Have you ever seen a motorcycle with a sidecar?  By attaching a little car to the side of a motorcycle, you get the benefits of the motorcycle's size and open air travel and the benefits of a car's long distance comfort.  Many site owners choose to do something similar by running Joomla and WordPress simultaneously.  They want Joomla's flexibility and power in addition to WordPress's wonderful blogging capability.  However, running these applications in tandem introduces several issues and, for a number of reasons, I recommend against using both systems together.

We used to have to test website changes for Internet Explorer 6 because many businesses continued to use it, believing that it was safer to stay several versions behind the current version of Internet Explorer. However, Internet Explorer 6 used non-standard conventions and had numerous security holes, creating serious risk for its users.

Many businesses express hesitation when it comes to upgrading to the latest version of a software. The decision to use newer versions must be taken on a case-by-case basis, as sometimes refusing to use the newer versions causes problems and other times it's in the best interest of the site owner. For the past year and a half, businesses have had a similar choice with Joomla, specifically choosing between Joomla 2.5 and 3. So which should you choose?

Recently, I helped an associate with a Wordpress shopping cart. They were running into problems because of how the developers had coded the plugin. On the front end it looked fine, but it was so oddly designed on the backend that they couldn't manage it.

Unfortunately, many site owners run into similar problems.

They choose an extension because they are impressed by the way that it looks, but once it is installed, the interface is so complicated that they find themselves unable to make it work for them. That’s not a big deal if you plan to have an outside development company manage your site. But for many businesses, that isn’t a reasonable option.

When developing or choosing a Joomla extension, its appearance is only half of the picture. The other half – and arguably the more important – is the end user.