Moving from WordPress to Joomla

As was alluded to on the About page, I’ve had some previous experience running a web site. At the time, and until this web site, I’ve been using and proclaiming WordPress to be the bees knees™ of free content management systems. But for this site, I wanted to actually try something different, maybe a little more complex. Enter Joomla.

Coming from WordPress, Joomla seems counter-intuitive for a blogging platform as articles don’t appear to be the main focus when you first enter the administrative panel. What options and menus I was presented with seemed obtuse and foreign.

But so far, I’ve been able to quickly piece together the rules and philosophy behind their thinking, and it has been fairly exciting.

• Layouts are way more customizable than what I’ve experienced with WordPress.
• I’ve hardly had to edit any PHP files.
• Articles metadata and settings are incredibly customizable.

With the niceties out of the way, I have come across a few screwy things:

• Articles do not auto-save, A lot of opinions over at the Joomla Code site, but it seems super silly to me that this isn’t in core Joomla, especially for blogs.
• Drag and drop file uploads and organization in the Media Manager. It’s crazy to me that you can’t organize a file after you’ve uploaded it. If it’s because “but then articles won’t know where the image is” then you have to make the articles smart about it because this is so archaic.
• The navigation bar in the administrator area becomes inaccessible when you’re editing anything. It’s frustrating because I know I’m editing something, but I really want to middle-click on a menu item to check something in a different part of the backend. This and the fact that Joomla shows the inactive navigation bar to you while it’s inaccessible just compounds the bother.
• The default editor, TinyMCE, should probably have an auto-sizing toolbar (or a hide toolbar option) because this is kinda ridiculous:

  

• Can a blogger get a CTRL+S keyboard shortcut to save in the Joomla core?