sarally.com.au - Drupal 5.7

Initially, it was because I wanted a good looking, well integrated site which was easy for community features (user web sites, user submitted data, etc). The problem I have with Joomla is that all the plugins look like exactly that: plug ins. Most plugins don't neatly integrate and look like part of the site, they look like they were tacked on. That and there are thousands of plugins to achieve the same thing, whereas Drupal has one or two GOOD ones, its as if the community self-screens, its brilliant.

I found with Drupal a platform where the plugins were nicely integrated, looked like part of the size, and that everything was more modern, better tech (zomg you've got AJAX!). Then I downloaded it and installed it. Install was under 4MB. Checked my Joomla install. 15MB. Pages loaded faster, templates were easier to modify (and although I haven't tried yet, I bet they're easier to make from scratch), modules were easier to work with, the whole thing was better.

I think the learning curve is tougher, but so worth it. I think its tougher because theres more functionality. Drupal, in my opinion, is more powerful, due mainly to the taxonomy system. Once you learn how to harness this power, its brilliant.

Mind you this has all been said before testing with the final release of Joomla 1.5, but I think Joomla is for people starting out, easy to setup but not as easy to get right. Drupal is for people with some experience, has better quality control, more powerful features, loads faster, more stable/faster loading codebase and much more.

I know people will disagree (maybe not on the Drupal forums, but they will), but these are my experiences based on developing a few sites with Joomla, WordPress and Drupal.