Prompted by Research
While conducting research in Google Trends a few days ago i decided to do a popular search: WordPress, Joomla & Drupal. What resulted from my search:
A Trend Showing No Signs of Stopping
So as you can see from the search results is that the global popularity of the WordPress content Management platform in comparison with the other two of the Big 3 content management systems, when i began to really get serious about web development and consider moving into a career doing web development for a living one of the needs that I felt was most urgent for me to be able to create websites for industrial sized clients was for me to learn how to create websites with a content management platform as the base. I began my research and as a result felt intuitively that i needed to learn to develop on “WordPress” this was all around the year 2009. I set off on my journey but had no idea that the resulting journey would be so exciting and rewarding.
Out of College & A Job
When I graduated from college I spent plenty of time looking for jobs and found none but even though i was not actively employed and making money for any of the work i was doing i continued day after day to code websites. I would do my own “web Experiments” and with diligence I eventually got really good at coding my own “WordPress websites”. I eventually got hired by a web marketing company in Houston as a Senior Developer and got to put those skills to use. In my 4 months of being a Senior Developer at the web marketing company was working at I actually got my first taste of web developer hell.
Tasting Web Developer Hell
I had to learn to develop websites on the Joomla! platform. I worked on a few major projects that had me up till very late hours in the night and often through very laborious means made progress. I found that the Joomla! platform was extremely fragmented! Whereas in my beloved WordPress I had a dashboard where i could update all of my plugins, in the Joomla! cms I had to research which Modules (plugins) actually worked with the current platform. I longed for a unified and search engine friendly technology that i could call my own but as this was the requirements of my current workplace i had no other option than to bear with all the failings of this platform.
Getting Laid Off & Switching Gears
After about 4 months at my job i was informed that I was not able to be paid anymore, and in short, the “ship was sinking” so i was laid off by my employer. I actually saw this as a promotion and seized the opportunity to take the full – time self employment route. My choice at the time for web development was to go mostly with WordPress as a platform for a CMS but to all the while learn to develop Drupal websites.
Working with Drupal
Before I was even employed as the senior developer at the company i worked for i was tinkering with Drupal and was somewhat still leaning toward the direction of eventually abandoning WordPress for the more useful Drupal. The only problem for me with Drupal was the learning curb. You see, i come from a background of HTML/CSS development and PHP for me was a completely different beast (one that i still have not completely tamed). This proved to be a disadvantage to me and now after the lay off my margin for error was extremely small.
WordPress Development a Fateful Move
With survival on my mind i made a decision after a a few weeks struggling with Drupal and not wanting to go back to Joomla! I decided that WordPress would be my CMS of choice. As I began to develop client Websites and learn more about WordPress I grew more and more convinced that WordPress was the real thing. It was easy to use, had a huge development community, very integrated and it was constantly being updated. Now, several years down the road, i do not regret that i made the move to WordPress and see that the trend of WordPress’ popularity only shows’ that it will continue to grow.
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