Last Updated on December 24, 2021 by David Vause
Facebook is, of course, the most highly integrated. It exists primarily as an advertising platform but also allows its company to harvest extensive data about its users and their habits. Blogger probably exists to allow Google to collect user data. With both, users get a customizable blogging platform. Facebook, via friends enables the creation of closed sets of users, which some call an echo-chamber. Both enable a very low barrier to creating an Internet presence. WordPress is an out-of-the-box blogging platform. It is highly extensible using themes, which most often come with a charge. Joomla is an out of the box content management platform. It’s layout is highly customizable through modules and plugins. WordPress and Joomla allow complete owner/user anonymity and privacy. Facebook allows very easy photo uploading with mobile devices with little or no display customizing. Blogger and WordPress photo uploading is most easily performed from desktop platforms. WordPress, with additional theme such as Fairy and plugins, allows high levels of photo editing and control of display. Joomla offers minimal photo editing, but high levels of photo content management. Uploads are best done using FTP.
| Blogspot | WordPress/Fairy | Joomla | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| barrier to internet presence | low | low | medium | medium/high |
| author has copyright | no | yes | yes | yes |
| free hosting | yes | yes | limited on wordpress.org | no |
| advertising | heavy | none | some from theme developers | none |
| social connections | friends followers comments | comments | comments | none |
| conversation | comments | comments | optional comments | none |
| privacy | poor | fair | user anonymity possible | user anonymity possible |
| extensibility | none | theme (color scheme) layouts | theme (color&layout) plugin function) | modules templates plugins |
| content management | none | low | medium/high | high |
| hierarchical categories | no | no | yes | yes |
| menus | primitive | The menu editor is graphical with drag and drop. Not highly scalable for large numbers of menu items. | The editor is text-based and highly scalable for large menus. | |
| tags | no | called labels | yes: applicable to posts only | yes: applicable to posts and pages |
Both WordPress and Joomla support tags and categories. Categories are hierarchical. In Joomla, they are mutually exclusive, that is, a post or page can only have one category. WordPress forces posts or page to be assigned to a default category if the author does not explicitly assign one. Joomla does not. Tags are simple labels. A particular post or page may have multiple tags. Tags are not hierarchical.
A WordPress widget is a piece of content that can be added to the sidebars posts and pages, variously, depending on the theme. Some are provided by the theme itself, others come as part of WordPress. They can be calendars, Recent Posts displays, text, or even custom HTML.
A WordPress plugin is a program that can be added to your site that provides additional functions. These can be social media icons, a program that limits the number of login attempts to the site, or an image slider.