Some High-Tech Tips

This post presents three summaries on how to choose between three content managers systems. These summaries provide you a quick overview but for deeper insight follow the links to the original articles.

The links for these CMS are

• http://www.joomla.org
• http://drupal.org
• http://wordpress.org

Enjoy and give your feedback.

1. From compassdesigns.net:

 

2. From goodwebpractices.com:

Wordpress Pros

• Simple to use - No need for modifications
• Excellent for blogging or sharing thoughts in a sequential manner
• Even the most elderly of users can get the hang of it quickly

Wordpress Cons

• Not developer friendly
• The community seems to like to complain
• Upgrades bring more bugs than fixes sometimes

 

Drupal Pros

• Extremely developer friendly. If I loved code more I would almost always pick this system.
• Strong community to help discern the dozens (hundreds) of functions and tags available.
• Can be used to create some really awesome websites that can outperform a majority of other sites out there.

Drupal Cons

• Not very designer and user-friendly. It's hard for someone with little code knowledge to make the leaps required to do the very cool things that Drupal is becoming known for.
• Theming of Drupal has been a huge case of fail (until recently). Probably because it has been developers, not designers, that are making the themes.
• Getting a Drupal website published could cost you more time, and thus more money, than Wordpress or Joomla.

 

Joomla Pros

• Friendly for all types of users - Designers, Developers and Administrators
• Huge community is awesome for assisting with creation of websites
• Has been rapidly growing and improving itself for the past three years

Joomla Cons

• Still not user-friendly enough for everyone to understand
• Not quite as powerful as Drupal, and can be a bit confusing for some to jump into
• Recently rebuilt the entire system from ground-up, and so there are still many out there sticking to the old versions (1.0.x)

From drupal.org

(yeah, it's one of three opinion's but they are realistic)

Drupal
* Rock solid & high quality platform
* Real multi-site-feature (only one installation for several sites)
* Any Kind of user groups & user permissions, OpenId compliant in Version 6
* Can run membership and community sites, not only CMS etc
* Powerful templating system. Any XHTML or CSS template can be easily converted to Drupal.
* Drupal needs a little time investment to realize all the huge possibilities of Drupal
* Clear, high quality code and API (easy to integrate with other solutions etc)
* Flexibility and no known limitations
* Many high profile sites use Drupal (e.g.: MTV UK, BBC, the Onion, Nasa, Greenpeace UK, New york observer. )

Joomla
* If you are not techy its good to start
* Easy install & setup with your mouse
* Easy learning curve
* Cannot integrate other scripts etc. to your site
* Generally you cannot create high-end sites, without investing huge amount
* No SEO out of the box, URLs are not search engine friendly.
* Server resources utilization is more compared to drupal
* Only one site per installation
* No Single Log-in to several sites
* No User groups & permissions
* More intuitive administration user interface
* Some polished modules for things like calendars, polls, etc.
* Modules cost you money

System Requirements:

* Drupal can work with MySQL and Postgres while Joomla is known to support only MySQL
* Drupal can work with Apache or IIS while Joomla is known to support only Apache
* Joomla support SSL logins and SSL pages. Drupal not known to support it.

Site Management

* Drupal has free add on for Workflow management. Joomla not known to have one.
* Drupal has inbuilt Translation manager. Joomla has a Free ad on for the same
* Drupal has more granular priviledge managment

Interoperability:

* Drupal has iCal support [Add on] , Joomla not known to have one.
* Drupal is XHTML Complaint. Joomla not known to be one.
* Drupal has excellent versioning and Audit trail which Joomla lacks