Creative Online Marketing, Link Building and Ecommerce

I always thought one of the biggest problem with Joomla was that it did not come with a standard commenting system or a set of features for bloggers, like Wordpress does. But over the years, a lot of blogging components have been added for Joomla by third parties. See the full list of Joomla blogging components here. Of these, the two most prominent and feature-rich ones, in my opinion, are:

1. My Blog by Azrul.com

2. mojoBlog by Joomlify.com (This is the one I chose eventually even though I rated My Blog higher. Read on to know why.)

I am going to write about my experiences with both here in the hope that it will help others decide between the two as well.

1. My Blog: This component was released in January 2007 and is a solid blogging component. They are not just a bridge integrating an existing blogging component in Joomla but an effort to create a full-featured blog component specifically for Joomla. And from what I an tell tracking their progress at their forum and their blog, they seem to have made a lot of progress and are steadily moving forward. They've released several new features over the last year and a half and have several blog-friendly modules available out-of-the-box such as the tag cloud, calendar, Recent posts, recent comments, etc. which are not available in other similar components.

Pros:

1. Commercial component - excellent support and longevity more likely.
2. Full-featured, not just a bridge.
3. Easy to install and configure. Gets up and running in minutes.
4. More features than any other blogging component out of the box.
5. Everything stays Joomla. No external component, so less worries about other third party components not working with it.

Cons:

1. Costs $$$. $45 for MyBlog and $38 for jomComment which you need to buy separately to enable user commenting on My Blog. I personally think they are a bit overpriced compared to other Joomla components. But I would be much happier had they simply sold My Blog for $80 instead of making it sound like it costs $45. There is no point in having My Blog without jomComment anyway. I think it's more like Almost My Blog without the commenting feature. Even more of a concern is that the $80 only buys you a one domain license. If you are like me and have several websites of your own and client sites, then this really does not work that well. A 40% discount is available for a 5-site license but I still think that's out of the reach of many website owners. Also, the license is only valid for major and minor upgrades for one year. So come next year, they will have the big upgrade or worse, a critical security fix, and and you'll have to shell the $80/site for all your sites again. I know I know I am sounding cheap (and I am) but the truth is that one component here, one there and it is easy to end up spending a good $300-400 on components per Joomla site. I am on a budget and have to worry about costs and consider my options.
2. Building a complete blogging platform is a challenging task and Azrul has done a great job at it. However, it is unlikely that they will ever offer the same bredth of functionality that an open source project such as wordpress can offer. Three years from now, you might have made a ton of money with your site, and you might find this one blockbuster feature in wordpress that you really really want but can't even pay someone to integrate it into your blog because the source code is not made available to you.

Overall, I rate this component 4/5.

2. mojoBlog: This is a non-commercial component available under the GNU-GPL public license. It is a newer component than My Blog and is only v.16 version as of this writing. But based on what I've seen so far, it's already a formidable opponent to My Blog.

Pros:

1. Integrates Wordpress (the leading open-source blogging software) into Joomla.
2. Works. This blog post that you are reading is based on mojoBlog. It does the job and does it well.
3. Open source and FREE. Nothing beats that. If you need a feature in Wordpress in your blog badly, just pay someone to integrate into mojoBlog or pay the developer who develops this component and he might do it for you.
4. Recently (in May 2008), they released a little bot that makes it possible to have Search engine friendly URL's in the blog and compatible with OpenSEF and sh404sef and possibly with Artio JoomSEF (though not tested). This makes the component a lot more lucrative.

Cons:

1. Not all wordpress plugins and features are available in mojoblog. The product comes with a small sub-set of essential wordpress plugins integrated into the product. For instance, some basic things such as Recent posts, Recent comments, Tag Cloud, Etc. are not available by default. Now it might be possible to get them work with a hack, but that's not for everyone. You can't have widgets in the sidebar as with the vanilla wordpress installation. That's a major limitation. You are limited by the developer's ability to make some of those plugins available to you as Joomla modules, which takes time and effort. So you can't blame him, he does it for free afterall.
2. It is still a very early release. The bot for SEF compatibilty is an alpha release. Are you sure you can put such a piece of software on your production site?
3. It is not available as of this writing for Joomla 1.5. So that's amajor limitation. It's also not available for versions older than 1.0.13. It integrates a slightly older version of Wordpress into Joomla, not v2.6 (current as of Aug 2008). So in other words, the product is likely to be available only for versions that a few versions older than the most recent Joomla and Wordpress versions.
4. Another small issue to remember is that now you have 2 content databases - one in Joomla and the blog in Wordpress. Several joomla third party plugins that work with Joomla content (such as adding a picture gallery in your content, etc. etc.) will not work with your blog posts anymore.  Now you might be able to find equivalent wordpress plugins that will do the same thing, but you will have to figure out their integration yourself. If it works without any hacks, you are lucky. The mojoblog forums has discussions on several such hacks. You are likely to end up spending a lot of time on their forums if you go with this component.

Overall, I rate this component 3/5.

So not that you know the pros and cons, I hope this will help you make your decision about the 2 products. If there is enough interest/comments on this review, I have plans of writing some more as well and adding other blogging components to this list. Long live Joomla!