The Trouble with Joomla!
Mar 10th, 2008 by Brian A. Thomas
I was thinking of using Joomla! for another website that I was thinking of building, since that website wouldn’t be a full blog. Joomla! is more of a CMS, where WordPress is focused more on blogs, but works okay as a CMS. Joomla! can do blogs well enough however, and overall is more versatile than WordPress, at least as WordPress comes by default, and in its present state.
The problem I came to find is that there seems to be a lack of free high quality themes/templates for Joomla!, while there are lots of great quality themes for WordPress that are free. Unfortunately, premium themes are creeping into the WordPress community, but there are plenty of good theme authors who keep their themes free.
It seems wrong to me to charge for a theme, that is made for free software. Now, I have no problem charging for customization of said theme, or for official support for the theme. Of course if you are using your WordPress/Joomla! site to make a living, then paying for a theme is viable; however, for the vast majority, of at least WordPress users, who are using the s.oftware to run a blog or website that may not be profit oriented, paying for a theme, then discovering it doesn’t work for you isn’t good. This is perhaps why the higher quality Joomla! themes cost something, as Joomla! being a full CMS, is more likely to be used to make a for profit website than WordPress, though there are plenty of for profit sites using WordPress as well. Ads on the site, in of themselves doesn’t make it for profit, one could have have ads just to help pay for the site, such as this one, and if there ever is any extra, then all the better, but the site itself isn’t run to make money (in the case of this site, it is just to keep friends and family informed of what is going on in our lives, and for random thoughts from myself, such as this post since most of my friends and family probably wouldn’t care).
There is a trend to clubs, where you can get all the themes from the club for a “low” monthly/yearly fee, and this seems to be where most of themes are heading in both communities. Also, I only looked for a short while for quality free themes for Joomla! and there may be more high quality themes than I saw, but most of the ones I saw were blog oriented, and if blogging is all you want to do, than WordPress is probably a better platform anyhow. In the end, for me and my purposes, WordPress is still a better fit, not only for this blog, but for most of the other sites I have had in mind.
