Oh, my sisters and oh, my brothers, all ye who struggle with the vagaries and inconsistencies of WordPress, let me tell you: I have come from a darker land, a stranger and wilder land, a land that rends women’s souls and devours all hope with a red and dripping maw. That dread land is called Joomla.

Joomla is a CMS (content management system) like WordPress, but stronger, more powerful, more versatile. Also harder, more stubborn, and more eager to EAT YOUR SOUL. Where WordPress tells you that you don’t have room to do something, Joomla promises you that it will accede to your outrageous request if you just do this little thing… then this thing… then this teensy thing over here… then install these five plugins… then rent a coder for a weekend… then do the OOPS BROKEN OH WELL YOU DIDN’T WANT TO DO THAT ANYWAY.

Grar. GRAAR.

I didn’t break my copy of Joomla, but only because I know the signs of imminent breakage. They are eerily similar to the signs of success.

And Joomla is slooooow. Oh lord, is it slow. WordPress, which is actually running on a server several states away from my keyboard, is several times faster than the copy of Joomla that sits ON MY HARD DRIVE. People promise there are ways to marginally speed it up, but their methods involve doing things that threaten to break Joomla. At this point I’d rather have a semifunctional but unpublishable copy of Joomla than a broken one.

So here I am, back with WordPress. Ah, WordPress, my tempestuous mistress, forgive me for forsaking you. My flirtation with Joomla meant nothing. I was with you in my heart. I shall shower you with plugins and widgets, I shall fix the issue with your image uploader, I shall even forgive what you did with that template behind the bank of RAM. Come back to me, let me take you in my arms, let me whisper sweet nothings into your tag cloud. We are one again, as we were meant to be.