Joomla is a Much Better Option Than WordPress for Complex Sites
CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS IN GENERAL
Although the bulk of the websites I work on are WordPress, I occasionally have to look at other Content Management Systems. I’ve found that certain industries like certain kinds. Government entities love to use .NET-based systems for some reason. These systems are a bit archaic with routing that mimics closely how Windows Explorer manages files. This is why so many government websites have pages with deeply nested pages in the form of https://maindomain.com/main/partofmain/anotherleveldeeper/page.html for example.
There are, quite frankly, terrible systems out there. The worst are proprietary systems that are not open-source and simply do not grow as a result. Brio is the worst I’ve ever seen (no version control, poor documentation, poor plugin support, costs money). Then there are the inflexible, propriety ones like Wix and Squarespace that exist for people who “just need a website” and want everything out of the box. The biggest drawback of this is that your website is tied to one of these companies. So, if there’s a huge price hike or one of them go out of business, you’re SOL.
WORDPRESS DRAWBACKS
WordPress is by far the more popular option for general business needs since it’s the cheapest and best option, quite frankly, for most people. WordPress is also much more portable than Wix and Squarespace.
However, WordPress does not scale well for large amounts of data. For data, especially, that needs to repeat throughout the site multiple times, there’s no great default option to do that. The closest thing for this is by default is their “dynamic sidebar.” However, it is quite frankly not very good since you can only ever really just add text and it’s not that intuitive to use since it’s buried within another section of . One often has to resort to simply copying and pasting from one page to another.
There’s also no easy way to only use the resources you need on a web page. For instance, if you need a contact form on one page, you will load resources for that contact form on all pages. This makes many WordPress sites bloated and eventually slow. Caching is a must on WordPress sites for them to work quickly. Performance plugins are also necessary. The tools that make editing easier (Elementor, for example) are also extremely resource-intensive and makes editing slow.
My biggest gripe with WordPress is poor security. Plugins are great; however, they are black boxes for both users and developers. I know very few developers who have the time to go through plugin source code and find security gaps. Plugins are also updated so frequently that even great plugins can unknowingly introduce security flaws.
As a result, WordPress is responsible for a disproportionately high amount of breaches among websites in general. Still, for most sites WordPress makes the most sense since most sites are purely informational with perhaps a few interactive bits.
MODULE-BASED SYSTEMS
Module-based systems are based on the principle that you will have many repeating elements throughout your site. Thus, you could build your pages by piecing together your modules. The advantage of this is only having to edit in one place for repeating sections. The drawback of this is a dramatic increase in complexity. The major CMS options that do this are Joomla and Drupal.
Having worked with Drupal; I think it’s an okay CMS. However, I believe it’s needlessly complicated. As today’s content management systems move towards simplicity, Drupal seems to aim for complexity. For whatever reason, academia and healthcare love Drupal.
I prefer Joomla because it is a middle-ground between simple and complex. Websites when set up correctly and properly documented, can be easy to use for clients. It is much more efficient in terms of resources and far more secure than WordPress. I like how one can add custom fields to content types without having to add plugins.
It is, however, not intuitive to use. Developing when it’s not obvious what content area is associated with each part of the website is confusing. However, once it is understood it can be easy to work with and makes a lot of sense for clients with huge amounts of content.