I want to blog about my Joomla update.
So, I was thinking of updating my WordPress website late last year. I had so many plugins my dashboard was flickering with ads, and my list of pages had a warped layout because of extra columns, inserted by said plug-ins. I didn’t like the layout or how I’d set things up. Time for a rebuild.
And then the WordPress drama happened, and I was like, right, what else is out there? Is WordPress the ultimate open source blogging these days?
Here’s my author website/blogger requirements:
- Need to have a sales page for each new book
- Landing page for latest news/books
- Blog. So requires tags, RSS feeds, comments.
- Decent article/information management. Not just blog and sales pages, but static articles about the lore of my fantasy world and so forth.
Stuff I would like the website to do in the future for projects natively (this is all spitballing here).
- Possible hosting of serials or a serialised novel (so needs to handle chapters, chapter links, indexing).
- Hosted webstore
- Integrated mailing list software, with an option to do some sort of paid subscription (e.g Patreon)
Of course, nothing’s stopping me from using different sites/services for this. That’s what I’m using now. EmailOctopus for the newsletter (recommended, and more affordable than my previous email service, MailerLite, who kept raising their costs but also had a lot of bells and whistles I wasn’t using). PayHip for my neglected webstore (I’ll clean this up later on). Patreon for paid newsletters which I haven’t looked at yet. But it’d be nice to integrate it all.
So what else is out in Content Management System (CMS) land? Where do you go after WordPress? Is it foolish to abandon WordPress which is about 40% of all websites?
My user requirements for a were:
- Stable
- Opensource, preferably with a foundation that isn’t entirely corporate owned to avoid the Wordpress drama. (So this excludes Wix, SquareSoft)
- Ease to use and setup. I mean, I’m not a web developer, but I can do stuff in CPanel and follow instructions, and write basic CSS.
It’s been a while since I was after something for a website that wasn’t WordPRess. What’s a headless CMS? What’s a static one? Which one could I use with minimal code?
I narrowed my list to Drupal, Ghost, and Joomla. (This is usually the top three CMSes if you search for open source alternatives to WordPress)
Ghost - this covers the paid newsletter side in spades, and is set up for blogging. However, it didn’t seem great at anything that wasn’t a newsletter/blog service. It works with Mailgun rather than Amazon SES which is what I’ve already got set up through EmailOctopus, and requires a different website host as it requires node.js hosting/
Drupal. Lots of government websites use this and big businesses. A bit overly complicated for my business needs. And to set up requires a bit of coding which I don’t want to do. What’s Docker? Do I need to learn? No, good.
Anyway, that’s why ended up trying Joomla, which I dimly remember using years ago. It’s also supposed to be close(r) to WordPress than Drupal. Good at article management, and there are extensions for memberships, email and shops. Runs off a MySQL/PHP back end like WordPress
So I got XAMP and tried to replicate my WordPress site with Joomla on my local computer. I bricked it a few times and had to do a few reinstalls. Joomla isn’t as easy to learn as WordPress, and the configuration is different. Eventually, I got it working. Definitely not as easy to get started with as WordPress, but it made sense after a while.
WordPress was originally designed as a blogging site, whereas Joomla’s original design was article management. The main thing for a new Joomla site is to figure out how you want to manage your articles. That’s the backbone of how the CMS works. A lot of author websites have stuff hidden in many places, or they bury information, so I wanted a data structure that, once set up, would make the articles findable or at least help in reducing long-term clutter.
Unlike WordPress where you can leap in and sort things out later, Joomla wants you think about how you’ll structure your website first. For managing my books, I had three options:
- [Main]>[Books]>[Book 1 of Series X]
- [Main]>[Books]>[Series]>[Book 1 of Series X]
- [Main]>[Books]>[Setting/Story Universe]>[Series]>[Book 1 of Series X]
I went with option 2. But what about short stories in that story universe as a book series? They’re outside the hierarchy. But Joomla also has tags you can stick on every page. If you muck around with your categories, you’ll mess up your URLs, which is terrible for SEO. (Although does SEO still matter in the age of AI?) Anyway, in WordPress, I used a plugin called MyBookTable to keep this organised, and I could replicate most of its functionality with the core Joomla functionality.
On my site, I can have different blogs with different RSS feeds. It’s a cool feature that I’ll never use i my current business model.
The Joomla forums kept saying how the default template (theme in WordPress lingo) was the best thing since sliced socks, but I couldn’t get it looking nice, and my PHP/CSS was rusty to customise it. I ended up purchasing a theme, Minix, which runs off Gantry 5 (a page builder). With the theme, I got support, and they (JoomLead) promptly answered my questions about obvious things about where to find various social media icons.
One of the strange things about Joomla is that if you want to have a static page not connected to the menu, it doesn’t appear. Instead, you make a ‘hidden menu’ and connect everything to that. Also comments and back-ups aren’t native to the core, so I ended up installing Akeeba Backup and Akeeba Engage. Having done all that, I’m only using a minimal number of extensions (plugins in WordPress terms). The URL redirect are all native to the core. The article management system is excellent. Once everything is set up, you can write an article and have it slot into the correct part of the website depending on what category you select.
Some colleagues raised concerns about leaving WordPress. You lose access to WooCommerce, which natively integrates with BookFunnel and WordPress. If you sell a book on your direct store, it’s recommended you use BookFunnel to handle the hosting and product delivery as they specialise in helping people get books on various devices. Joomla has webstore extensions, but nothing that’s BookFunnel friendly.
Another concern was that Joomla isn’t as popular as WordPress, and lacks the full ecosystem of extensions. What if Extension X isn’t developed anymore? (Hmm, my commenting softare, Akeeba Engage, appears to have vanished! Perhaps that's temporary.) If it’s critical to my workflow, I’d either have to find another or change CMSs again.
What if Joomla disappears? Well, it’s got a decent critical mass behind it. Everything is stable for now, and there’s a decent community building things for it and developing it. Looks good for now.
At the moment, I have a website, doing website things without a billion flashing adds for JetPack on the control panel and other strange site-bending plugins. It’s working fine, and if anything, the experience has shown me that if you can do one big migration, you can do it again if required.