Mind switching from "Joomla way" to "Drupal way"

By stjepan21 on 15 Feb 2013 at 16:17 UTC

Ok. I'm using Joomla for long time now. I developed little bit (modules and simple / medium hard things), modified components and modules etc. When i think about any new web, my brain is automaticly thinking about menus, categories, articles, modules and components.

Not long ago i heaed about Drupal and i tought, heck, why dont i invest an hour or two into researching what Drupal is and what i saw i really liked. I like idea of being able to create web site just like kid creates whatever he wants with lego blocks.

But (yes, ther's always "but"), i have kinda of big problem. Whenever i install fresh instalation of Drupal, i have no idea where to start. What defines "sitemap" of drupal site, where are categories and stuff like that. What i realize is that i'm still thinking like i'm using Joomla.

Now to my question. Is there somewhere tutorial or explanation for ppl like me that need to unlearn stuff to be able to learn things from scratch? Or am i totaly getting it wrong?

Comments

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VM commented 15 February 2013 at 16:25

Been quite some time since I used Joomla.

Joomla vs. Drupal

categories are taxonomy
modules are blocks (i think)
components are modules (i think)

There is a plethora of documentation using the link at the top of this site.

What's version are you using?

bawoor commented 15 February 2013 at 17:25

What's version are you using?

Joomla ---> Drupal

Extension and Components > Modules
Modules > Block
Templates > themes
Categories > Vocabularies (Taxonomy)
articles > Node (D6) or Content (D7)
User manager (limited group)> Roles (unlimited groups that have specific permissions)
Menus > Menus, Menu is block behaviour (and every content have setting to direct link to menu)

None in Joomla:

Permission: Custom permission/access for Roles
Content type: Custom articles/content with different structure

Recomended modules to adaptation from Joomla :

Core modules thats you have to activate (check if they are'nt activated):

Update manager
Shortcut
Search
Contact

ꦱꦠꦽꦶꦪ

It depends

andrew.eddie commented 16 February 2013 at 18:13

@Bawoor, you must be thinking of Joomla 1.5 (that's actually gone past EOL).

Categories are like taxonomy but it's one (category) to many (content).
The user manager does have unlimited groups.
Not everything needs to attach to a menu but you can if you want (usually for SEO purposes). The key difference here is that Joomla separates content organisation (articles and categories) from site navigation (menus).
There are deep, customisable permissions in Joomla.
Content types are variable with additional extensions (K2, Zoo, FlexiContent).

I would argue that themes are less widely available in Drupal, but ironically our Joomla template clubs are branching out into Drupal and Wordpress to fix that ;)

Off-the-shelf extensions are not all free in Joomla, but you get what you pay for.

My impression from the consulting world is that a Drupal site is generally more expensive to maintain in terms of hiring consultants to customise code, but that could just be that Drupal consultants tend to charge more than Joomla shops :) Drupal's move to Symfony under the hood might change that (to be honest I think that will be quite disruptive to the Drupal consulting market, but in a good way).

Drupal is also, as I understand it, more complex to upgrade between major versions. Joomla has it's moments in this regard (notably 1.5 to 2.5) but we try to keep an extremely high level of backward compaitbilty even between major versions. For example, choosing to deploy with Joomla 3 today means you have support until 2016 and there's a good chance you'll be able to upgrade (as opposed to migrate) to Joomla 4 when it comes out. I'm not sure what the Drupal support policies are.

That's from a site builder point of view (both systems are good, it just depends on what differences you favour). From an architectural and deployment point of view, the changes are huge.

_

WorldFallz commented 16 February 2013 at 19:13

...but you get what you pay for.

While that may be true of joomla, that's certainly not the case with drupal. Views, panels, rules, etc are all free, significant, and commercial quality and would likely carry a significant price tag in other systems.

That is one of the fundamental differences that frequently go mentioned in these types of posts. One of the main reasons I found drupal and switched from joomla was the price tag I encountered every single time i needed any type of bug free functionality. It almost seemed as if buggy versions were floated for free simply in order to catch users for the paid versions.

Now that was some time ago-- before the re-dedication to the terms of the GPL so it may have changed since.

Thanks for all!

Balu Ertl

he/him

Hungarian

Budapest 🇪🇺

commented 16 February 2013 at 20:22

Hi Guys,

Thanks to VM, bawoor, andrew.eddie and WorldFallz for the useful info, now I have a better insight about differences and similarities.

My life just brought up that after several years of happy Drupalism now I have to maintain one of my clients' Joomla-based website. So the time has come to establish a new friendship with an other proudly open-source CMS. And this is the point why your comments helped me a lot, thanks again!