Bye Bye Joomla…

For me It’s been 13 years since I started using Joomla professionally and a couple moreyears playing with it before that (well, with Mambo).

In 2007 I even developed a free affiliates plugin for Virtuemart, Jafilia VM Affiiates, it lived for some 4 years and helped lot’s of Virtuemart shop owners increase their income (Affiliates and CPA was all the rage at the time, we called it “Viral Marketing” and it really was viral!).

Around 2010 I started dedicating a lot of time to Marketing and stopped creating websites for clients, 2 years later I almost exclusively worked on Social, more and more in SEO and Started working on Content Marketing, Inbound, and Marketing Automation.

However, for the last 6 years, even if I didn’t build any websites professionally, I followed the technical advancements of Joomla, and I created a few toy sites of my own or for other projects, so I knew what was going on, I knew how version 3 accomplished many great things and 3.5 was excellent, much superior than WP, more robust, better organized…
In fact, the current version of Joomla is so far ahead than WP that it’s not even an apples to apples comparison anymore.

So when I decided to launch this blog I didn’t even have to make a decision, there was no doubt, I was going to use the best CMS in the world, Joomla, and without thinking twice, that’s exactly what I did.

Just after that, a very old friend, asked me to build a website for his company, I explained to him that I wasn’t doing that kind of work anymore… He made me an offer I couldn’t reject, with one condition, the site would have to be created with WordPress. I told him I wasn’t an expert with WP, in fact I had just built 3 WP sites in my entire life, he raised the offer even more… “for the extra trouble…” Long story short, after 13 years of Joomla and 6 years of not working with websites, I found myself building a WP site.

Just recently, I started planning on adding new features to this blog, so I started researching plugins, little did I know how badly the Joomla plugin ecosystem had feared of late. Every single plugin is either old or bad or paid for (or several of these combined). There is rarely any new plugins, there are usually no freemium versions, so you can’t test the plugin, it’s an innovation desert!

So the features I wanted to add to Mauteam, where either not possible or pretty expensive to add to a Joomla site. What to do?
13 years of using Joomla is a lot of time to just switch! It took me several months just to convince myself I had to do the move…

Around half way in that self-adjusting process, the announcement of the Mautic aquisition by Acquia was out, “Great news! Now I don’t have to look further”, I was decided to rebuild mauteam with Drupal!

Well, that didn’t go as I expected, external help was scarce and expensive, I certainly didn’t have the time to “learn Drupal” myself and just understanding how the ecosystem worked was a job in itself…

Then I remembered, how simple it was to use WP, how plentiful and innovative the plugin ecosystem, and started thinking about the possibility of using WP. But 13 years of using Joomla is a lot of time! and it really is technically superior and much more well organized, so again, it took me an extra 3 months to convince myself… WordPress was the only way forward.

So after many months, I can’t delay this decission anymore, the time has come to embrace the future, not because Worpress is better, I really believe Joomla is technically superior to WP and much more well organized, but because the plugin ecosystem is all but dead, and a CMS without a rich, varied and vibrant plugin ecosystem is not really that usable.

A small chunk of my heart is yours, I will always love you Joomla, you gave me so many good times, even a few good friends…
Sorry, it’s not personal, it’s just how business goes… We might meet again in the future, but now, I really need to move on… Bye Bye Joomla…

Check who’s protagonist at 1:50!