CMS Showdown Joomla vs. Drupal
Joomla vs. Drupal
In the world of Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS), there are currently two big names. Well, actually three but two are forks of the same original. Those programs are Joomla and Drupal. Joomla is a recent fork of Mambo and currently offer the (nearly) same features. There’s a whole lot of political hoo-haw over the split but for now, I’ll consider them functionally similar.
These are mid-tier CMS’s fine for serving hundreds of web pages from a MySQL database. They both are programmed in PHP, though knowledge of programming is not essential to use them. Both have long lists of features and longer lists of add-on plugins that extend their capabilities. How to choose?
You might try looking at comparative charts of features. Good luck. Choosing a CMS is not the same thing as shopping for a car. Those features come at the very real price of complexity. These are not simple install and go applications. They both have long and steep learning curves.
If you have fairly standard and basic needs, I’d even go so far as to say that both are overkill and could hurt productivity and timely updating. If something is hard to use it won’t be. These are both programs that require a trained administrator.
Website Baker or CMS Made Simple are good choices for small business or organizations. Website Baker is a bit easier to use. CMS Made Simple is a bit more sophisticated. Both work well and are a better choice than either Joomla or Drupal for the typical website.
But you have deeper and greater needs. You need calendars and PDF generation. You need complex directories, news publishing and repurposing of content. You need to tackle these more complex systems.
What sets the mid-tier systems apart from their simpler cousins is that content is stored separately from pages. It can be reused in multiple pages, either in whole or part. This offers an amazing degree of flexibility in creating a site structure but does require more effort to work with.
Both systems have sophisticated user access management that allows an administrator to grant authoring, editing or admin privileges to all or parts of a site. If a person only has to use the CMS interface to write articles and can leave publishing to someone else, they can get by with a minimum of training.
Joomla
So far we have looked at the similarities but these are really two different animals. Joomla excels at complicated page layouts. Content can be placed in up to a dozen of different places on a page and each page can be totally different, if you choose to make them so. It seems that it was designed from the top down, starting with display then writing the code to make the display work.
Unfortunately, that makes it painstaking to manage and somewhat brittle. The HTML it generates is pretty ugly. Because it makes a large number of server calls, pages are a bit slow to load and Joomla isn’t particularly search engine friendly. The development team is aware of these shortcoming and is working to address them but this is a big program and changes have to be made carefully.
Still, it works, and some nice sites have been built with Joomla. Another plus is that there is an active and talented community of template and add-on builders that give the CMS a lot of added value. One of the modules might just be perfect for your needs. The general level of design sophistication that you can find with commercially sold templates is excellent, much higher than that offered by Drupal.
Drupal
Drupal is built from the bottom up. Programming functionality takes precedence over complex layouts. The code is clean. Sites load quickly and Drupal is one of the most SEO (search engine optimization) friendly of current CMS’s.
Drupal started in the arena of community building and it has no peer there. CivicSpace, a special selection of Drupal modules, was the engine behind the very successful Web fund raising campaign of Presidential hopeful Howard Dean.
But Drupal is not just another portal. It is actually an incredibly flexible system that can be molded around most site needs. Unfortunately that flexibility is hidden behind the worst jargon I’ve seen in the CMS universe. Instead of sections and entries we get taxonomies, for goodness sake and nodes.
One of the most difficult learning hurdles is wrapping yourself around Drupal’s unnecessarily opaque terminology. However, the rewards are worth it. The system is actually quite elegant, once you figure it out.
For my part, I’m willing to accept some design inflexibility in Drupal for the more feature flexible CMS. Like Joomla, it has a hundreds of add-on modules. As expected from its roots, those related to community building are the more polished. Drupal has fewer commerce related add ons than Joomla. Though both have good shopping carts and image gallery systems.
Both systems have active and avid developer and user communities. Both have enthusiastic tutorials written by their members. Unfortunately, both suffer from the common malady of Open Source projects. Documentation is inconsistent and not of commercial quality. We are not dealing with Photoshop or Dreamweaver here, with whole bookshelves of help or community college classes just a credit card purchase away.
On the other hand both have active and helpful forums that in large part make up for the lack of written documentation.
Unless you are a fairly experienced web designer who has a good understanding HTML and CSS, at a minimum, either of these systems might throw you in the deep end without an adequate life preserver. You will have to learn to swim quickly or drown. A basic understanding of PHP and MySQL wouldn’t hurt either. Though you can do without.
You can create large, feature rich and sophisticated sites with either of these systems. Unfortunately, the dream of a truly simple yet powerful CMS is still a long way from reality.
Joomla
[rate 3.0]
Drupal
[rate 3.5]
18 Comments
1. Nick Murphy | July 3rd, 2006 at 7:42 am
The Plone CMS based on the Zope/Python stack is a great option for those who want more power and are not a fan of PHP.
I suggest checking it out first. Also very OS X friendly community with most core developers using Macs.
Nick
2. Ballroom Dancer | July 3rd, 2006 at 8:34 am
I evaluated both an decided for none of them. Instead, we are now successfully running AWF. Got great support by the original author and many professional features!
