5 years ago when I started Web Circle I did a bunch of research on which CMS to choose and decided on Joomla!.

For a year or so it was the CMS we used for pretty much every website and it was very sophisticated for what it could do at the time – particularly with the growing extensions directory. However as time went on and WordPress got better and better we gradually moved to using WordPress for most of our small business websites.

Since these days we focus predominantly on small business website design, WordPress has become the platform we use for the majority of our new sites (note we also still use Joomla!).

In 2006

In 2006 WordPress was seen mainly as a blogging tool and Joomla! was in my view the CMS with the most potential. I haven’t come across specific market share figures from the time but have a look at this Google Trends screenshot.

ABOVE: Screenshot showing 2006 Google searches – Joomla (blue) and WordPress (red)

There were some niggly things about each platform which people used to mention. The things about WordPress tended to be around it’s lack of flexibility in display, it’s focus mainly on blogging, limited menu capabilities etc. The Joomla issues were security and usability (particularly the way it separated menus and content items / articles).

So rewind to 2006, what did each platform need to do to win this race? There are a lot of complicating factors. One big one is WordPress managed to gain a huge foll0wing with it’s free hosted version WordPress.com – this no doubt propelled it’s uptake and spread the word particularly among DIY web builders (not so much developers).

But let’s just say the job of each system back then was pretty straight forward. Think of it like a business, you need to listen to your customers and give them what they want. So in other words, improve on the things that people don’t like about the system and make it so people do like it.

Both systems were free, both had a good market share and relatively equal potential to win this race.

Perhaps this is a simple view but let’s look at what happened.

The situation now

This chart shows Joomla! and WordPress searches over all years available.

ABOVE: Screenshot showing 2006 Google searches – Joomla! (blue) and WordPress (red)

In terms of Market Share, in the 2008 Water and Stone Open Source CMS Report Joomla! downloads were about 25% of WordPress downloads. In the 2010 report they were 11%. I’m guessing the 2011 report will show a similar trend.

Some reports show WordPress market share to be as high as 63%.

So what happened?

Let’s assume that both systems were actively going after this DIY or small business type market (it’s worth noting that Joomla! has a big uptake among Governments and Universities etc and we still use it a lot for more complicated sites). What has WordPress done since 2006 and what has Joomla! done?

First off WordPress has managed to shrug it’s blogging history by bringing out new and improved features that have made it into a great platform for non-blog type sites (growing extensions, better menu management etc). But it’s managed to do it while also winning the battle with Movable Type on the blog front – during a time where the popularity of blogging has exploded – further spreading the word to people who want a blog as part of their site or even to those who want other sites that aren’t blogs and grew to love the platform.

Joomla! on the other hand hasn’t really dealt with the issues that were common back in 2006. Note that Joomla! is an entirely community driven system which does make things challenging when competing in a space filled mostly with systems with commercial backing (like WordPress). However Joomla has improved a lot since 2006 with 2 major version releases and the uptake in some sectors like Government etc has been very good. But did they fix those niggly issues that existed back in 2006? Let’s break it down.

1. Security

The main problem with security in Joomla! is not that the system is less secure than other systems. The problem is that when new versions come out, it’s a pain in the backside to upgrade the system. First of all you don’t even really know that the system is out of date (how hard would it be to put a notification up the top like WordPress does) but secondly the process for patching Joomla! is one that a web developer has to do – and even a web developer will take a while to do it. WordPress on the other hand can all be done by the site owner with a couple of clicks.

So even with the latest version of Joomla! Small business owners who are using it find it hard to (a) know when it needs to be patched and (b) to do the patching.

And this is just with minor version releases – the major version releases are literally all over the place.

Easy solution – Here is a super easy solution that Joomla! could have implemented 5 years ago – Make sites check for the latest version and if they become out of date display a message up the top that says the site is at risk and the website owner needs to speak with their web developer to upgrade the site. This would have been a couple of lines of code. Magento does it (in fact they pop it up right in your face and force you to acknowledge it) – WordPress does it while at the same time offering a 1-click upgrade option.

Better solution – I don’t know how complicated doing the 1-click patching is, a lot of systems don’t work this way  but WordPress seem to have managed to make it work. In my experience putting this back in control of the site owner is going to reduce the amount of out of date sites by a huge margin – especially combined with the messaging above which is exactly how WordPress manages to do it (I note the new Joomla! 1.7 this functionality is available).

