It’s Official: Wordpress 2.5 Wins - Joomla is Out.

It’s been nearly a week since my last post. The main source of my neglect here is because I’ve been setting up my company web site on the Wordpress 2.5 platform. After weeks of reviewing how Google and Yahoo are practically ignoring my Joomla-run site while LOVING my Wordpress based site (a site I’m not promoting in any way shape or form, mind you) I’ve decided that for the good of my business I need to switch to Wordpress.

The final tumbler that put things in place for me we Brian Gardner’s Revolution Themes that help turn Wordpress into a CMS system. I had purchased one of his original Revolution Themes about a month ago and was messing around trying to turn it in to a real estate web site. The “missing link” was that I really wanted to use Tags for the cities each of my properties were located in but the Revolution themes were written before Wordpress included tag support.

Earlier this week Brian announced the his new Revolution Real Estate theme. I had no clue he was working on it. And to me surprise and adoration, he added tagging capabilities! I bought it immediately. While the Revolution Real Estate theme wasn’t exactly what I was looking, the tagging feature was. So I’ve spent the past several days combining all of things I had been doing with the original Revolution theme (including setting up all my rental property types as categories with drop-down menus in the header…something missing from the Real Estate theme!!). And now I’m getting close to CMS Nirvana on Wordpress.

Well - calling it Nirvana is probably stretching things a bit. There’s no doubt that Joomla is a better overall CMS systems. It can definitely catalog and re-use bits of content far better than Wordpress but for my specific needs in a real estate web site, Wordpress 2.5 along with Brian’s (modified) theme, is going to work well for me. I’m excited to be able to bring the site live some time this weekend. I can’t wait to see how Yahoo and Google react to the well structured, heavily tagged, and rich SEO/SEF layout and content.

Don’t get me wrong - I’m going to miss Joomla. It has many great attributes as a platform and a system. But it’s overall bulkiness (read: slow performance) and it’s TERRIBLE SEO/SEF capabilities just hurts my ability to do business on the web too much. Wordpress 2.5 is leaner, faster, and can make friends with Google and Yahoo quickly.

So, thanks to the Wordpress team and to Brian Gardner for helping me finally say goodbye to Joomla. I bought a box of issues for the goodbye party — but some how I don’t think I’m going to even break the wrapper on the box. Only time will tell.