Joomla vs Xoops vs Typo3 vs Drupal

an unbiased opinion on drupal.org itself ? Drupal Rocks! ; )

So the question is how is performance on shared hosting

Too difficult to answer. Too many variables unaccounted for. How many logged in users? how many page views an hour? what kind of server and OS? is mysql on the same server? how many modules being used? which modules are being used? so on so forth.

Drupal's vast array of modules = http://drupal.org/project/Modules

Drupal's vast array of themes = http://drupal.org/project/Themes (These can all be manipulated any way you want)
A way to test Drupal themes = http://themegarden.org/drupal50/
If you have css and HTML skills you can convert most any theme to Drupal including but not limited to those here : http://www.oswd.org/

Drupal's vast documentation = http://drupal.org/handbooks
Drupal even documents their APIs = http://api.drupal.org

My advice is to install Drupal on your local machine and play with it, or play with it here :http://www.opensourcecms.com/
They even allow you to test the backend.

Oh, another thing, My site, which I am redeveloping now, will have many videos and different looks for each section. Is this possible/easy with Drupal?

Yep, taxonomy_theme.module in the downloads area. or you can create a custom theme using the theme developers guide : http://drupal.org/theme-guide and theme until your heart is content.

I have tried all the CMSes you listed. Here's my humble opinion of their usability:

TYPO3 has a very very steep learning curve. I gave up after trying it for a while.

Xoops was very confusing. =(

Joomla was confusing as well. It's fairly easy to create themes for it but it isn't any easier than Drupal.

I find Drupal very easy to configure, add features (there's so many of them!) and theming is very intuitive.

The only complain I have is that Drupal is hard to upgrade. It's a pain.

I hope that helps you a little.

I've been in the CMS market for a while.
There are the big guys, and the other commonly-mentioned ones that really have some catching up to do. it's really between drupal and joomla, in this case. I don't have the authority to say which one's better, but I think typo3 and xoops have some maturing to do before they can be factored into this equation.

Drupal is used by IBM, Yahoo, Ubuntu... big-namers. sure it's an argument of authority, but more importantly it's an argument on how much man-power is behind its opensource development. the more big boys involved, the larger the community, the larger the repository of great and stable modules, etc etc.

Joomla's got some big names as well, from what I've read. I haven't found anybody using xoops or typo3 (correct me if I'm wrong), even though they're brought up so frequently.

Dump Joomla

Use Drupal 5.2 (or 6 if ready), with clean URLs, pathauto, and gsitemap, and you are ready to rule the top SERP

This not biased, its proven, try before you buy!

I've used a bunch of the CMS...

Xoops is dead in the water. What it is, is what it is. In other words the guys that spearheaded the development of the Xoops have jumped ship.

There hasn't been any major improvement in it and quite a while. There are still periodic security releases to keep the fires burning.

SEO is practically non-exisitent in Xoops. I've got one site that has never indexed worth a hoot after over a year. I've got one now, that I converting to Drupal to see if I can get the site indexed.

The devs actively working with Xoops can probably be numbered on one hand. The people working with it are competent.

The original devs for Xoops are now XoopsCube

Honestly, I love the modular concept of building sites, but coding help to modify the Xoops modules is pretty non-existent.

You can of course do your own thing.

I still have Xoops sites, because I've spent several years working with it.
------------------------------------------------

Joomla is over-run with users trying to be web site devs. The forums are busy, but if you ask a question every response has to be carefully tested.

The extensions sometimes work, and sometimes not. There are a myriad of extensions and tools, but in my experience many extensions are not supported at all.

One thing about Joomla that kinda turns me off, is the all the commercial extensions and themes and stuff. Joomla gives them broad latitude and even promotes commercial products on their forums and site. I really got into it on day when I started reciting "Open Source dogma" on the forums. I think I must have been like the bug-man (exterminator) the commercial devs came out like roaches outta the cabinet...they gave me a "what-for(hell)" for days.