And with Major version releases I don’t know where to start. Do we need them? Can we not just improve something incrementally. If we do need them then I would suggest not bringing out a major version release until you have a simple upgrade path that is part of the core (not relying on 3rd party extensions) and something that steps through the process and automates it (for example files and replaces references in templates etc). No doubt this isn’t easy but major upgrades are a real thorn in Joomla!’s side.

2. Ease of use

Ease of use is a very important factor in the small business community. I’ve heard a lot of Joomla! site owners say they were looking forward to Joomla! 1.6 because the old version was hard to use. I heard the same things about 1.5 but the truth is neither release was really any easier to use than the original Joomla 1.

One of the main issues I see with the usability of Joomla! is the weird way it separates menus and pages. Small business owners see websites as comprised of pages – they always have. Joomla sees articles and sees menus as ways to link to articles. So the intuitive process for adding a page to a website you would think would be to log into the CMS, click on add a page, add the page and click Save. This would create the page and add a link to the main menu. On top of this you would need to have the ability to exclude pages from menus.

One CMS I have seen do this very well is a system called SilverStripe. How WordPress manages menus now goes close enough to re-producing this. But even after 5 years in Joomla! to create a new page you need to create an ‘Article’ (note changing the older terminology from content item to article didn’t help – as I say small business owners see them as pages). Then after creating the Article you need to go to a totally different section, find the menu that the site uses (hopefully there aren’t too many as there often are) and then create a link through to the article. And still even finding out how to link through to an article is not easy! it’s as hard as it was when I tried to do it as a web developer in 2006 for the first time and couldn’t work it out.

There are still people in the Joomla! forum asking how they can create a page.

Easy Solution – This is something I thought of 5 years ago when I first started using Joomla! that they could have easily done at any stage. Have Joomla! by default set to ‘automated menu’ mode – or at least force people to choose when they set it up. In automated menu mode there would be a top menu in the site which automatically listed very page (or article, or content item if they want to call it that). Surely this wouldn’t be that hard – even thrown in an option in the pages to not publish them in the menu. This would not impact on their ability to service larger sites because it would be a setting that could easily be turned off.

Better solution – To me the architecture of Joomla! has always been a bit strange. To me a better approach would be for the site owner to create a ‘page’ and on this page they could have the option to have a few different ‘layouts’ (it would default to the default specified by the template). Then once the page is created they could click on the various regions provided (regions would be specified in the template like they currently are) and they could choose what goes in each region. For example click the main region and enter text / HTML with an editor or choose to have it as a list of articles (and provide the ability to create these articles on the fly). And then click on the right column and add some text / HTML or choose from some inbuilt display modules.

This would effectively make Joomla! a different system but to me this is an entirely more logical way to go and it would very much support simple small business sites but could also be scaled to bigger sites like the current system can.

What is the message

To me the message in this is really clear and it’s about listening to your customers. The issues that were holding Joomla! back in 2006 are holding them back now and meanwhile WordPress have stamped out their issues and excelled at exactly those things that were problems for Joomla!

Joomla! continued improving but they didn’t improve in the areas that their customers wanted. At least not their small business customers.

WordPress listened, they didn’t want to be known as a blogging platform only – they made it easy – and they won.

What does the future hold

I really believe both systems have the potential to be prominent in the small business space moving forward. WordPress is here to stay and whether it has beaten Joomla! in this market yet it is certainly well on the way. Is it possible for Joomla! to claw back into this space and reverse the trend. For one thing the challenge now is huge.

Not only do they have to improve the things that customers want improved but that along will not be enough. That alone won’t reverse the trend against WordPress they are going to have to also innovate and come up with ways of doing things that WordPress can’t. And that is not going to be easy.

About the author: Dan Norris

Dan Norris runs Australian web design firm, A Website Designer. Dan is passionate about helping small business owners succeed online using WordPress.

We’ve already shared part 1 of our highlights from 2010, but what about you? What is your most memorable WordPress-related highlight from the year 2010? This could be anything from the first 3.1 release candidate to that time when you spent all night fixing your friend’s blog.

