WordPress or Joomla for Real Estate Websites

I have recently installed the same IDX product that I currently use on my main Joomla based real estate website on three WordPress sites for clients. After doing so, I can say that while it does work pretty well, especially on smaller and relatively basic real estate websites, and WordPress may have some advantages over Joomla, especially in the very critical SEO area, that the experience has been less than pleasant.

However, in this article, I will try to be at least somewhat objective, lay out the facts, as my experiences tell me they are, and let the agent decide what is best for their particular situation and goals.

The Challenges

While real estate brokers and agents were among the first to embrace blogging, or at least some of them, when it comes to real estate websites, especially the better ones that will have several hundreds of pages of community specific, property type specific, and subdivision specific pages, it takes a pretty strong CMS system to be able to manage all that content. For smaller real estate websites, say 100 pages or less, powerful CMS capabilities may not be so critical. But even the smaller websites need at least some CMS-like capabilities.

Joomla has been built from the ground up primarily as a Content Management System (CMS). As such, it excels at managing content, especially on very large websites, and especially where multiple authors are contributing to the content but some management oversight is required. Blogging capabilities are there, but are secondary to its CMS functions. Joomla’s setup and extensive and complex admin functions can be a challenge to master at first, but once they are, it gets to be a lot easier to work with.

On the other hand, WordPress has been built primarily as a blogging platform, not a CMS, and only lately has been seen as a reasonable CMS platform. Even so, in order to get even close to the capabilities of Joomla, and provide for the many functions that any good real estate website must have, a WordPress real estate webmaster must install many more third party plug-ins to match capabilities that are core functionality on the Joomla platform. The end result is a mishmash of plug-in settings, a hodgepodge of dissimilar admin interfaces, and great potential conflicts with other plug-ins, which can sometimes be fatal. Joomla is not totally immune to these issues when third party plug-ins are installed, but because Joomla has such a comprehensive set of built-in capabilities, the potential for those kinds of issues is less in Joomla than it is in WordPress. Also, at least in my experience, Joomla plug-in vendors tend to implement their admin interfaces in such a way as to be more Joomla-like than WordPress plug-ins are WordPress-like.

Examples of the Issues

Web Page SEO Tags

Joomla has native SEO tag support built in, allowing the author and/or webmaster to exercise very precise control over Title, Description and Keywords metatags within Joomla.

WordPress requires a plug-in to accomplish the same basic SEO tag management functions. My choice has been All-In-One SEO Pack.

Menu Management

Joomla’s extensive menu management capabilities and flexibility is superb, if somewhat hard to grasp at first. But for large, complex websites, with lots of pages, the capabilities that Jommla offers, all in its core and without requiring any plug-ins, is a real joy.

WordPress core menu management sucks. I can’t say it any other way. The new menu management functions that the new WP 3.0 release is supposedly bringing to the table may help. But from what little I have been able to ascertain, not by much.In the meantime, and maybe even after 3.0, building and managing menus in WP is a job that only a couple of plug-ins can handle. The Plug-in I like best so far, and has more Joomla-like menu management capabilities than most of the rest of the pack, is MenusPlus. Still, it has its own issues, like not being compatible with the horizontal menus of many themes, and many times, requiring its own css styling to display properly.

Embedded HTML – Stripping and Modifying Code

Joomla’s standard content editor still has some major issues of arbitrarily stripping  and modifying an authors html code, especially for some more advanced functions. However, a few good content editor plug-ins fix that pretty effectively, and add significant enhanced capabilities as well.Plus, if the author is comfortable with direct html editing, as I am, and does it in a well structured way, all of these issues go away.

WP has similar html code stirpping issues, but can still get pretty close to Joomla, as long as an advanced content editor plug-in, like TinyMCE Advanced, is used. However, it does not have the “html only” capability of Joomla, so no matter what content editor plug-in is installed, it still seems to strip and modify html code in ways that the author did not intend, and the final result is not satisfactory or what was intended. So, in order to preserve advanced html that I sometimes need and use on my client’s real estate websites, I find that I have to resort not only to an advanced content editor plug-in, but also install additional plug-ins, like IncludeIt, that allow me to include raw, pre-coded html, stored in a folder on the website, into the page, thereby totally bypassing the WP content editing process entirely.

Content / Page Management

Joomla’s core functionality allows content pages to be conveniently listed in a number of ways, including filtering by section, category, author and published/unpublished state. Once it is listed, pages may be ordered in many different sequences, including title, section, category, author, date, and number of page hits.

WordPress has no comparable capabilities. Even with several plug-ins to do some of these things, wading through all of the content of a WP site can be daunting. The one plug-in I like that at least helps, is CMS Tree Page View. However, while it seems to work very nicely with WP 2.9, it doesn’t work in WP 3.0 Beta 1, or may have a conflict with one of the many other plug-ins I have had to install for the project I am working on that will eventually be deployed on WP 3.0. I will update as I find out more about this issue.

Summary

In my opinion, based on my experiences with both platforms:

• If your real estate website will always be relatively small, no more than about 100 pages, then WordPress with lots of CMS-like plug-ins may be the answer.
• But if your real estate website plans include eventually building a Goliath-sized site, with more than 100 pages, Joomla may be a better bet.

I have, can and will happily build and support either Joomla or WordPress websites for my Realtor clients. But I will also always advise clients of these issues and differences, so they can make a more informed decision, based on their own long term goals and commitment to building a strong website for their business.