When comparing ProcessWire vs Joomla!, the Slant community recommends ProcessWire for most people. In the question“What is the best PHP CMS?” ProcessWire is ranked 1st while Joomla! is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose ProcessWire is:
You will always find one to respond politely in the forums. Sometimes even the creator Ryan Cramer himself.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Nice and helpful growing community
You will always find one to respond politely in the forums. Sometimes even the creator Ryan Cramer himself.
Pro Custom Fields on steroids
ProcessWire is heavily based on custom fields. All objects (Pages) inside ProcessWire are based on extensible templates comprised of fields that can be easily defined. Many useful fields come prebuilt and they can be extended with modules.
Pro Easy to learn
Processwire is extremely easy to learn. Consider this:
echo $pages->get('title=Hello World')->title; // "Hello World"
echo $pages->get('title=Hello World')->parent->title; // "Home"
echo $pages->find('Template=Category')->count; // 126
echo $pages->find('Template=Category')->each('title'); // ['Audio', 'Video' …]
Selectors are so powerful but yet so easy.
Check out the cheatsheet.
Pro Powerful and easy API
The API is jQuery like;
// find some pages:
$pages->find('template=skyscraper, architect=john, sort=title')->limit(4);
// mutate
$pages->get('title=Hello You')->set('title', 'HelloWorld')->save();
$pages->get('title=Old')->trash(); // trash page
// check user…
$user->isLogedin();
echo $user->name; // guest
$session->login($name, $pass);
$session->logout();
// redirect
$session->redirect($url);
Pro Powerful selector engine
The way you fetch, access and manipulate objects (Pages) in ProcessWire is extremely powerful and easy. You can receive any page and its custom fields, filter, travers, add…
Pro Template Engine Agnostic
By default, ProcessWire comes with 0 assumption on how you handle the output. You have 100% freedom on how you want to develop the frontend. Want to plain output stuff, go ahead. Want to use any number of Templating Engine, do it. Just use as Headless-CMS, okay!
Pro Extensible
Either using the modules already available or writing your own module, using the jQuery-like API.
Pro Open source
Source available on GitHub.
Pro Highly customizable templates
Joomla allows for heavily customizable templates to be changed from the admin interface without needing to hack.
Pro Powerful and user-friendly admin interface
Admin interface is constantly being iterated on to remove unnecessary legacy features and to streamline the interface. Resulting in a very clean and easy to understand interface that also offers a wide range of options.
Pro More than 8000 extensions
Which can be found here.
Pro Easy to pick up
Pro Great for social networking and commerce sites
Joomla has both a good native support and a great list of extensions that make creating either a social networking or a commerce site easy.
Cons
Con Insecure
It's common-place for a Joomla-based website to be defaced, often very quickly. This is most often due to the low quality of extensions.
Con Extensions are scarce, badly maintained & rarely good
If it's not part of the default Joomla installation, quality extensions are rare. Joomla has a extensions library, but it is full of abandoned, dated or bloated components, modules and plugins.