While Joomla! was the first CMS to really grab my attention, WordPress 3.0 has stolen the show!

I first ventured into Open Source CMS platforms in 2008 when job hunting. I spent some time building a simple resume site using the ASP.NET framework and a pure CSS layout. While I was happy with the results, I found I had a desire to include more functionality and realized I could either spend time building the site or looking for work.

Easy call there.

As many web hosting companies do now, mine offered a relatively simple-to-use installer to automate creation of various web applications. I first tried DotNetNuke. Works fine, but U-G-L-Y. I looked around for available templates from which to start and found very little. Granted, I could spend time on the template and tweak the CSS, but that negates the whole purpose of having used this system.

What I did find while looking for DotNetNuke templates was WordPress and Joomla! templates – all over the place. Themes for WordPress (akin to templates for Joomla!) were abundant and beautiful, but I needed more functionality than just a simple blog – I just didn’t realize WordPress had more flexibility than being a simple blogging tool.

So, I began building sites with Joomla! CMS. Joomla! I was overwhelmed at first by the complex structure and plugin/module/component concepts, but within a few hours, I had a reasonably well-functioning site built. I continued to delve deeper into Joomla! and built a few other sites for myself and a few clients while also dabbling with WordPress.

In the last year, I have come to not only appreciate WordPress much more as a platform for web applications outside of pure blogging, but have begun moving my sites from Joomla! to WordPress. Why? WordPress 3.0.

Among the game changing features of WP 3.0 are:

• automatic updates for WordPress
• automatic updated for  plug-ins
• automatic updates for themes
• custom menus

As much as I have appreciated the power and extensibility of Joomla!, it has a steep learning curve to work in efficiently and all components, as well as the CMS framework itself, all have to be updated manually. WordPress has always been more refined, but with the 3.0 release, I can no longer find a compelling reason to use Joomla over WordPress.