Drupal, WordPress, or Joomla? (A Trick Question)

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Thu, 08/14/2008 - 07:05 — aaron

Drupal, WordPress, or Joomla?

I was recently asked my opinion of whether to use Drupal or one of those other ones. I was going to just write a flippant reply, when I realized I'm not actually qualified to answer the question.

I have never personally used WordPress. I read a comparison of it and Drupal some years ago, and knew even then that WordPress would just never cut it. And I've never looked back.

Now if Joomla had been part of the original question, I would have had slightly more qualifications to answer. I used that once (back when it was Mambo, and for all of three weeks), and was sorely impressed at first. But the glow faded quickly when I realized that though it was slick out of the box, it required more work tearing it down to make it do what I wanted than Drupal's simple building blocks offer. And again, I've never looked back.

However, that's coming from a decade of experience on the web beforehand. I really have no idea if Drupal is suitable for someone just starting out. (That is more generic: the author of the original question is a seasoned developer, and specifically to them I say use Drupal, what are you waiting for?)

WordPress

I dug up a few comparisons from Google, and they seem reasonable (for someone who doesn't know spit about WordPress). 10 Reasons to Use Drupal has an obvious Drupal bias. WordPress Vs Drupal Vs Expression Engine has a WordPress bias. And WordPress vs Drupal can't make up its mind (its author continues to use both).

Joomla

I found a few comparisons of Joomla and Drupal, but they're largely out-dated, the first on the list dating from Drupal 4.7. Most of the negative points on Drupal on their list have turned into strong positives since then. That was a thorough comparison, but needs to be revised to warrant its current Google ranking.

Drupal

From a blog, to a news mogul, to a store-front, to a social network, to a university's portal site, Drupal can handle any of it. Just take a look at this slideshow:

With a strong community of developers, there are easy-to-use tools that can handle pretty much anything you can think of. Its underlying architecture is scalable, its API is robust, and Google loves Drupal; its SEO friendliness is well-known. (Although to be fair, as pointed out on Joomla's forums, they're all SEO friendly, and Wordpress does that out of the box, as opposed to needing to install Pathauto for search-engine-friendly URLs in Drupal.)

My Opinion

The rest of this is largely opinion. Please do the research yourself before coming back and telling me this other can do this or that. Without doing a thorough examination of the CMS options, it doesn't do any of them justice to oversimplify their offerings.

Basically, from my perspective, I'd say, if you are an experienced developer, particularly if you have any programming background at all, you need Drupal. If you are looking to hire a developer for your site, whatever site that might be, you need Drupal. If you are a newbie and want nothing more than a blog, then WordPress might be for you.

However, if you're willing to jump through the hurdle of learning the administrative back-end, then Drupal would likely serve you better in the long run. Particularly if you think you might want things like easy video embedding or customizable content entry. And if you want a blog with multiple authors, or forums, or e-commerce (before you ask, I suggest Ubercart, and that comes from having used both that and e-Commerce, but read Diving into Drupal E-Commerce: An Ubercart vs. E-commerce Comparison first), or any kind of social network, then Drupal hands down is the one for you.

If you want some of that, and want it now, and don't want the hassle of learning, and don't care if it's impossible to change it later, then maybe you should stick with Joomla.

Take your pick.

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Comments

Tue, 11/11/2008 - 18:48 — Azzam (not verified)

I use Wordpress and Joomla

I agree with part of what Jennifer stated, with clients looking for the more SEO'd type of site with straight content I would push for wordpress since the engine is more compact. But if clients are searching for a powerful engine that can duplicate e-commerce, social networking site then I would push for Joomla. Wordpress has sufficient support for it and there are plenty of joomla tutorial sites out there.

However unless you have dissected Joomla 1.5 then you have not done justice. With its Model View Controller it is a very powerful engine

Mon, 11/03/2008 - 00:34 — Steve Parsons (not verified)

I have only used wordpress

I have only used wordpress so far, but I am considering starting to experiment with drupal for some of my sites. I like wordpress because it is SOOOOO user friendly. But, from what I have heard, drupal is not so much. I guess I will have to break down and just put up a site and play around with it.

