27 June 2009 (Silver Spring, MD) - Rushton Photography has gone under a complete overhaul. For the last couple of years, the site used Joomla 1.0 as it’s CMS, coupled with Gallery 2 to run and house all image galleries. I had initially upgraded the Joomla, to 1.5, but was not happy with a few things. Plus, I wanted to change from Gallery 2 to SlideShowPro Director.
After some testing and reviewing how I would be building out Rushton Photography in the coming month, I decided to mirgate all the articles to WordPress. The integration between WordPress and SlideShow Pro Director is much smoother and easier than what I had experienced with Joomla 1.5. WordPress is also much easier to keep up to date as all the plug-ins and the WordPress software alert you to when they have been updated.
Adding plug-ins in WordPress is way ahead of Joomla. You are able to search for plug-ins and templates through WordPress CMS while logged in, install it and active it with out having to navigate away from your site. With Joomla, you had to navigate to the Joomla > Extensions web site, download the .zip file to your computer, log-in to your Joomla Admin console and go through the add plug-in module.
Joomla’s web site does not publish templates for downloads. With Joomla, you go hunting for templates and while there are a lot of free templates out there, in my experience, I found it better to actually pay for the template.
Joomla is still a great CMS to use and I continue to use it on my other web site, but for Rushton Photography, less was more and WordPress has come a long way from simply being just a blogging CMS.
For more information on:
Joomla – www.joomla.org – Current version is 1.15.11
WordPress – http://www.wordpress.org/ – Current version is 2.8
Gallery2 – http://gallery.menalto.com/ – Current version 2.3
SlideShowPro Director – http://slideshowpro.net/products/slideshowpro_director/slideshowpro_director
