Last month I took over support of one project that inspired this post. It is a website with couple static pages, news and galleries that was created with Joomla. The problem was that site owners could not support it. They are not computer savvy and the internal structure of admin panel is way too complex for them to understand.
Funny enough, I would have gone to completely opposite direction with that site design. Based on site requirements, I would install WordPress and code additional functionality. WordPress handles many things better than Joomla:
- Image upload and resize to sane sizes
- Article/news organization
- Simpler admin interface
And a lot of clients do not need anything more – they do not want to resize media prior uploading, or searching for missing plugins to do that resize on upload time. Also, content and organization is tragic in Joomla, and it is really difficult to comprehend for person that does not work with such systems daily.
Now Joomla has its own uses and I would not create complex sites on wordpress. However, how often developers think about customer needs instead of their development speed and “Power” of the application? Many of us want to show off with powerful options, lots of customizability as we cannot brag about nice code inside to the customer. Often it is not what customer needs.
Thus it is important to write down requirements of project before putting everything on most powerful CMS you know. Think what user wants to see and make it easy for user to navigate through admin panel to do the tasks he needs.
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