Drupal vs Joomla

Madhu,

Drupal has the best community support which you must look at seriously.

Why you should use Drupal over Joomla ?

1) Overall Performance
2) Efficient and cleaner code ( A Big one - I don't like messing around 100's of files for simple changes)
3) Extensible and Robust Framework
4) Granular Access Control
5) Versioning
6) Taxonomy ( Just Lovely!!!! )
7) Scalability

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Roshan Shah
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Vancouver, Canada
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When I saw the points "completely customize the front end" and "fine grained access control to the articles", it became clear that Drupal is the only way to go.

Joomla is smooth and easy to install, and out of the box (without changing settings in either CMS) it seems to be more powerful. But if you are trying to change anything in the way it displays and controls access, it turns out to be a brittle codebase that has practically no access control or customizable user groups.

And the part about search-engine friendliness is also true...

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Aran

Joomla is a joke for content management.

You can't nest anything. You are limited to a single level of sections and categories.

Drupal on the other hand, offers unlimited article nesting using the taxonomy, or by using the excellent Category module.

I'm migrating my employer's website away from mambo to drupal because of the lack of basic content management features.

Joomla doesn't have so many modules as drupal.
There are thousands of modules for drupal, this is not the case with Joomla.

I agree that Joomla has a bigger installed base. Yes, it's easier to learn, yes there are more templates, yes there are more modules and yes this, yes that...

Drupal is a lean mean machine when it comes to clean and robust code, SEO friendly out-of-the-box, theming power, user access, categorization, stability, contributed module creation, ...

For all things that really matter you should stick to Drupal. If you put serious effort into Drupal you will never regret making the choice. If I have to make a choice between quantity and quality, I'll know what to choose.

One thing I noticed and didn't like about Joomla, vs Drupal, is that while the Joomla page is being created, a blank white page will appear in the browser for several long seconds while that is done - at least Drupal doesn't seem to do that as much.

for 18 months and three sites, I'm really starting to bang my head against Joomla's limits. I'm seriously considering moving to Drupal, and starting on a test basis, to get around this.

To me, the issue is Gloss vs Guts.

Joomla has Gloss in spades, gazillions of themes, flexible block presentation, WYSIWYG editing, and more flash based presentation galleries than you can shake a stick at.

Drupal seems to have the guts that Joomla lacks; everything integrated, taxonomy, flexible hierarchies, access control, etc.

I'm not saying that you can't have these guts in Joomla (if your willing to code hard) or the gloss in Drupal (can't see how to get this out of the box) but you really do need to choose horses for courses.

Don't get me wrong, I love Joomla and have two sites working faultlessly, and would not hesitate to use it again and again and again.

But for your project, I would look at Drupal first.

Gareth

Hello,

I used to work for a company that used only Joomla (and thanks to me they are integrating Drupal right now). Joomla and Drupal are totally different approaches. Here are mine thoughts:

• Joomla - the lack of flexibility - you have thousands of extensions, but most of them provide a ready solution, whereas Drupal's modules extend the way we can customize Drupal. In Joomla you would install the 'real estate' extension and in Drupal you would extend the system with a couple of different modules and configure them to suit your needs. It's a major difference. I totally hated installing one Joomla extension and spending HOURS or even DAYS removing loads of unneeded (for certain project) features. Joomla sites are easily distinguishable since usually it requires a lot of effort to customize the extensions (thus hardly anyone does it).
• Maintainability (just learned what this cool word means ;) ) - if anyone tried to make some bigger customizations to Community Builder extension in Joomla will surely agree with me, that most Joomla's extensions' code totally SUCKS. In Joomla community hardly anyone follows any guidelines so each modules' code can totally differ from another one. So you spend even more time figuring how each extension works and praying that newer version won't differ from the previous one too much...
• Features - well, I made a couple of sites using VirtueMart (check out: www.galiciajewishmuseum.org - the bookshop; I don't maintain the site anymore - I don't have enough guts to stick with this cms...). The shop is really ok, but again - it provides 10,000 unneeded features. Someone wisely said: "A feature that you can't turn off is a bug". This way making a small shop is actually much more effort due to slow removal of all those cute details the client doesn't need. Joomla's popularity is fueled mainlly because ease of deploying it. Couple of clicks and you have a e-commerce web site.
• "Joomla is big, lots of files" - this one is not true. Joomla base install takes about 1100 files mainly due to TinyMCE which is quite pulverized. A ready Drupal site (with all needed modules) can be as big as Joomla (sometimes even bigger). The number of files actually doesn't do much difference since we upload them only once and both Joomla and Drupal are well organized, so you don't browse dirs for hours (if you know the cms that is). What I like in Drupal is that all the modules' files are in one place (Joomla puts them to several directories depending what they do and whether they perform something in the frontend or the backend).
• Performance - I think it's Drupal's weakest point. You won't see much difference in a site with 200.000 visits per month. But comparing huge Joomla main site and drupal.org the former performs much smoother. It's only my observation. Drupal, due to it's flexibility, makes much more complex and less effective database queries. I think ;)
• Themes. Well, I always create custom themes for my projects so for me that's not an argument that Joomla has far more themes than Drupal. Making themes for Joomla is a real pain in the ass, because you have to study it's css structure (you're forced to use it since you can't theme any element as easily as in Drupal). It's quite complex because divs are mixed with tables, there's lots of classes and lots of tiny details (like the fact that tables display varies in each browser - different margins, paddings, overflow settings etc.) that give you a real headache to overcome. As an example compare a simple article table in Joomla (yes, Joomla can only use tables...) and a single article node in drupal (the node.tpl.php). Which one is more legible? I mentioned tables... yes, if you want Joomla to have table-less layout you need to... rewrite it almost entirely. If you have time for that I'd recommend actually writing your own CMS ;) Drupal can use multiple template engines - take superior (as people say) smarty theme system or even more superior, Drupal's native phpTemplate which gives you total control over what you want to show. I never used smarty actually ;) I bet this wouldn't be much of a problem to write a Joomla theme handler for Drupal :>
• SEO. Joomla is not search engine friendly. It's even hostile I would say. Just take a peak at it's mod rewrite implementation... Well, you can BUY a commercial extension that handles that better, but... well it costs :> Drupal's clean url's are really easy to set up and are easily customizable.
• Community sites. Well, Joomla's Community Builder is great unless you don't need to customize it beyond some basic stuff ;) private messages, user galleries and other fun stuff. There's no single module for drupal to achieve this - you have to combine forces of a couple of modules - believe me - the effect is much better ;)