To start the ball rolling, I’d have to say that the hiring of Andrew Nacin as a full-time developer certainly stands out as my favorite WordPress moment of 2010. So, what’s yours?

Swift is the fastest loading, SEO optimized, server friendly WordPress theme. This theme is mainly for blogs running on low server resources and for those who like clean and simple designs. [directory listing]

Hybrid is a user-friendly, search-engine optimized theme framework, featuring 15 custom page templates and 8 widget-ready areas, allowing you to create any type of site you want. [directory listing]

Twenty Ten is stylish, customizable, simple, and readable — make it yours with a custom menu, header image, and background. Twenty Ten supports six widgetized areas (two in the sidebar, four in the footer) and featured images (thumbnails for gallery posts and custom header images for posts and pages). [directory listing]

Thematic is a free, open-source, highly extensible, search-engine optimized WordPress Theme Framework featuring 13 widget-ready areas, grid-based layout samples, styling for popular plugins, and a whole community behind it. It’s perfect for beginner bloggers and WordPress development professionals. [directory listing]

Suffusion is an elegant, versatile and browser-safe theme with a power-packed set of options. It has 19 widget areas, one-column, two-column and three-column fixed-width and flexible-width formats, 10 pre-defined templates, 17 pre-defined color schemes, two customizable multi-level drop-down menus, featured posts, a magazine layout, tabbed sidebars, widgets for Twitter, Social Networks and Google Translator. [directory listing]

I’m sure that most of you weren’t surprised by a few of these, but maybe you discovered one that you just might try today. If you find yourself always relaying on a particular theme, find the developer’s donation page and at least buy them a drink.

Those of you with WordPress theme design and modification experience may find the lack of being able to edit the template files to be quite limiting, but nothing could be further from the truth.

If you’re a WordPress.com user seeking to produce your own unique design, look no further than this collection for some of the best Custom CSS blogs on WordPress.com.

Some of the blogs in this collection used the Sandbox theme (practically a blank slate) to build their unique design using nothing but their own CSS, but some have used their Custom CSS upgrade to build extensively on top of existing fully designed themes.

Do you use custom CSS on your WordPress.com blog?  If so, we’d love to see it!

Well, I’m sure you could have guessed that this was coming next, so without further ado, we’d love to know what your favorite WordPress themes are and why they rank #1 out of the thousands available.

Reason 1: you can’t beat “free”

This one is pretty obvious: there are plenty of stuff to win, and you might win one. Check out the Sponsors page and peruse the growing list of goodies provided by several benefactors of our community. Vote and one could be yours. Not interested in any prize? Vote anyway, win one and sell it during your next front yard sell!

Reason 2: it’s good for the community

Our community consists in users using products, and authors crafting those products (themes, plugins, tutorials and news sites…). This event is an occasion for users to show their support, admiration, thankfulness or love to makers. Some of the products in our community are commercial and as such require a financial effort, but most are free and don’t get too many feedback on how users are pleased to use them. And anyway this is not about money here: this is about love. Tell makers you love them. Vote for them. And if your favorite product maker is not nominated yet, submit them.

Reason 3: it’s custom post types

That is actually my personal favorite reason why you should register to the site.

A little background information for those who are starting to get lost? WordPress can register different types of posts, and uses internally a few of them: “posts” in the traditional way, “pages” as you know them, but also attachments, revisions and nav menus. Users and authors can also define custom post types (sometimes referred to as CPT) to further extend the way they will manage their content with WordPress.

The 2010 WordPress Honors website makes good use of custom post types, to file Sites, Plugins, Themes and Personalities. You probably have seen a few tutorials already explaining how to implement CPT into your theme or plugin, but if you are not that tech savvy and just want to understand how the end result might look like and work, register and poke around the admin interface. Then, of course, browse the site itself and vote!

Final voting will begin once the nominees have been announced in mid November, and the winners will be announced in early January.

What’s your take on award ceremonies like this? Will WPHonors show the best that the WordPress community has to offer, or will this be just another popularity content?