An observation about buying the payware for Joomla sites - The mentality of Open Source is the same in the minds of the people producing Payware. The documents are just as lousy, you still have to mess with the code... but usually stuff looks a little better.

I still have some Joomla sites, but I don't mess with them much after they're working. I hate to apply patches to Joomla,because I don't know what the heck is going to work afterward. I think it would probably be OK, if you took the most promoted and used extensions. Hopefully, they would have updates close behind the Joomla patches.

SEO is not a slam dunk with Joomla. There was an extension called OpenSEF, which worked pretty good. I understand it will be going commercial and it is not available at my last visit to Joomla site for the 1.5 version. It did have a tool for creating and working with landing pages... a big ++ IMO.

I guess to sum it up... no taxonomy, SEO is not easy, adding content is pretty rigid and almost all extensions (download modules) that are worth a hoot are payware.

Some of the commercial devs of Joomla put up free stuff, but they water them down hoping you'll frustrate and buy their commercial stuff.

750pxl fixed width free theme templates are the norm, and who do I know that uses 800x600 resolutions anymore.

--------------------------------------

I don't build sites for fun... So, I've never looked into e107 or Typo. I do have a ModX site up, because it very SEO friendly. I haven't submitted the Drupal site I'm working on now, but so far I'm pretty happy with the results and the SEO possibilities.

The support on Drupal forums is good, and I have always gotten decent sensible answers to my postings. I cannot say that about Xoops or Joomla.

I tried Drupal couple years ago, and it was more of a coders thing then. The Xoops modular way of constructing sites was great for my purposes, in fact I rarely had to code for anything.

------------------------------------

SEO means alot to me, because my site owners want their sites to be found and seen. Flexibility with content is crucial as well.

I've only been with Drupal a week, but so far... I'm impressed.

I've used all of the cms' mentioned above.

Joomla:
Not bad for beginners, I've seen a fair amount of half decent sites made by absolute no-nos. But I can spot Joomla sites from the home page usually within the first seconds. So it is fairly rigid.

Xoops:
Can't recommend at all.

Typo3:
Only usable by professionals or people with a lot of spare time. Typo3 can do just about anything you might want, but it is hard to set up the first time and it offers too many options which are not clearly structured. Good CMS!

Drupal: *never used 6.x or 7*
Drupal used to generates very recognizable websites because of several modules that exist, but I just checked the showcase and was pleasantly surprised. I also like the frontend editing because clients tend to better understand that, but the administrator menu's very often do not fit the normal content elements I make and then the result looks a lot less. Also, I have to delete any drupal stylesheets in order not to get a website that looks as if it has been made using Drupal. Unfortunately that means I also have to spend time EVERY time on the administrator menu style. I did manage to build most sites that I wanted, also including searchable/filterable catalogs so that's another point in favor of Drupal. I didn't like that a page (used to) be of a certain type and I could only create text, or gallery or whatever other types that I defined. I also didn't like I had to weigh menu items to get them in a certain position. So I'd have to order in such a way that I could always insert before and after and in between depending on the weight and the alphabetical order; very cumbersome and illogical. Finally I'd like to point out that Drupal (on purpose) is not object oriented, but then the code goes and fakes object oriented program structures. A bit messy, but it is extensible. If you value code quality, then Drupal is not for you...

But eventually I moved to another CMS that makes development a lot quicker and has a professional looking backend: Contao (fka TYPOlight).

Contao:
It is a CMS with a real framework that can be easily extended. It's modules just generate the most commonly needed HTML. Because you need to write your own stylesheet from scratch that leads to unique designs every time (if so designed ofcourse ;)). Content (text, galleries, modules, forms, ...) is added in blocks that reside in articles and 1 page can have multiple articles. This leads to a flexible page setup in which each page can contain anything.

In short; I've switched from Drupal to TYPOlight (now Contao) and never looked back or missed any feature. If anyone can point to anything that Drupal can do that is unique or really good in Drupal (6 or 7) to make me consider it again, then please do tell me!

(I saw the thread is old, but there was recent activity, so I'll react as well)