As goes for performance - I think if your site has 5 milion visits per month no ready cms will be optimized enough :) And I guess Joomla's main sites database isn't bashed so much because the forums are handled using a totally different system ;)

My advice is: if you don't do websites for money and want to deploy your small website easily - go for... Wordpress. It is lightning fast, really legible, customizable and has absolutely best documentation ever. If you want to do some serious website, which won't resemble 200.000 other websites using the same cms, which you can easily extend go for Drupal. For the first peek it seems complicated, but after two days of fiddling with the options of default installation, when you get the idea you begin to appreciate it's ingenuity. And what about Joomla? Well, forget about it ;)

If you read that far, you have proven that you are a tough guy ;)

Best regards!

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Pielgrzym

I usted to be a Joomla user, until I figure out all the advantages of Drupal (specially since version 5.0). There are so many benefits from Drupal over Joomla.

1) Joomla is too limited, you can't even have more than 3 categories level. Drupal allows you unlimited categories

2) Jooomla does not have a comments module. Drupal has one in the core

3) Joomla does not have a forum module. Drupal has one in the core

4) Joomla is too insecure (my hosting recommend us not to use it), specially because you have to install extra "components" to use it. I don't see many problems in this regard with Drupal

5) Joomla's admin is too slow

6) Joomla is limited to certain user roles (in Drupal you can create many roles as you want)

Anything else to say?. Joomla is only good...for small sites. If you want to grow up, Drupal is definitely the best choice.

Cheers

David.

Just to put the fork in it, I work for a company that started a Joomla site about 5 months ago, I don't want to say who it was for but its a major company you all know, at any rate Joomla has been a disaster but not from day one. Currently the site is at a state where at any moment it may go over the edge and fail. User management is absolutely horrible/non existent, we have been able to hack the hell out of community builder but still have terrible limitations and the memory usage is crippling. The devs responsible for the product can only recommend hardware upgrades and looking under the hood exposes code that is impossibly sloppy even to a designer like me.

We are currently scrambling to build tools for an emergency migration of the entire site to Drupal in the future but it's a nightmare, I will never use Joomla again for anything even a blog site and instead I am building a simple blog install of Drupal for uses like that, its not perfect but I wont be "trapped" again.

In all maturity and seriousness the two CMS cannot be compared and although Joomla!'s candy admin UI really wow'd the client that quickly faded with the onset of astronomical dev costs required to do some of the most basic of functionality, whats worse is the Joomla community seems to be really venomous when you bring these things up like user management and the lack of any real content management even in the newest version.

I would highly recommend anybody that can overcome the first few hours of confusion when dealing with Drupal to do so as Joomla is a path to extreme limitations and costly work arounds.

To the person that said Joomla components/modules/mambots are generally more stable then Drupal your absolutely mad or inexperienced, it has been my extensive experience that it is quite the opposite.

To really hammer it home, in the time we have been struggling to keep Joomla from bleeding to death we have completed multiple Drupal sites that have superior functionality and performance. The recent talk concerning the License of Joomla! seems unsettling as well even though the Joomla lords have stated it isn't anything to worry about as if it wasn't bad enough.

Regardless its a free tool but so is Drupal and I am sure Joomla has its place, it just isn't in professional enterprise level sites or any site that requires a great deal of flexibility.

ok, enough Joomla bashing.
I have built over 10 Joomla sites, and I run one with over 3000 pages.
Normal user management is ok.
Forum integration is stunning (Fireboard)
Ecommerce is Brilliant (Virtuemart)

I am developing 2 Social Networking websites which have blogs & userpages, so I am devving them using Drupal.
Why?< as you have all read in this thread, the categorization of content, and the extensibility of user pages.

All drupal needs, to make it the best OpenSource CMS EVER, is for perfect forum integration (with something like SMF)< or build up the existing one, and for Ubercart & Ecommerce to really come alive, and become international.

Drupal rocks, but don't beat the crap outta Joomla!, the developers are fantastic, and the community is also great, but the hackers also love it.

Enough already. Use the tools relevant and appropriate to your needs.
Joomla is Open Source, Drupal is Open Source.

-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
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