Tue, 10/28/2008 - 18:53 — Justin (not verified)

Joomla v. Drupal

Why use a package at all? Can't anyone code these days?

Ok - there is a place for application servers and templating systems (Perl's Mason beats the pants off anything the PHP world has to offer) but why limit your site to someone else's vision, which is what you are doing when you use Joomla or Drupal?

Would you prefer to go on a package holiday or take some cash and find your own way? Which will be more interesting? Which will you customers find more interesting?

The problem is: if you use a package either you stay within its limits in which case you probably save some development time but limit your site or you spend forever trying to bend it into doing what you want - so you might as well have started from scratch yourself anyway.

Wed, 10/08/2008 - 08:00 — Anonymous (not verified)

The only thing I would add to

The only thing I would add to what has already been mentioned is that their communities vastly differ. Wordpress has a MUCH stronger community than Drupal (I've used both). What mostly comes to mind is theme creation - because Wordpress has 'appealed to the masses' more it has an extremely large choice of themes, a large number of which are of much better quality than the Drupal themes available.

This of course makes no difference if you're building it yourself from scratch....

Sun, 10/05/2008 - 08:33 — Anonymous (not verified)

I dont believe Wordpress is a

I dont believe Wordpress is a CMS, you can let it behave like a CMS, but its bare functionality is not focused upon what you would need a CMS solution for. It's just that people need really simple solutions, for those 4/5 page websites and Wordpress offers that, even though its not focused upon it.

Mon, 09/22/2008 - 14:14 — Anonymous (not verified)

Drupal is better than both but...........

I have been using joomla and its great. I am hearing a lot of buzz about drupal. I search and search and search and all I see is all fart and no shit.
I am not saying drupal is bad. Drupal is indeed better than joomla, but what I see with drupal is a lot of articles which can be called PR. All these articles just keep on singing praises on drupal.
Tutorials? Help? or any other resources for drupal...........NONE!!!!!
Joomla still beats drupal when it comes to resources, infact it beats the PR of Drupal with the amount of help one can get on joomla is just amazing.
Drupal seems to me like a community full of selfish snobbish geeks who want to prove that drupal is the best(and It may very well be) and then just go around all "snobby snobby" without giving any kind of help in their websites or articles. It is very closed and selfish community I feel. They want drupal to be popular and they dont want many developers to become and expert in drupal.

Whereas joomla is in the true spirit of opensource. Joomla users just keep on contributing and contributing. There are tons and tons of videos about joomla articles websites you name it.
Youtube i filled with joomla tutorials. No geeks talking about how good joomla is. You get tutorials on anything.

But when you search for drupal all you get is all these drupal geeks telling us how drupal is the best thing to happen to this world.

So in the spirit of opensource I would rather wait for joomla to catch up and I am sure with the help of extensions any of these above mentioned 10 reasons can be tackled in Joomla.

Wed, 09/24/2008 - 15:24 — Anonymous (not verified)

Aw, you found us out! We are

Aw, you found us out! We are all just doing this for popularity. It'll be our little secret.

Fri, 09/12/2008 - 11:38 — Tomas (not verified)

well...

I prefer Drupal. And I really like this project. I think it is far more better than all others (Joomla, Wordpress etc.)
But, I'm not very pleased the way all those are coded. It is full of crap crap cram and mixed php and html...
Not to mention that 70% of themes are ugly and badly coded...
But, once again, it suites my needs and that cool :)
I love it :)

Thu, 09/04/2008 - 02:20 — Jason (not verified)

What's wrong with Joomla?

What's wrong with Joomla !? I have been using it and have found it to be very versatile and extensible. It is week for blogging, but can be stretched into that mode if you want it. It has the Fireboard forum and good video plugins like Allvideos. It's not super easy, but if you have programming experience you can build very feature rich sites with it.

Sat, 09/06/2008 - 13:20 — vege (not verified)

Joomla is Toy car

Nothing wrong with Joomla. I used it for 2 years and moved to Drupal couple of months back. Joomal is like toy gun. It looks pretty and get easily attracted by kids(beginers). But when you really need some action then you will realize Joomla is just tooy gun useful to showoff.(Show case websites..i mean here). In joomla, user managemet really sucks or there is no user management. In drupal, you can control each page and you can define users in different groups and control their roles. Also, categorization in Drupal is excellent (Taxanomy). Another important thing is SEO and Blogging. This is part of the core in Drupal. In joomla you need to "buy" external modules for that. I can talk for an hour ,.....but to be short...Joomla is good if you want just showoff site. If you are serious about site, go drupal ,...much...much better

Thu, 08/14/2008 - 13:52 — Bojhan Somers (not verified)

Why is Wordpress in the picture?

