CMS Comparison - Drupal vs Joomla

when you say Joomla allows designing with divs. With Drupal you can certainly create a customized tableless layout.

Have a look at IBM's 7th article on theming your html, ahem, I mean xhtml & css with Drupal.

IBM have just added a new article in this series actually, on Understanding the database layer.

http://buytaert.net/drupal-vs-joomla-performance
http://buytaert.net/drupal-vs-joomla-hosting-costs
http://buytaert.net/drupal-vs-joomla-popularity

- Robert Douglass

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Lullabot | My Drupal book | My Digg stories

I dare say asking on Drupal.org isn't the best place if you want to get for and against arguments. You're more likely to get for Drupal arguments - that's why we're here!

Just look on Google to get some comparisons from users of both, e.g.:
http://bendiken.net/2006/02/08/drupal-vs-mambo

The initial "don't look all that" reaction isn't uncommon and I believe that's an issue that has been raised in the community. It's not the case for sites that aren't using out-of-the-box themes...

Have you seen:
Gallery: Images and links to the home pages of Drupal sites?
http://drupal.org/handbook/drupal/gallery

If your not convinced about those designs look at:
http://www.mtv.co.uk/channel/mtvuk

The place to start with theming Drupal to achieve the design you want:
Customization and theming
http://drupal.org/handbook/customization

To quote from the user article above:

In Conclusion

The bottom line is simply that Drupal allows us to be significantly more productive. In our experience, we are able to put together complex sites in a fraction of the time it would have taken us with Mambo. We can use Drupal modules such as Flexinode, which brings to mind some of the power of Lotus Notes, to quickly solve needs that would have cost us a lot of custom programming (or buying a custom component) in Mambo. We can take advantage of Drupal’s excellent templating to produce truly unique-looking sites with not much effort.

Mark

Here is also a series of Arto's articles:
http://xaneon.com/content-management-systems/drupal-vs-mambo.html

Flexibilty is a twisted word by Joomla, just like `Simplicity' was the slogan for Mambo... not so simple after all, with the licensing issue and commercialization run amok...

*and they have mentioned they want to work with Drupal* = this means that they knew Drupal is good but they either lack the know-how to install and configure Drupal, or they saw excellent Drupal sites or by words of mouth

18+ Criteria of a good CMS - Drupal fulfills them all and more
http://drupal.org/node/78874

*Note - this article is written from a seasoned non-programmer web design and builder, and from a non-committing stand to Drupal

*allowing Flash elements - Drupal nodes can take PHP, Flash, XML, HTML, Embedded audios and videos and more = use Flexinode if you want to allow non-HTML users to create any type of content, or specific modules like CCK and Video, Audio, Playslist etc

Modules for Drupal are for FREE and EXCELLENT, so do Themes for Drupal. Unlike in Joomla, every corner is screaming `Buy themes, buy plugins' , free plugins sometimes can wreck the whole system, like the SEF URL plugins

Browse Drupal Showcase and you will find excellent Drupalized sites
theonion.com
mtv uk
BBC

http://optimerawifi.net
Here is a Joomla-esque design I am slapping together, when i am finished it will have considerable more flashy "web2" functionality then the average Joomla design (even the ability to generate vector logos on the fly with a library of over 200 and infinitely expandable at any size color and alpha transparency, this kind of stuff would be like the moon mission with Joomla) and I have to contend with none of the absolutely stupid template logic that Joomla uses, its really odd that Joomla users consider it to be more flexible considering it allows for a fraction of the content types and no way to directly dev without interacting with terrible and complex install systems that can literally obliterate your site in a single click.

http://piratemesa.net/i_hate_joomla

Drupal may not be the ideal choice for your project either but I would urge you to consider other options against Drupal that are not Joomla as in my professional opinion of over 10 years of web design experience, Joomla is not a professional solution in any way and is more of a "pimp my website" contraption of questionable quality in an attractive package.

Joomla is for teenagers building warez sites and carbon copy, sweat shop web designers.

Perhaps when Joomla 1.5 is officially released some of this will change but the bottom line is Joomla is just not developed from a stand point of addressing the needs of web professionals and thusly in my opinion does not deliver a professional level experience to your clients and their users. Plus I hate it, God I hate it so much.

Nobody can say "Drupal better than Joomla" or "Joomla better than Drupal". I'm using both CMSs, depending on type of site need to be created.

Mahjong Online

We must compare them, of course, depending upon the application at hand. So, that begs the question:

In WHAT INSTANCES is one best to use over the other?

We're actually tackling this subject in our live group discussion today. The comparisons online are naturally out-of-date, as there have been a multitude of upgrades to both Joomla and Drupal. I'm looking forward to our "Drupal vs. Joomla CAGEMATCH" Discussion in Chicago today, and will report back to y'all.

I'm impressed with both so far.

John Coonen
CMS Association