1. Akismet: This plugin should be the front line of your blog’s anti-spam defenses. According to its directory listing, it’s been downloaded individually over 4,060,000 times, but it’s also bundled with WordPress. Just to give you an idea, the current version of WordPress has been downloaded over 15,800,000 times. Considering those numbers, it’s no wonder that this is the most popular WordPress plugin and the top of almost every commentator’s top five list. [directory listing]
2. Google XML Sitemaps: This plugin was the first XML sitemap generator for WordPress. Though the concept of a dynamically generated XML sitemap took a while to catch on, the popularly of this plugin should be a clear sign of the protocol’s success. [directory listing]
3. All In One SEO: As its name proclaims, this plugin takes almost everything you’d need for search engine optimization and wraps it into a nice package. If you’re concerned about SEO, this is as close to set-it-and-forget-it as these SEO plugins come. [directory listing]
4. WP Super Cache: This plugin reduces server load and improves load time by serving html copies of every page without the need to run PHP or access the database. It’s the oldest surviving cache plugin for WordPress. By that I mean that it’s been around since 2007 and it’s still under active development. [directory listing]
5. WP-DBManager: This all-in-one plugin allows you to backup, optimize, and repair your database, empty/drop tables, and run SQL queries. Perhaps one of the most interesting bits of trivia on this plugin is that it hasn’t been updated since June of 2009, it still works perfectly, and there’s no other plugin like it. [directory listing]
6. Google Analytics for WordPress: This is so much more than your typical “enter your Analytics code here” plugin. It includes the ability to track outbound and download links, ignore visitors with specified user levels, track meta data via custom variables, and much more. [directory listing]
7. Contact Form 7: This is one of the first WordPress contact form plugins, it allows you to manage multiple fully customizable contact forms with spam protection, and it continues to be updated at a very steady rate. [directory listing]
8. W3 Total Cache: This is one of the newest caching plugins. Thanks to its promises of an easy setup and compatibility with most hosting environments, its user base is growing rapidly. [directory listing]
9. Subscribe2: This is the oldest email subscription plugin for WordPress. The plugin was first released in 2005, and although it may have changed hands a few times, it’s still under active development. [directory listing]
10. WordPress.com Stats: This is the official plugin for the one and only hosted stats solution from Automattic. The adoption rate has been a bit slower than expected due to some interface and usability problems, but with a new user interface on the horizon, things are bound to improve. [directory listing]

I’m sure that most of you weren’t surprised by your top ten, but I bet that some of you were, and at least a few of you discovered a great plugin that you may be installing today. If you find yourself relying regularly on a free plugin, find the developer’s donation page and at least buy them a drink.

I’ll have to join with the popular vote here and say that Akismet is definitely my favorite plugin. You have no idea how much of a comment spam nightmare this blog would be without Akismet.

What’s your favorite plugin, and why can’t your blog live without it?

• Fluency Admin by Dean J. Robinson. A nice looking, well documented, well translated admin theme that is often updated.

Wait for it ….. thats it!! (that I could find, please let us know if you know of others that are of high quality and updated regularly) There are various useful and popular tools to control and modify your admin interface such as Ozh’s Admin Drop Down Menu or the Adminimize Plugin, however no admin theme market has developed. The initial momentum seems to have fizzled out. We feature hundreds of themes for your WordPress blog every month. I barely ever see one for the admin side.

It really sucks to know that there is such a demand for these, but no supply whatsoever. To encourage talented developers and feed this need in the WordPress community, I would like to offer up our services for what they are worth. If you create, build and support a high quality admin theme (we decide what is high quality) for WordPress and release it under the GPL as appropriate, we will let you feature your admin theme and your design services on this blog for our readers. Think of it as free advertising in exchange for some service to the community. (Please leave a comment or use the contact form linked above if you need clarification or have questions.)

Are you interested?

So without further ado, I would love to read about and be linked to The Top 5 Plugins that you WordPress Genuises use in every one of your WordPress installs and why are they so important to you?

Last week, the WordPress Support Forums mailing list presented nominations for the top active support forum volunteers. These volunteers were nominated for being active on the support forums within the last month and for helping multiple users almost every day on their own free time. The nominees were then organized by the number of topics they have been involved in since joining the forums to find this year’s top fifteen.

If you stopped by the WordPress Support Forums this year, you were probably helped by one of these fifteen volunteers, or you at least got the chance to see them in action.

