Joomla is one of the most popular content management systems (CMS) in the world and there’s one main reason for that. This software is still the best open source choice for management of portal type websites. From the start, it’s designed for easier management of sites that contain many elements on each page. Such websites are usually news portals. For such websites, many elements (news articles) should be published on a single page and many articles are usually added daily. There are many Joomla templates available in the market that allow you to create your own portal website.
The main content output in Joomla is usually handled by the core com_content component. If you are experienced in WordPress, this is similar to your main loop of posts. A slight difference is that posts are usually called articles in Joomla. So, the com_content component lists one or many categorized or uncategorized articles, similarly to the WordPress’ posts loop.
Joomla’s Modular Structure
All content besides the main content output of your portal is usually in Joomla modules. These modules include core Joomla modules that display popular articles, latest articles, the articles from a certain category or the articles written on a specific topic or by specific author, etc. Also, it’s worth mentioning that you may need image rotators or video gallery for your portal. That’s also something that you would achieve by using free or commercial Joomla modules. There are many other elements that may be interesting for inclusion in the modern web sites. Some of the most commonly used are: social sharing modules, ads modules (for banners and textual ads), newsletter management modules, contact forms, etc. Everything that we mentioned here is available for your Joomla site in the form of Joomla modules.
Joomla vs. WordPress: The Portal CMS for Choice
Let’s compare this situation with Joomla’s main competitor and the most popular CMS in the world today: WordPress. You can make the similar modular portal site in WordPress as well. But, not so easy! Let’s examine our news portal website example. WordPress themes are usually not bundled with too many module positions (or widget positions that’s the proper term in the WordPress world). Even further, if a WordPress theme contain too much widgets, regular WordPress users would scream: It is a “widgetized theme”! A website with a bunch of widgets everywhere is not something that’s recommended in WordPress and it’s not considered as a good practice in this CMS. The main reason for that is the fact that WordPress is basically developed for simpler, blog-like websites. The management of news portals in WordPress is possible, but it’s not as intuitive and as easy as in Joomla.
However, if you are about to create your news portal and you decided to use WordPress, you will probably need to customize your theme and add more widget positions. Also, you will need to find a good plugin that will limit your widgets from showing them on all pages of your site (this is not a core WordPress feature). Finally, you must check if all elements that you need for your news portal is available in the form of WordPress widgets. Although, there are thousands of WordPress plugins available in the market, usage of them in form of widgets is not too often as it is in Joomla world.
On the other hand, all good Joomla templates usually contain dozens of available module positions. Some of them contain even hundreds of module positions which reflects the modular structure of Joomla. As a core Joomla feature, you may select to publish a module on all pages or only on certain pages. It’s even possible to publish on all pages and exclude only some of the pages.
Finally, we would like to present the Sparky Framework, our free Joomla template framework to all the Cloudways users who are working with Joomla. It’s also available as WordPress theme framework for all WordPress fans! Both of these frameworks are available for download on our site and all our newer premium products are based on this framework. You can download it and try on your site. The Layout Builder of this framework is developed in a “drag and drop” way and it’s very intuitive and easy to use. You can easily create your site’s layout and add as many module positions as you need using our framework.
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This is a guest post contribution from Milos Stankovic from hotTemplates.
Umair Qureshi
Umair Qureshi works as Assistant Digital Marketing Manager for Cloudways- A Managed Cloud Hosting Platform. He loves combining creativity with skills and marketing with technology.
