My Experience - Wordpress to Joomla to Drupal in 6 months

I have almost finished the development of my first Drupal site, http://10000Thoughts.com - Harness the Power of Thought

I am now in the testing phase so if anyone wants to take a quick look and provide feedback I would really appreciate it. (I know I have some stylesheet things to fix.)

Theme: Modified BlueMarine
Modules: Userpoints, CCK, Favorite, LoginDestination, LoginMenu, PrivateMessage, Legal, Tagadelic, Fivestar

First I want to say thanks to Drupal. This framework is really amazing. I am new to PHP although I do work as a java programmer in my day job, mostly messaging systems, so I am and not experience in front end web apps. Anyway, Drupal makes things very easy.

I realized I am in a unique situation to tell about my experience. I have built 2 sites in the last 6 months, one with Joomla and one with Drupal.

The first site I did was a small community site for daughters pre-school. I did not know about Drupal when I started and was looking for something easy. I found Joomla because people at work had used mambo and led me that way.

The second site was 10000Thoughts.com that I helped build for my brother. I knew up front I would need to be able to customize and new Joomla would not be adequate. Luckily I stumbled onto Drupal.

This is what I now tell people when they say they want to build a website -
I break it down into the skills of the site developer and the goal.

Blog

Developer: Beginner, Non-Coder
Goal: Blog or information site but no community. No customization, very simple framework but would like to potentially make money on ads.

I think people falling into this group can get away with Wordpress. My brother was in this category when he first came to me with 10000Thoughts.com As soon as he said he needed searching, member signup... etc I knew Wordpress would not be sufficient

Cookie Cutter Community Website

Developer: Beginner, Non-Coder
Goal: Create a basic community site from a template. No need for any customization besides theme. No need for custom node types.

I think Joomla may still have a slight edge here, but not much. There are more templates to choose from with Joomla but I think that is because the community evolved from Mambo. I like that joomla has the admin functionality as a separate site. In my development with Drupal I experienced the 'blank screen' a few times and maybe by separating the admin section this could be easier to recover from. I also like the way Joomla installs packages automatically without any need for unpackaging (I know Drupal has a new module, http://drupal.org/project/module_installer, to help with this but I have not tried it). I also like being able to modify the main page template and style sheet through the Joomla admin interface. Just made changes quicker.

Two issues I did run into with Drupal that I did not notice with Joomla:

1. The need to create temporaray tables in the database. My original hosting provider (GoDaddy) did not allow this on their shared hosting plan. This is an issue that will scare most non-technical people and will lead them towards Joomla over Drupal. I imagine the Drupal search is better because of the temp tables but there should be a better way around this. (Please correct this statement if I am missing something) If the Drupal installer cannot create a temporary table it should make adjustments.

2. The need for Cron. Again this should be handled in the installation. If cron is not discovered, PoorMansCron should be enabled by default. Non-technical people just want a site that works. The fact that Drupal allows hooking into the scheduled tasks (cron) is a big plus for customization but for the non-technical user they will be happy with PoorMansCron.

At this point you probably think I am recommending Joomla but I am not. The big factor is customization. If you are happy with very little customization you could be happy with Joomla. I built my first site with Joomla thinking I could just use a template and would not need to customize. As soon as people started to use the site I began getting requests for features and without an API it is not real clear how to do this.
Having the ability to create custom node types and create access control rules on those node types catapults Drupal in front of Joomla. Most new users do not see the advantage here until they are well into development.

My feeling is that most sites that are successful will have to customize to keep their users happy. You may not think you need a system with a well documented API and lots of hooks but you will.

Community Website

Developer: Beginner -> Advanced
Goal: Develop a site that can grow and evolve and that can be maintained

I built 10000Thoughts.com with Drupal. I am not a PHP programmer but it was pretty straightforward. I needed to have few different content types and some relationships between those. I also needed to modify the userpoints module to allow for two categories and the removal of points each day (points are removed as a way of cleaning up content by non-active users. When a user reaches zero points their content is unpublished). The cron hook made this very easy.

The ability to override theme functions made it easy for me to customize. I wanted to add more user profile information about the the node author and was able to easily do this.

Drupal seems to offer lots of caching and performance features. I hope my site one day has a very large community and I am confident that drupal can handle this. The fact that IBM Developerworks chose Drupal for a long series of articles gives me even more confidence.

I am very pleased with Drupal and want to thank all the contributors. As my PHP skills improve, I hope to start contributing as well.

http://10000Thoughts.com - Harness the Power of Thought