Without further delay, here are the top fifteen active WordPress Support Forum volunteers:

Mel “esmi” Pedley: Professional web developer since 2001 with a special interest in CSS, web accessibility and, more recently, all things WordPress. Spent a number of years in a previous life running IT support in the public sector. Old habits die hard. [forum profile]

Samuel “samboll” Bollinger: I am a landscape architect by trade and am an avid golfer and camper. I originally started using WordPress back in the 1.5.x series for a business site. I became active in the forums when version 2.0 came out. Can’t remember exactly when I became a mod, but just came to forums one day and saw I was…thought that was a weird way to do it at the time, but years later and I’m still here. I use and support WordPress because of the community and transparency of all levels of the WordPress hierarchy. [forum profile]

Chris “Chris_K” Kasten (fka HandySolo): I’m Director of Technical Operations by day, an independent consultant by night and experienced in a wide range of technologies. I got involved with WordPress support back in 2005 when I had some questions, found the forum and realized I could answer others’ questions while waiting on my own answers. Volunteered to help clean up mangled forum posts shortly afterward and have been a mod ever since. [forum profile]

James “MacManX” Huff: When I started using WordPress six years ago, I had no clue what a “server” was, I though PHP was pronounced ffp, and I think I killed my blog eight times during the first hour. I would never have made it as far as I did without the WordPress Support Forums. Now, I’m happy to donate my time to help others, just like the forum volunteers from years ago helped me. [forum profile]

Otto: I live in Memphis, TN, and make beer in my spare time. I’ve been doing this sort of thing for about 5 years, and recently got hired by Matt as his “Tech Ninja”. So I’m actually paid to help people out now. [forum profile]

Michael “alchymyth” Stolze: I am a senior scientist, with interests in logic and computing since the early days of “fortran” and “assembler”. I began using WordPress and visiting the support forum while I was remodeling a website for a friend; and now I am part-time building web sites and WordPress themes. My life’s motto: “I am here to help.” [forum profile]

James “Rev. Voodoo” Yeo: I’ve tried to make my own website since 1993 when I got my first email account in university. I’ve hand coded, and I’ve tried just about every package out there. WordPress finally made it fun! [forum profile]

mercime: My first WP site was a WPMU 1.2.1 install in 2007 to consolidate all blogs I set up with Greymatter (CGI) in 2002 and self-hosted Blogger sites set up in 2003 under one admin for a church. I believe in the power of giving and giving back. Even though I am neither a coder or programmer, I go to the WP/BP forums and try to help others out where I can. For it is in giving that we receive … more than we even hope for. [forum profile]

Clayton “ClaytonJames” James: My involvement with WordPress started after a year-long trial of installing, evaluating and then discarding more than a dozen other blogging and content management systems that just didn’t live up to my expectations. After only a month with WordPress I knew I had found the right solution. Being involved with support in the forums has taught me almost as much about myself as it has about WordPress. It’s a pleasure belonging to a support community that’s always so willing to share its collective patience and knowledge with others. [forum profile]

Mark “t31os” Duncan: In my spare time I write hacks, plugins or provide support in the forums for WordPress (it’s great fun – generally) and it’s also nice sharing back what I know about code with the community, there’s also the satisfying feeling you get when you’ve helped someone troubleshoot a problem, create a custom hack or add some special functionality to their site (I think we all know that feeling). [forum profile]

Roy: I used to have an html website, but in April/May 2007 I switched to WordPress. Being unfamiliar with CSS, PHP, XHTML, etc. (and still!) I frequently used the forums to clear things up. After a while I could answer other user’s more basic questions myself and this is still the case. I just check every once in a while if there are questions that I can answer, because I think it would be a shame if a new user with a simple question would get stuck early in his/her WordPress experience on something (relatively) simple. Also I check the forums frequently because it is usually the first place to learn about large or small hacks, hiccups in the software, etc. [forum profile]

Mika A. Epstein: I work for “the man” at a large, multi-national bank, but I help with WordPress because the Communist/Socialist in me thinks that if we make the code better, we help make the world better. WordPress has caused me to master all sorts of bizarre talents I never would have thought possible. It’s even helped me to be better at my “real job” because of the coding ideas I’ve come across in the WP community. No one thinks better sideways than the WordPress Devs! [forum profile]