3. Crip | July 3rd, 2006 at 8:49 am
Installed and considered both Joomla and Drupal when upgrading our site 6 months ago. Chose XOOPS instead. Easier to understand.
http://www.xoops.org
http://www.sail-japan.info
4. Carsten | July 4th, 2006 at 1:07 am
this is still beta but ….
http://modxcms.com/
Is going to be something worth watching.
ModX is based on Etomite (this is stated on the site) and is very geared towards site builders, since the beta is being at this crowd for the moment. However, 1.0 is going to head up the ease of use issues for those with less experience.
BTW, yes, I am partial to ModX :)
5. Laird Popkin | July 4th, 2006 at 4:45 am
We’re using Drupal, and loving it. It does almost everything that we need “out of the box”, and it’s easy to add new modules to customize it.
It’s odd, though, that there’s no good Java CMS. We have tons of Java code in our application, and it would have been nice if there were a Java CMS as it’d be easier to integrate than a PHP CMS.
6. Christopher Meinck | July 4th, 2006 at 1:42 pm
I don\’t agree with your assertion that Joomla is not SEO friendly. I\’ve done quite well in the engines with my Joomla based site. There are a few modifications such as SEF Patch and SEF Advanced that make Joomla more SEO friendly. I use it for a few sites and it rocks.
7. Dave the Rave | July 4th, 2006 at 3:33 pm
In the world of Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS), there are currently two big names
Yes, but not what you wrote. The biggies are Typo3 and eZ Publish
8. michael | July 4th, 2006 at 6:07 pm
Dave the Rave wrote:
Yes, but not what you wrote. The biggies are Typo3 and eZ Publish
I didn’t forget Typo3 or eZ Publish. If you’ll read carefully, I said that Drupal and Joomla are mid-tier systems. They are accessible to an experienced person with a week or two of focused effort. And they are good for sites with hundreds of pages.
The two systems you mention are not. You’re talking enterprise level CMS here. They are execellent and I’ll cover them later. But the learning curve for either is measured in months, not weeks. For sites with over a thousand pages, they are definitely worth considering. But the size of the site has to make the extra development time worth while.
We are currently trying to decide if we want to use Typo3 or Drupal for a large site. We decided against eZ Publish, not because it isn’t a good CMS, but because its server requirements are too steep for the host.
It’s a tough call. Typo3 probably is the better system for the job but it will require quite a bit longer to develop, That both hurts to profitibility of the job and delays deployment.
I’d say that Typo3 and eZ Publish are the heavyweights of the OS CMS world. But they don’t get used nearly as often as the two I reviewed.
9. Pepper | August 8th, 2006 at 10:38 am
I’d like to learn how to use Drupal. Where can I go to learn?
I know xhtml and css well and can code complex sites in them, just code, not packaged software. But where do I find a learning tool . . . someone said it takes a week or so of effort and I’m interested.
10. user0 | December 18th, 2006 at 6:04 pm
Pepper
Don’t believe all you read. I am fluent with HTML and CSS and have no trouble handcoding a static site. However, my recent experience with Drupal has left me looking around for alternatives.
The author is correct when he states it uses the worst jargon around, although I don’t feel quite so flippant about it. The lack of work in this crucial area (do you want to create a page, or story – do you understand that your content is a node, published in a node, which is actually a page, etc etc) seems to reflect their approach generally i.e. it’s very haphazard. I take a dim view of this lack of polish as it’s the bit I can see and they couldn’t be bothered tidying it up. What kind of mess is the bit I can’t see?
To anyone considering it I’d have to say that despite its great promise Drupal is little more than a tinkerers toy. Yes, some nice sites have been made with it, but given the speed with which Ruby on Rails developers are making alpha CMSs I can’t see Drupal lasting the pace. It lacks the crucial sophistication needed to survive in my view. And before anyone goes mad they are at version 5, they’ve had plenty of time to take a good look at much of the mess.
The documentation really sucks. Try finding a solution for adding META tags to your site, it’s just a confused mess of opinions with few solutions. Add into this mix some seriously dodgy “modules” which are little more than people having a go. When you add it together its just not worth the effort.
As for any kind of commercial application? Bear in mind Drupal make no secret of the fact they don’t even try to make new releases backward compatible! Hardly likely to endear them to an IT team.
All in this is CMS developed with a Linux mentality. It’s a confusing mess that has much promise but will almost certainly be outstripped by newer kids on the block. As noted my money’s on Ruby on Rails, as even the early alpha releases seem to take care to try and understand how a designer/developer actually makes a website. It is this element, thinking ahead, that Drupal seems to lack. It’s not really good enough any more to assume site creators will spend the time looking for workarounds to accomplish tasks. And the main reason I use a CMS to avoid the kind of coding until dawn kind of stuff you have to do to jam a new template into Drupals torturous templating system.
Finally, to put this in perspective, Drupal is the kind of thing I would have loved when I was 18. Tinkering around and learning stuff. I just don’t have the time anymore as not enough of it works right out of the box. A brave attempt but already slipping compared to others.
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