Back around May 1st, the CMS Expo was taking place in Chicago, Illinois. during this event, Rafael Corral of CorePHP gave a talk on a new Joomla component that integrates WordPress with Joomla. I first came across this news on CMSWire.com. The component enables the use of tags, all of the plugins available for WordPress and finely tuned SEO capabilities. This integration comes at a cost like most cool things for Joomla at $80.00 a year or $100.00 a year if you want to use the multi-user component.
The demand for the component comes from the fact that Joomla is not much of a blogging platform while WordPress is the best. One thing that is cool about this component if you’re a Joomla user is that the WordPress administration side of things can be accessed from the front end meaning you won’t have to bother yourself with the Joomla administration panel. Inside of this component, you can switch, style, or move the WordPress sidebar. The sidebar is dealt with via a Joomla module. According to the talk, migrating WordPress themes is difficult but not impossible with the content area only able to be themed. The multi-user extension deals with integrating Joomla with WordPress MU.
The beauty of both projects being open-source allows for things like this to happen. However, I still wonder why I would integrate one content system into another. I would consider what it is I need in a publishing system and figure out between the two which one has more of what I want and then go with that.
It’s funny because I chose to go with WordPress after realizing that Joomla didn’t have native comment support which drove me insane. Yes, I did try to install and use a few different extensions to give Joomla a commenting system but those all sucked! Making regular blog posts was a pain in the rear because I had to select all of this Meta stuff before the post was published. This was back before 1.5 and I have not used Joomla since so I have no idea if it’s changed for the better. In the end, I think this component solidifies the fact that Joomla sucks if you want to use it to blog. Something I’ve known since 2007.
On the other hand if your project is heavily dependent on CMS type functionality, Joomla begins to look better considering the features built-in to it’s core. There also seem to be more advanced, feature rich themes available in the Joomla community. I wonder why that is?
I’m not knowledgeable of it but have you seen the GPL RokIntenseDebate plugin? It was created by RocketWerx (RocketTheme)
http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/rocketwerx/
“Two simple plugins that make adding IntenseDebate comments to your articles extremely simple. RokIntenseDebate consists of a content plugin, and an editor button plugin. All you do is write your article, then click the button to enable IntenseDebate comments at the end of your article. Only setup is to enter your IntenseDebate account number in the content plugin before using”