Joomla Africa

If you had to choose, which will it be - Joomla or Wordpress? This is sometimes not an easy question. To get to an informed decision we need to look at the features for Joomla and Wordpress.

Let us start with some features of Wordpress:

• Full standards compliance — We have gone to great lengths to make sure every bit of WordPress generated code is in full compliance with the standards of the W3C. This is important not only for interoperability with today’s browser but also for forward compatibility with the tools of the next generation. Your web site is a beautiful thing, and you should demand nothing less.
• No rebuilding — Changes you make to your templates or entries are reflected immediately on your site, with no need for regenerating static pages.
• WordPress Pages — Pages allow you to manage non-blog content easily, so for example you could have a static "About" page that you manage through WordPress. For an idea of how powerful this is, the entire WordPress.org site could be run off WordPress alone. (We don't for technical mirroring reasons.)
• WordPress Links -- Links allows you to create, maintain, and update any number of blogrolls through your administration interface. This is much faster than calling an external blogroll manager.
• WordPress Themes — WordPress comes with a full theme system which makes designing everything from the simplest blog to the most complicated webzine a piece of cake, and you can even have multiple themes with totally different looks that you switch with a single click. Have a new design every day.
•  Cross-blog communication tools— WordPress fully supports both the Trackback and Pingback standards, and we are committed to supporting future standards as they develop.
• Comments — Visitors to your site can leave comments on individual entries, and through Trackback or Pingback can comment on their own site. You can enable or disable comments on a per-post basis.
• Spam protection — Out of the box WordPress comes with very robust tools such as an integrated blacklist and open proxy checker to manage and eliminate comment spam on your blog, and there is also a rich array of plugins that can take this functionality a step further.
• Full user registration — WordPress has a built-in user registration system that (if you choose) can allow people to register and maintain profiles and leave authenticated comments on your blog. You can optionally close comments for non-registered users. There are also plugins that hide posts from lower level users.
• Password Protected Posts — You can give passwords to individual posts to hide them from the public. You can also have private posts which are viewable only by their author.
• Easy installation and upgrades — Installing WordPress and upgrading from previous versions and other software is a piece of cake. Try it and you'll wonder why all web software isn't this easy.
• Easy Importing — We currently have importers for Movable Type, Textpattern, Greymatter, Blogger, and b2. Work on importers for Nucleus and pMachine are under way.
• XML-RPC interface — WordPress currently supports an extended version of the Blogger API, MetaWeblog API, and finally the MovableType API. You can even use clients designed for other platforms like Zempt.
• Workflow — You can have types of users that can only post drafts, not publish to the front page.
• Typographical niceties — WordPress uses the Texturize engine to intelligently convert plain ASCII into typographically correct XHTML entities. This includes quotes, apostrophes, ellipses, em and en dashes, multiplication symbols, and ampersands. For information about the proper use of such entities see Peter Sheerin's article The Trouble With Em ’n En.
• Intelligent text formatting — If you've dealt with systems that convert new lines to line breaks before you know why they have a bad name: if you have any sort of HTML they butcher it by putting tags after every new line indiscriminately, breaking your formatting and validation. Our function for this intelligently avoids places where you already have breaks and block-level HTML tags, so you can leave it on without worrying about it breaking your code.
• Multiple authors — WordPress’ highly advanced user system allows up to 10 levels of users, with different levels having different (and configurable) privileges with regard to publishing, editing, options, and other users.
• Bookmarklets — Cross-browser bookmarklets make it easy to publish to your blog or add links to your blogroll with a minimum of effort.
• Ping away — WordPress supports pinging Ping-O-Matic, which means maximum exposure for your blog to search engines.

WOW! What a lot of fantastic features from WordPress.

