*Jozzua

I’ve used a number of content managements systems, including:

• Mambo
• Joomla
• Drupal

I found these CMS quite useful for developing websites. Lately, however, I’m getting biased for Wordpress. Three main reasons why:

• Wordpress seems to be naturallly Search Engine Optimized
• It’s so easy to add plugins
• It’s so easy to edit the look/design of the site through the templates

I’ve noticed that Mambo/Joomla tend to use tables for it’s site design. Granted, that may be a bit dependent on the uploaded templates, but most of the templates I’ve seen so far aren’t Search Engine Optimized. Most really still seem to use old school design methods (using a lot of tables and spliced up Photoshop images). Mambo/Joomla guys, prove me wrong on this. Drupal, on the other hand, seems to be much more SEO friendly that Mambo/Joomla.

It is relative easy to add modules and other functionality on Joomla/Mambo but the code often used don’t follow a certain ‘paradigm’. Programmers just add their own code. In effect, Mambo/Joomla appear to be a collection of independent programs tied up together. In contrast, wordpress has a general format for its coding structure. If a programmer were to add a plugin, he’d have to know the general wordpress conventions.

It’s so easy to add functionalities in wordpress. Need a forum? Search on a the web for “wordpress forum plugin”. Need to show comments, an avatar system, show related posts, show popular posts? Yep, there are ready plugins. Just upload these into the wordpress plugins folder, activate and viola! There’s even Akismet to protect from Comment Spams.

On the design side I found it much easier to just go to the wordpress themes folder, edit the stylesheets of a basic template to adopt a new look for my site. I’ve done a couple of designs on joomla/mambo before. Wordpress seems to be easier to work with. This is also my problem with Drupal. I couldn’t figure out how to change the template to fit my needs.

Then again, I am relatively new at Drupal.

Joomla, Mambo and Drupal seem to have a better community functionality over Wordpress. I think wordpress is really meant for simple post/news publications and not really for big, community websites.

These are just some things to think about when choosing a CMS for your website.

Some Follow up notes on my previous posts:

• Yahoo has fixed that Movie Profiles Bug. It’s about time. I was getting rather annoyed seeing David Arquette’s face on Rosario Dawson’s Profile. Rosario is much cuter.
• So far, I have one offer for the earrings trade. Any other offers?