I still don't get it, ever since these discussions started we take Wordpress into the picture. While Wordpress is a blogging solution. Drupal is not a blogging solution, it can do blogging, but its not focused upon it as much as Wordpress is.

I think its really useless to have these type of discussions, because Wordpress is for blogging, Drupal is for complex sites and Joomla is for simpler sites. All engines can probably do each others job, it's just the system and its community that's not focused upon it.

It seems just as much as the Joomla vs. Drupal wars, it totally depends on the context of the client. Without that, you cant really say pro's and con's. Maybe it's time to take the wars, outside the open source community? There is way more propriety CMS's we should be competing with and that acctually are competition.

Installation profiles is the answers to a lot of troubled solutions in Drupal now, but not many can be bothered to work on installation profiles. So I don't think we should really promote that as a solution.

Disclaimer: I use all three CMS's.

Thu, 08/14/2008 - 11:50 — Anonymous (not verified)

your links

Hi,

just want to comment that your links are very hard to see - at least on my display. You should underline them or use a color that is more easy to see right away

Thu, 08/14/2008 - 21:15 — aaron

Links should be easier to see

Thanks, excellent idea. I've set content links to be ~~bold and~~ underlined now.

Thu, 08/14/2008 - 10:54 — Chris Charlton (not verified)

I'm gonna learn more about the others

I was telling another LA Drupal member that its time I, as co-manager, learned more about WP & J!, because I am Drupal biased right now and felt it was time to update my answer of "I had to remove a bunch of stuff in Joomla!" and I've never personally installed WordPress but never was impressed to anyway.

Thu, 08/14/2008 - 10:58 — aaron

Original Source...

Whoo hoo! Original source is always the best teacher. I can't wait to read about your findings; let me know when you've done a comparison.

Thu, 08/14/2008 - 10:37 — ceejayoz (not verified)

I've used all three...

Joomla - avoid like the plague. Adding or modifying any functionality almost always requires hacking the core code, the code it generates is usually horrific, and the admin interface is horrid IMO.

WordPress - the best platform for blogs, no question in my mind. WordPress (and WPMU, the multi-site version) are perfect for blogging-centric sites with perhaps a few static pages on top.

Drupal - the best platform for general CMS, also no question. It's significantly more work to set up a site than WordPress is, but it's much, much, much better at handling non-blog content.

I've written a bit about why I like WordPress and Drupal so much - the bottom line is that both platforms allow we developers to dramatically extend and modify the way it works without screwing ourselves over for upgrading to new releases.

Thu, 08/14/2008 - 10:47 — aaron

Installation Profiles Needed for Drupal Blogs

You put that much more succinctly than I. Thanks! Although I'm a bit biased and prefer Drupal for blogs as well. But without a decent installation profile (an under-developed technique still in its infancy), it is admittedly a bit of a more of a pain than it should be to set up Drupal for a simple blog.

Thu, 08/14/2008 - 12:27 — ceejayoz (not verified)

Agreed

Yep, that's the biggie. The biggest appeal of WordPress for me is that it's got a heavily tweaked WYSIWYG editor that works really well because it's maintained by the WordPress core code staffers, with integrated media handling that's also handled by core code staffers. I don't have to install third-party modules, I don't have to configure it to have sane default settings, it just works.

Thu, 08/14/2008 - 10:25 — Bam (not verified)

they all suck, but

I remember i started with wordpress, at first i was like hell yeah i can do anything i want but i was wrong, then i discovered joomla but quickly got turned off, it was confusing to figure everything out... then i heard about drupal and i really liked it, well compared to wordpress and joomla it's a lot better, i worked with the system for 2 years... but even drupal is crap...

