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We considered two approaches:
- Stick with Joomla, our existing content management system, and use the K2 component for blogging purposes
- Use WordPress within a sub-directory
The easiest and obvious choice was to use Joomla with K2. Joomla was already installed and powering the rest of our website, so installing K2 for our blog would have been an easy process. Beyond the easy configuration, K2 would use our Joomla template and require very little (if any) additional styling. If you aren’t familiar with K2, it’s a content extension for Joomla that dramatically enhances the control you have over your content. It comes pre-packaged with comment and tagging functionality, two critical blog features that Joomla lacks out of the box. Overall, it’s a very robust and well-rounded extension. Despite the benefits associated with K2, we ultimately chose to use WordPress for the blog portion of our site. The decision came down to a few key points:
- Long-term outlook. K2’s development seemed to stall during the summer months and it was uncertain whether the component would be available for Joomla 1.7. Though it was eventually released, the lack of information coming from the developers brought the long-term viability of the product into question. We didn’t feel comfortable being dependent on a component that may not be in development indefinitely. WordPress, on the other hand, is here to stay.
- Performance. We’re already putting a lot of effort into maximizing the performance of our core Joomla website, and installing another component would only bog us down. K2 also has trouble with some of the compression tools we use, which means we couldn’t use them together to speed things up.
- Flexibility and ease of use. WordPress was built for blogging and is much easier to use. As we grow, more people within the company will be responsible for publishing, and it’s important that we have something that’s straight forward and easy to navigate. Joomla has a steeper learning curve, even steeper when using K2, and it would be tougher for the average user to blog with on a regular basis. Plus, Joomla is powering our core website and is more critical to our operation, so the less people we have using it, the better.
Ultimately, WordPress was the best choice and we’re happy with our decision. The hardest part of the setup was developing a theme that matched the rest of our site, but that was accomplished in a day or so and it turned out rather well. We currently have WordPress running in a sub-directory and there haven’t been any problems. What do you think of our decision? Were there other factors we should have considered? Potential problems we should be aware of? We would be interested in hearing your thoughts.
