access and security or administration or calendars, editing, directory and documentation, living, maps, weather, marketing, things along those lines.

So if I go into the map section maybe I want to add Google Maps. And so I can go ahead and I can just say, I want to install this. And it will install this I think. And from there I can go in and I can hopefully configure it and figure out where the settings panels are and things along those lines for using the extensions for this Google Maps.

And so it's really cumbersome and I really have no idea, after spending maybe an hour playing with it, like I don't know how to view my blog posts, I don't know how to view individual ones or all of the blog posts that I've created. I don't really know how to create a page. I'm not sure how to make any customizations, whether it's done within the theme or things like that.

I remember when I was using this for a client a few years ago, I had to install like a – I wanna say it was like Superfish or something like that to get a dropdown menu to work. And so it was just – it was really, really confusing honestly. I'm not trying to speak badly of Joomla just because I'm a WordPress guy. I really honestly cannot figure it out. And I feel that I am a fairly decent technologically savvy guy, that I should be able to kind of go in and at least create something.

I mean, all of the other ones I've done, the Squarespace, Wicks, Weebly, Rainmaker and, what's the other one, Ghost and Drupal, I was at least able to create a page. I could modify my template. I could do some things and I have no idea where I would do that.

And they do have a section called components and they've got things under there like banners, contacts, Joomla update messaging, search, things like that. So I'm not sure if that is where I would do – to go to get things. Maybe let's try to add a banner and see what that does. So it says there's no matching results. I could – oh, I can create a new banner but I don't really know what a banner is or where I would go.

So this is – it's really crazy that there's that many people that use Joomla with this high of a learning curve. And so it's really – I guess I really don't know what to say. My summary, my thoughts are honestly like, I don't foresee myself ever doing this again. I don't foresee myself ever going in and using Joomla again because I don't – I have no idea what's going on. It may be different if I would inherit a site that has Joomla on it and have to make tweaks.

But I also did this a few years back as part of a project that somebody was paying me for. They're like, oh, I just want you to do this, this and this. But the site's made in Joomla. And I think I was basically changing phone numbers and maybe an email address on the website. And I could not even find where that was located. It was ridiculously hard. It's all in these little pieces, like it was just really, really, really hard.

So I think that Joomla would be perfect for people who know Joomla of course, but it would be a really good solution for somebody who has spent some time training and learning and understanding. And it may be perfect for some people but this is not going to be a solution that you want to recommend to anyone to get started.

If somebody's like, I wonder how I should get started. Should I use WordPress, should I use Drupal, should I use Joomla? Of course WordPress will be my number one recommendation but then I'd also – I mean, Drupal you can at least kinda figure some things out. It's pretty intuitive and there's a fairly large population of people that are using Drupal. But with Joomla I don't even know where to start or where to begin.

So I thought I was gonna have a much better, a longer like detail like, oh, I really like this of Joomla and oh, I really like this with Joomla. And I wish WordPress would do that. And honestly I can't find, off the top of my head looking through some of this stuff, I can't really find anything that I would take from Drupal – or from Joomla and move it over to WordPress. There's nothing that really makes sense to me. There's nothing that I could really understand how to use or how I think those features would be good on WordPress.com.

So I'm fairly confident I'll never do this again with Joomla. I'm fairly confident that I'll never recommend Joomla. And I'm gonna stick with WordPress, I'm gonna stick to my guns and that's going to be my recommendation for using Joomla. So never again will I – well, I can't say never again but unless I'm forced to, I will choose not to use Joomla ever again.

All right. Well, that's going to wrap up this episode. Hopefully next week I got one more episode of this Compare/Contrast. And hopefully next week's is going to be a lot more intuitive and I can at least figure out and use it and set it up and play with it and try to build a site with it. So that's my ultimate goal. So hope you've enjoyed these different episodes and you're learning a little bit about the differences between some of the content platforms that are out there. Now you can feel most confident about recommending WordPress to your friends and clients. You bet. Let's take care of it. Bye-bye.