Mark “songdogtech” Ratledge: I got involved helping out in the WordPress.org forums after I found lots of help there myself. I’ve been developing WordPress sites for individuals and non-profits for a few years now. As well as working in IT and being a technology journalist, I’ve been a carpenter, mechanic and have taught university-level English and literature. [forum profile]

mrmist: I got into WordPress a few years ago after switching when MoveableType were having something of an identity crisis. Since then I have been getting more involved with the community, picking up bits of knowledge here and there. These days I am mostly active around the forums and Codex, and I try my best to submit simple patches to the code base. [forum profile]

Andrea “andrea_r” Rennick: I became a user of WordPress MU a good three years ago – when it was in pre-beta stage. I was just your typical mom at home, teaching my kids, and I wanted to create a community for other homeschoolers to have blogs all in one location, so we could find & support each other. It took me a month just to get everything running. I was spending so much time in the MU support forum finding answers, eventually I was helping others. [forum profile] (Note: Andrea was highly active in the WordPress MU Support Forums before they were closed a month ago.)

No support forum would be complete without moderators. The following moderators are currently active in the forums and deserve an extra round of applause. Not only are they tasked with keeping the forums organized and free of spam, but most of them are volunteers as well.

Michael “mdawaffe” Adams, Les “LesBessant” Bessant, Sheri “designsimply” Bigelow, Michael “miklb” Bishop, Samuel “samboll” Bollinger, Brian “briancolinger” Colinger, Mark “t31os” Duncan, James “MacManX” Huff, Chris “Chris_K” Kasten, mrmist, Andrew “nacin” Nacin, Otto, Mel “esmi” Pedley, Andrea “andrea_r” Rennick, and Peter “westi” Westwood.

Obviously, this is just a small sampling of the volunteers providing help on the support forums. If you ever helped someone on the WordPress Support Forums, give yourself a pat on the back, and keep up the amazing work. You’re a part of something that makes WordPress one of the greatest open source blogging platforms.

If you have ever been helped by one of the volunteers on the WordPress Support Forums, let them know how much you appreciated their help.

Six Revisions has an ultimate guide to the new features in WordPress 3.0, while Rohand Mehta tells us of the 10 features that he is looking forward to in WordPress 3.0. I also really appreciated Navjot’s list of Template Changes/Tags for WordPress 3.0

What other WordPress 3.0 resources are you reading to catch up?

Here are a few plugins that I think deserve more attention. These will probably be more useful to power-users who really want to tweak their WordPress site, but I encourage everyone to get their hands dirty every once and a while and get creative with their installs. Unless otherwise noted, these should work with with both WordPress 2.92 and WordPress 3.0.

Widget Logic

This gives every widget an extra field in which you can specify WP’s conditional tags. What this means is that you can have certain widgets appear on certain pages but not others. For example, I have my blogroll set to only appear on my front page.

SEO Friendly Images

This plugin can automatically add alt text to any image that doesn’t have one already. You can use the post title or the name of the image. This is great if you have a blog with lots of images that were never properly tagged and you don’t have time to go through and change them all by hand. It can also override WordPress’s default alt text – this would be useful if you have a group blog where one or more contributors frequently neglects to put any sort of alt text into their images.

AStickyPostOrderER

I’ve only recently discovered this plugin, and I’m totally in love with it. It lets you sticky or order posts within a tag or category. I’m experimenting with using this plugin to sticky “portal” or “best of” posts to the top of certain tag archives.

Domain Mirror

This is an amazing plugin that lets you have different domains, titles, and taglines for the same WordPress install. If for some reason you don’t want to use redirects, you can use this plugin to host mirror sites from the same install. You can see it in action on the plugin authors pages lightpainting.org and mcaleavy.org.

Headspace2

Platinum SEO Pack and All-in-One SEO Pack usually get all the attention, but Headspace2 is worth some special attention. It gives you far more (possibly too much) control over your WordPress site’s title and meta-description tags. Some users will find it overkill. I like it because it lets me set descriptions for category and tag pages. Note: This doesn’t seem to work with WordPress 3.0 yet.

All security plugins

I also think pretty much all WordPress security plugins are underrated, which is why I’ve been covering that subject.

What plugins do YOU think are underrated?