Love Joomla. Have zero Joomla Sites.

I was doing some project administration last week, when I realized something funny (which other people called “alarming” when I pointed it out). For the first time in five years, no personal sites of mine run on Joomla. The only exception are two test sites, which I use for Joomla & More articles.

That is not an indication of how I feel about Joomla – which I still love – at all, but a result of my personal needs. Most of my sites are simple blogs, powered by the same combination: WordPress, Akeeba Backup, Jetpack and WordPress SEO (the last one being optional because I don’t really bother to use it anyway). The combination suits my needs: I get to write blog posts, add some static pages (Check “Glossaries” on this site for an example), make a back-up regularly and I can easily push new posts to social media. Let’s get social! Oh, and I can work with my sites on every device I own, without fuzz; or visit WordPress.com where all my blogs are linked to. It works for me, so why change?

There is one exception to my army of WordPress sites. My “main” site which used to be a Joomla 1.5 site (I know) now runs on Kirby CMS, which is a flat-file based CMS. Contrary to Joomla or WordPress it’s pretty static. It mainly allows you to create pages. And that’s all I really needed, considering my old Joomla sites’ content wasn’t updated in 3 years. Now I don’t have the head ache of using an outdated CMS, extension updates, and other fun stuff, to deal with. For a site which I’ll likely not touch for another three years.

I thought you liked Joomla?

I got the question above a few days ago. “I thought you were passionate about it, so why not use it?” It’s true. I’m still passionate about Joomla. I still use it every day at my job, too. We’ve even built a cool “display” app using only Joomla and K2, a custom template and a single module. It works like a charm, the clients can’t even tell they’re using a website!

And I still love writing about Joomla, a lot. While Joomlareporter is a goner, Joomla & More isn’t going anywhere. I still use Joomla daily, so I’ve got tips to share. I’ve got opinions (like it or not) which I’ll throw in your direction. Joomla is far too interesting of a product, with a far too friendly community to stop using it alltogether. That’d be stupid, since Joomla can do things that WordPress can’t do – believe me, after a while you just say “Screw this WordPress site”, and start over in Joomla 3.3 because the pieces don’t fit together sometimes.

You don’t have to use Joomla religiously to believe in the strengths of the product, in my opinion. While it’s funny that people blog about Joomla using WordPress, it makes perfect sense if that want to do just that – blogging. Hell, even some PLT members run their personal blog on WordPress (I won’t rat them out, don’t worry).

In the end, the only thing that matters is this: Use the tools you’re most comfortable with, not the one you feel you should be using. It’ll make things more fun. I know it did for me. 🙂