Let us have a look at some of the key features from Joomla:

• User Management: Joomla has a registration system that allows users to configure personal options. There are nine user groups with various types of permissions on what users are allowed to access, edit, publish and administrate.
• Authentication is an important part of user management and Joomla support multiple protocols, including LDAP, OpenID, and even Gmail. This allows users to use their existing account information to streamline the registration process.
• Media Manager: The Media Manager is the tool for easily managing media files or folders and you can configure the MIME type settings to handle any type of file. The Media Manager is integrated into the Article Editor tool so you can grab images and other files at any time.
• Language Manager: There is international support for many world languages and UTF-8 encoding. If you need your Web site in one language and the administrator panel in another, multiple languages are possible.
• Banner Management: It's easy to set up banners on your Web site using the Banner Manager, starting with creating a client profile. Once you add campaigns and as many banners as you need, you can set impression numbers, special URLs, and more.
• Contact Management: The Contact Manager helps your users to find the right person and their contact information. It also supports multiple contact forms going to specific individuals as well as groups.
• Polls: If you want to find out more about your users, it's easy to create polls with multiple options.
• Search: Help navigate users to most popular search items and provide the admin with search statistics.
• Web Link Management: Providing link resources for site users is simple and you can sort them into categories, even count every click.
• Content Management: Joomla's simplified three-tiered system of articles makes organizing your content a snap. You can organize your content any way you want and not necessarily how it will be on your Web site. Your users can rate articles, e-mail them to a friend, or automatically save a PDF (with UTF-8 support for all languages). Administrators can archive content for safekeeping, hiding it from site visitors.
• Email Cloaking: On public Web sites, built-in e-mail cloaking protects email addresses from spambots.
• WYSIWIG: Creating content is simple with the WYSIWYG editor, giving even novice users the ability to combine text, images in an attractive way. Once you've created your articles, there are a number of pre-installed modules to show the most popular articles, latest new items, newsflashes, related articles, and more.
• Syndication and Newsfeed Management: With Joomla, it's easy to syndicate your site content, allowing your users to subscribe to new content in their favorite RSS reader. It's equally easy to integrate RSS feeds from other sources and aggregate them all on your site.
• Menu Manager: The Menu Manager allows you to create as many menus and menu items as you need. You can structure your menu hierarchy (and nested menu items) completely independent of your content structure. Put one menu in multiple places and in any style you want; use rollovers, dropdown, flyouts and just about any other navigation system you can think of. Also automatic breadcrumbs are generated to help navigate your site users.
• Template Management: Templates in Joomla are a powerful way to make your site look exactly the way you want and either use a single template for the entire site or a separate template for each site section. The level of visual control goes a step further with powerful template overrides, allowing you to customize each part of your pages.
• Integrated Help System: Joomla has a built-in help section to assist users with finding what they need. A glossary explains the terms in plain English, a version checker makes sure you're using the latest version, a system information tool helps you troubleshoot, and, if all else fails, links to a wealth of online resources for additional help and support.
• System Features: Speedy page loads are possible with page caching, granular-level module caching, and GZIP page compression.
• Debug: If your system administrator needs to troubleshoot an issue, debugging mode and error reporting are invaluable.
• FTP Layer: The FTP Layer allows file operations (like installing Extensions) without having to make all the folders and files writable, making your site administrator's life easier and increasing the security of your site.
• Private Messaging: Administators quickly and efficiently communicate with users one-on-one through private messaging or all site users via the mass mailing system.
• Web Services: With Web services, you can use Remote Procedure Calls (via HTTP and XML). You can also integrate XML-RPC services with the Blogger and Joomla APIs.
• Powerful Extensibility: These are just some of the basic Joomla features and the real power is in the way you customize Joomla. Visit the Joomla Extensions Directory to see thousands of ways to enhance Joomla to suit your needs.

Another WOW for Joomla!

Now let us compare these two database, PHP coded, web based systems.

They both have similar features. However, it is in the goal of the system where the secret to selecting the right one is found.

Wordpress is a blogging tool .Blogging being a web log. An online log of events. This is the aim and goal of WordPress. To be a blogging tool.

Joomla, is a CMS - a content management system. A system to handle content of a web site.
Decide on what the system is needed for, then decide on the system. Form follows function! It is the form that determines how something will function!