The keener eyed among you may have noticed that this blog is run using WordPress and yet my preferred CMS platform is Joomla. Joomla can be a blog, right?
Well, yes it can and indeed is by plenty of people around the world. Some make use of the default article manager, others take on a specific third party component that is more specifically tailored to blogging. There is even a bridge component that allows you to host a WordPress blog within Joomla itself.
For me though, this was an experiment in using another piece of software to see how it performed, how easy (or not) it was to install, update, use and extend. How were sites templated and were these easy to change, amend or start from scratch? What options were available for adding posts and comments?
To be fair, setting up WordPress was fairly painless. Having never used it before I was able to find my way around the admin panel fairly easily. There was the expected learning curve trying to match up what I might expect to call things in Joomla (components, modules, plugins, etc.) with their WordPress relatives but all in all that curve was much shallower and shorter than the one for Joomla itself.
I don’t intend this to be a fully fledged comparison of the two systems but it has been an interesting side avenue for me and one I’ve actually quite enjoyed. While I might not use WordPress for my own future projects it has at least enabled me to offer assistance to a few friends who’d had problems with their own blogs and proved to me that despite approaching the end of my fourth decade, this ‘old dog’ can still learn a few new tricks!