One challenging aspect of web development is finding the right CMS for each client. The obvious and most popular choices are WordPress, Joomla or Drupal. In my opinion each has its place to fit the project from design and programming to how comfortable the end user feels managing their new site.
WordPress is perfect for small business that have little time for the learning curve, want ease of use, with moderate design flexibility. In my opinion, Joomla comes as the next level up CMS and best used for those that have good computer knowledge and are willing to learn more complex coding or have a dedicated web person. Drupal I reserve for businesses that wish to have powerful website tools and have a dedicated full time programmer on staff to maintain the site.
Today however, I will primarily focus on WordPress 4.1.1 and Joomla 3.x. Key factors; WordPress’s popularity has put it somewhere with Windows in the hack world. Poor hosting services, usernames and passwords and untested plugins make WordPress vulnerable to hackers looking to inject self serving malicious codes. This is only prevented through diligence and maintaining framework updates.
Joomla on the other hand is less popular as a CMS, due to the need that whomever is managing the site is an experienced programmer and more in tune to versioning updates and legitimate plugins, components and modules.
Of the two, Joomla by far has the best app extensions for its CMS. As for load times, Joomla is MVC (Module-View-Controller) and WordPress is function-function-function-plugin which causes higher server loads making it about 35% slower than Joomla. This however, is only a problem if your building a large site.
Joomla allows for a more fluid design experience whereas WordPress is template based. WordPress is easier to train clients on, so for smaller business it works best.
There’s no doubt that all three are great CMS products, but each has it’s place based on the end user needs and experience level.