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

-----
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

Drupal is good because:

• Nice default theme
• Easy setup (no complications)
• 1 000 000+ user-contributed modules avalible (grows every day)
• Flexible for any use (blog, wiki, site, portal, etc.)
• and more...

Why not Joomla? Because:

• Complicated setup
• Not SEO-freindly
• Unattractive
• No PostgreSQL support
• Long developing period
• and MUCH more...

Mambo has the exact same about "page" as what Joomla has. (at least, the first paragraph)
http://mambo-news.org/content/view/168/97/
http://www.joomla.org/about-joomla.html

Like many I have recently been trying to work out whether to use Drupal or Joomla for my own business, and being a small company I didn't want to spend time using the wrong tools. I am also quite new to CMS's so I don't have any bias (yet). I searched the net and found, among many other good reviews, Webology's survey. Then I did some additional analysis of their work and put an article on my own personal blog to contribute to the discussion and help others in the same situation as myself.

The summary of that analysis is as follows:
* There are 18 out of 42 Selection Criteria where Joomla and Drupal scored about the same.
* There are 7 criteria where Joomla was judged by Joomla users to be more satisfactory than Drupal users judged Drupal.
* But there are 17 criterion where Drupal users judged the Drupal CMS to be more satisfactory than the Joomla users judged the Joomla CMS.

On numbers alone Drupal wins for that particular survey. Of course it depends on what Selection Criterion are critical for your project.

Here are the areas where Joomla seems to be markedly stronger than Drupal

Let’s look at the numbers first:

* There are 18 out of 42 Selection Criteria where Joomla and Drupal scored about the same.
* There are 7 criteria where Joomla was judged by Joomla users to be more satisfactory than Drupal users judged Drupal.
* But there are 17 criterion where Drupal users judged the Drupal CMS to be more satisfactory than the Joomla users judged the Joomla CMS.

On numbers alone Drupal wins for this survey. Of course it depends on what Selection Criterion are critical for your project.

Here are the areas where Joomla seems to be markedly stronger than Drupal

* Easy to create attractive websites
* Range of Themes
* Easy Interface for Non-technical people
* Easy to train clients to use
* Easy to find qualified Joomla developers

Here are the areas where Drupal seems to be markedly stronger than Joomla

* Documentation of Core and Modules
* Fewer bugs in the Core and Modules
* Social Networking Support
* SEO Support
* SSL Support
* Internationalization Support
* User Management and Permission Features
* External integration
* Quality of Add-ons for administrative functionality
* Easy to develop large complex websites
* Developers don't need to invest time with extensions that don't perform well

The choice is good one to have because either way Joomla or Drupal are great systems and for many people either will do what they need but Drupal wins overall.

So far in my brief excursions into both I have found Drupal much easier to use than expected based on some reviews I had seen and definitely better documented than Joomla. Drupal's footprint is also clearly smaller and its wide range of power and good design already means I am starting to consider developing more complex sites than I had originally planned. That might not be a good thing :-) But I can see Drupal gives me enormous power, and from what I can see quite a wide range of templates. Installation of some extensions however does seem more complex with Drupal, but it is early days for me. The absolute easiest system for installation of extensions is Wordpress in my limited experience but it doesn't compare of course to Drupal in features or power. There is no comparison in fact.

Another confusing point of comparison was speed and SEO features. In my reviews on the net it seemed clear that most reviewers felt that Drupal was faster and was much better at SEO than Joomla. However, in the Webology survey that marked difference didn't seem to be supported. So I was left a little puzzled on if there is much difference between the two for SEO and speed. Drupal seems to win but by how much is the question?

At a certain point the only way to decide for yourself is to try each and find out what is really the case. So in addition to learning Drupal, I am also building a site with Joomla to learn that as well. But in my limited spare time this could take a while.

My full article can be found on my ad-free blog at http://owenmcnamara.com/2009/08/08/comparison-of-drupal-and-joomla/ and that also refers to the other good articles I found.

While I am at it, thanks to the Drupal community for such a great product.

Owen

I think Drupal is easier for advance user
but Joomla is easier for novice

I just stumbled across a couple of very insightful, and recent, links on this subject:

http://joomladevelopers.ning.com/profiles/blogs/sirius-labs-why-we-moved-to

http://www.siriusit.co.uk/labs/2009/why-we-moved-to-drupal/

drupal: today

joomla: yesterday

Search volume on Joomla is down 50%, based on figures provided by google, whereas Drupal searches are exponentially increasing.

After using both for a major client, I have really settled on Drupal. From a development standpoint, things in Drupal are a little bit more standardized. I was building a community site for a client, with subcommunities with their own content. In Joomla, I tried using Jomsocial, Supergroups, Community builder, etc, but none of them would work well with other extensions, but in Drupal, Organic Groups handled everything + was more compatible with additional modules.

The reason I found for this compatibility was the very idea that Drupal works is its Node concept. So all content has a single meeting point. This allows for TONS of possibilities and lets you control any content across the board, which makes categorizing into subcommunities easy as well as make the ACL extremely easy.

Joomla extensions were like independent applications inside Joomla and for that reason, they did not play well together at all. Plus, a lot of desirable Joomla extensions are commercial, and you have to pay for them before you can even TRY some. VERY VERY FRUSTRATING and it really slows development. I do not mind paying, but the very idea that I have to go through a paying process to try the software, and then finding out it does not work, was one of the worst experiences I've had with dev.

From a developer's point of view, I found it a lot more flexible to code for Drupal than Joomla. And after convincing them to swap over to Drupal over Joomla for this site, they have never been happier.