Wordpress is a amazing application for building blog websites, but what about a Joomla Blog? Is Joomla 1.5 a good system for building a blogging website? There are many debates rolling around the Internet about Wordpress vs. Joomla for blogging and Joomla vs. Wordpress for content management system websites (CMS). One great blog post is to read is 5 Reasons You Should Use Joomla Instead if Wordpress. While the article is not aimed at blogging per se, it does raise some good points about expansion, customization and extensibility.
We build both Wordpress & Joomla blog websites. We use the correct tool for the job. If a client wants a straight blog without many future enhancements or is interested in a Third Party Blog, we will always choose Wordpress. If the client needs a corporate or marketing website with functionality (like ecommerce, multiple templates, social networking, forms, forums etc) AND a blog, we will always choose Joomla. This very blog post you are reading is just that, a blog on a Joomla business website for our company, s-go Consulting.
So is Joomla any good at this? Well yes, absolutely. And there are many ways to approach building a blog in Joomla.
1) Use Third Party Blogging Components Like:
These components and plugins also some provide supporting modules and plugins to handle important blog functions, including; tags clouds, blog archive, blog categories, blog comments, latest blog posts and more. The advantage is that the modules are developed as addons specifically for the component, so integration is easy. And most of the primary blog website features are in one package.
2) Wordpress Integration into Joomla 1.5
Core PHP offers a commercial plugin to fully integrate Wordpress into Joomla 1.5. We have not used or integrated this solution. This is a promising approach as both applications are amazing and the ability to use both with seamless integration is compelling. We intend to test this solution. But it may not be that practical for many people, and not necessary.
3) Use Core Joomla with Plugins & Modules
So we finally get to the purpose of this article. For many businesses and website owners, Joomla delivers a corporate website with a blog. And it can do that with the core content functionality with some free addons. We call this a hybrid approach. It is especially great for new website projects, or modifying an existing Joomla site to add pure blog functionality. And it is easy. Think about how Joomla works. Section Blog Layouts, Category Blog Layouts, and articles. Meta tags in content. This IS a blog.
How We Built The Blogging Functionality on This Site
We just used standard Joomla content creation and a category called s-go blog. We also use the core Joomla module Latest News to display our Latest Blog Posts. We researched and found these additional free third party addons.
RSS Feeds - Mod Feedburner
Joomla has built in RSS feed capability, but this module is far superior. It puts you into the Feedburner community.
Tag Cloud - Zaragoza Cloud Module
A servicable tag cloud module that has some very cool programability.
Tags in Posts - Zaragoza Tags Plugin
An in content tag plugin that creates links to articles sharing the same tags.
TweetMe Plugin
An in content retweet plug-in that keeps count of the number of times your blog post has been retweeted to Twitter. Also puts you into the TweetMeme community.
Disqus Comment System
Superior plugin to add Disqus commenting to your blog posts. Commentors can post comments using Twitter, Facebook or Open ID logins. It is a superior comment management system.
Other free Joomla addons exist for category lists, pinging, archiving, etc.
So this Joomla Blog using core content management and one core module plus some other free modules and plugins is a simple, native solution. It does basic blooging very well. What about SEO? With proper keyword research, meta tagging, content titles and purposeful writing, Joomla Blogs can be just as effective for SEO as Wordpress blogs.
