Nearly everybody who's had anything to do with web design has heard of WordPress. Not so many people have heard of Joomla!, and those who have may have heard of it at the end of a discussion that began with "WordPress doesn't do that ..." or "I can build that for you in WordPress for $x ..." Many Joomla! professionals have trouble getting a fair hearing from clients who assume that WordPress must be the solution to their problems because that's the only CMS they've heard of. It's time to change that. This talk was delivered to the Melbourne Joomla! User Group on 18 Jan 2017.

1. WHY IS JOOMLA! BETTER?
Melbourne Joomla! User Group
18 Jan 2017
Russell Searle
Psicom

2. SCORECARD
Joomla! has better
Power
Quality
Value

3. SCORECARD
Joomla! has better
Power
Quality
Value
Just as good
Security
Performance
Community
Ease of use
SEO

4. MORE POWER
Joomla! / WP each have standard features the other doesn’t
Joomla! built to run business apps (but does blogs too)
e-Commerce
Marketing
Directories
e-learning
Auctions
Social communities
Customer portals
Media libraries
Vertical markets
Custom applications
Truckloads more

5. BETTER QUALITY
100% object oriented product
Consistent architecture
Quality engineering
Independent framework
RAD tools
Established standards
Specialist teams

6. MORE VALUE
Guaranteed free platform
No ads, subscriptions or contracts
All blog / CMS features included
Average TCO for basic sites:
WordPress lowest TCO
Joomla! about 20% more than WP TCO
Drupal 2 or more times WP TCO
Bottom line: Joomla! goes further

7. STRONG SECURITY
Current release is just as secure as WordPress / Drupal
Strengths:
JSST: Joomla Security Strike Team
Rapid response patches for vulnerabilities
One-click updates installer
Very solid third party firewalls
Two-factor authentication
LDAP authentication
All CAPTCHA options
ACL permissions, text filters

8. SOLID PERFORMANCE
Current release performs just as well as WordPress / Drupal
Strengths:
HTML5 / CSS3 / BootStrap standard UI
Two standard caching options
Gzip page compression
Third party HTML / CSS / JS minifiers
Works well with CDNs

9. VIBRANT COMMUNITY
Passionate Joomla! community as strong as WP / Drupal
Extensive platform, extension and developer support
Strengths:
Community owned product: no boss or shareholders
Online user and technical training / documentation
Standing specialist teams
Rotating leadership
Global conferences
Global user groups
Resources directories
Public repositories
Very healthy aftermarket

10. EASY TO USE
WordPress is famous for ease of use, best for small / blog sites
Joomla! 3.x has caught up, once you have basic knowledge
Strengths:
Consistent, open interface
Clean separation of concerns
Well placed configuration options
Front-end editing options
Powerful template frameworks
New generation of page builders
New generation of admin templates

11. EXCELLENT SEO
WordPress touts SEO
Standard Joomla! 3.x is just as good, just has to be turned on
Third party components may be
responsible for their own SEF URLs
Very good third party SEO extensions
Unique or legacy URL routing