3 months ago i discovered ExpressionEngine, though not free, it kicks drupal's ass to the curve!!! when you get involved with EE you wonder how in the hell you kept up with all the crap in drupal. You haven't seen power, speed, efficiency or beauty until you try EE... my life as a designer, consultant is so much easier, i have literally nothing to worry about. ( i do NOT work for EE, nor do i sell for them or anything, i'm simply pissed that i wasted 2 years with drupal!)

Thu, 08/14/2008 - 14:17 — christefano (not verified)

Re: they all suck

Much of what the Drupal community knows about ExpressionEngine, I think, is from quicksketch's recent article, The Open Security Model, Drupal and ExpressionEngine on Security. It doesn't paint a good picture of EE's security practices.

Thu, 08/14/2008 - 10:40 — aaron

Thanks for the Heads Up

I'll have to take a look at EE. I only have limited experience with that (as an administrator at Blognomic), and have mixed feelings about it thus far. But I haven't used it to build a site from scratch, so I don't know first hand how it could be used to build some of the media-heavy sites I generally work with.

Thu, 08/14/2008 - 10:21 — farrell (not verified)

I'd Say Drupal, But Learning Curve Remains Hurdle

I've used both Drupal and Wordpress, and I'd say I agree completely that Drupal is the better solution for any complex or multi-author site.

The only reason I'd recommend Wordpress is that it is much easier to use and understand, particularly for non-developers. In other words, there's still a steep learning curve involved with Drupal.

Take a non-programmer who pays $10 a month for shared hosting and wants a blog or a simple website. Wordpress is far easier for that person. WYSIWYG editing is included. The admin interface is far easier. There's no new vocabularly to learn: node, taxonomy, etc. Just my 2 cents. I like Drupal, but I understand the non-developer perspective, too.

Thu, 08/14/2008 - 10:36 — aaron

Administrative Spaghetti

I have to agree there. That's still a weakness of Drupal, although one that developers are taking an active look at. There's been a strong focus on usability this last year, and I can't wait to see what good things come out of that. (Views 2 has raised the bar for administrator usability, for instance.)

Still, up to a quarter of questions from clients that I get have to do with how to navigate the spaghetti back-end of Drupal. And when I set up a simple site for friends (like Erik Gecas or Ecstatic Marriage), I usually find it simpler to just make the changes myself than trying to explain how to do it.

Thu, 08/14/2008 - 10:11 — Jennifer Hodgdon (not verified)

WordPress has its merits

I am one of those "I use both" web programmer/developers, in regards to Drupal and WordPress, for my clients. Basically, my take is this.

WordPress is great for sites whose content consists only of Title and Body, classified by hierarchical Categories and folksonomy Tags, with some content being static Pages and some being date-organized Posts (news, blog, etc.), and visitor interaction limited to reading and commenting. For this type of site, WordPress is very simple for me to set up and customize for a client, and very intuitive for them to understand and use for content management once it is set up. So as long as a site doesn't stray far from this model, I recommend WordPress for my clients. It works fine for multiple authors, by the way, and it does have a plugin capability that allows you to modify behavior and add functionality.

On the other hand, if a client wants a more complex site, Drupal is definitely what I recommend. By "complex" I mean that it would be best developed using CCK (content with fields beyond title/body/taxonomy, or multiple content types beyond Post and Page), needs Views functionality (lists/tables of content beyond listing headlines/teasers), needs e-commerce, needs community interaction beyond commenting on posts, etc. While all of those things could probably be built in WordPress, they would be rather ad-hoc instead of systemetized, and I think the client is better served by using Drupal in those cases.

Thu, 08/14/2008 - 10:30 — aaron

Open Source Rocks!

Thanks for sharing your perspective, Jennifer. Other than a few personal blogs, my background (with Advomatic) is working with larger sites, such a Air America or the New York Observer, and I tend to think in that direction when writing about development.

I hadn't realized, for instance, that WordPress handles multiple authors, although I did know about WordPress plugins. Of course, WordPress has a large base of users, so its not surprising that its functionality continues to evolve.

And I'll defend any of these CMS's simply for the virtue that they are all Open Source, which means that, as a developer, I could join any of the projects and help improve them if they didn't quite yet meet my standards and expectations.

Aaron Winborn

Drupal Multimedia

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