I'm commenting on two earlier posts in this thread - the original post, and Paul's response concerning consolidation and 'market' share.

My main issue is that Joomla is often framed as a competitor to Wordpress, where it is my experience that they don't compete at all. Joomla competes, it seems to me, with other big applications such as Drupal, Magento, and some of the hugely expensive frameworks. Joomla does things that Wordpress cannot hope to do (though I expect with Joomla devs mucking around WP of late, that may change).

There are reasons I use WP but that is a decision made once we determine the site is not likely to become functionally ambitious, but will exist to (beautifully) serve a few simple needs.

In general, I am finding client technical literacy to be frighteningly low - and expectations of instant commercial success to be nothing short of delusional. Most of the time, my clients won't manage their own site - and since I might wind up doing that for them, I have a self-interest in providing a framework that 'just works' as they say. For a site with complexity, and will scale, that's Joomla.

Thanks - a great post with some interesting comments

"I am finding client technical literacy to be frighteningly low - and expectations of instant commercial success to be nothing short of delusional"

I'd echo this - want results but aren't prepared to work for them e.g. spend time / money updating / investing in the site.

Wordpress has the strength of a central organisation although this can be weakness

From a UI standpoint, 'central organization' is a complete mess now - and if functional versatility is ever to come to wordpress, it will not get simpler. there are things wordpress is simply incapable of - I think Joomla devs would be better to package fully configured *applications* (as opposed to templates) and charge accordingly - for example, a store with a functional J2Store demo shop on board, real estate with a pre-configured component, etc.

I like ZGF because I can design absolutely anything - that puts it not in another orbit than WP installation, but a different solar system. A WP theme is an off-the-shelf commodity.

Some WP sites I've seen with advanced functionality, say, real estate or politics, run on hosted servers with dedicated database systems - WP is merely the front end GUI. The back end of those sites? More complicated than Joomla, by a long shot. Joomla is an application construction kit.

From my experience which with Wordpress is limited the template is more integrated with the site itself. I feel constrained and buildr is soo much more flexible - I just wish more people thought the same

Talking to people cleverer than me (a lot of those) they like Wordpress but don't like the database. UI wise some of now WP clients prefer the interface over Joomla but I don't agree

Enjoy your weekend

Cheers
Paul