I've been using Joomla for the past several months learning the idea of CMS. It seemed to lag some things that I felt Drupal offered by looking at websites that I liked create with Drupal. I've read several different comparisons between the two systems and wanted to share my thoughts.
Drupal is barebones and light. It's a framework. Web sites are developed in Drupal rather than with Joomla. Each piece of information in Drupal is intrinsically connect to every other. Whereas, in Joomla some types of information are disjointed. You can have news articles with comments (depending on the third party software you use) but that information will not be connected to a forum or a user profile.
Over the last year there have been many third party companies that have refined their wares and have made fantastic out of the book add ons of Joomla. If you wanted to create an out of the box social networking website grab JomSocial, MyBlog and JomComment then bridge it to Kunena or PHPBB3 and you are good to go in a day with an amazing product. Still it's WYSIWYG.
On the Joomla main website you have a choice between commercial and free licensed modules and on the Drupal website there are only free modules. You can compare benchmarking (Dries..... about your benchmark website. Joomla 1.5 is fundamentally different from Joomla 1.0 in that Joomla 1.0 loaded everything every time whereas Joomla 1.5 only loads which parts of which modules that are needed for that particular call. Joomla 1.5 is a ton faster than 1.0 and it caches for registered users too. You can also put overriden modules in a folder in the themes directory to keep the core clean like sites/all/modules. ) or compare framework. The biggest difference is the evolution of the modules. Does not have commercial modules available to the average web hobbyist. Drupal is an all or nothing CMS. If you know a lot about MySQL and PHP it is easy to dive into otherwise it is very difficult and it would be better to look else where. If I just wanted to blog I would use wordpress or if I wanted just a business directory I would use phpYellow or some other out of the box script like vBulletin for a forum.
Drupal is elitist! This mostly is why Drupal is so fantastic. I think that Drupal has become a snobby and exculsive club because of it's learning curve. If your not a developer in PHP and MySQL then GTFO. There is very little information on learning Drupal compared to learning Joomla. Barnes and Nobles carry eight books on Joomla and only three (Front End, Using Drupal, and Pro Development) on Drupal. When I had a problem developing (putting together modules) in Joomla I found loads and loads of resources online with any question I asked through google. Whereas, in Drupal forget about it. This is because the people who use Drupal have a strong background in programming development and Joomla is more for amateurs. People who know what they are doing from the get go don't ask as many questions. Joomla does have a much stronger community for beginners of CMS.
Rather than trying to make Drupal more accessible perhaps you should make it a tool to learn development to help people bring them up to speed. I think that Drupal could become is a great tool to teach computer science. You could use CCK and Views to slowly and methodically introduce Database structure. You can cover most of HTLM and CSS and then progress to PHP starting starting with print $content and move onto logic slowly through use of the template.php file. The best part is that at every step a student could create something that is useful.
I say these things because that's how I'm going about it. Instead of using PHP to learn Drupal, I'm using Drupal to learn PHP. It's just frustrating that there aren't more resources out there in the Drupal sphere for me.
I'm going to now work my way through Drupal Pro Development. Yesterday I finnialy learned what a hook is. I've been learning Drupal for three weeks 8 to 12 hours a day and everybody throws the word around (that's you guys at lullabot fyi) but nobody thought to explain it to me. I might not make it past page 80 in Pro Development but at least I understand what a hook is now.
Comments
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I'm not a developer in php. I couldn't code myself out of a box. But there are a lot of examples in the forum and handbook to use or start from - copy and paste has worked for me.
Generalizing a bit here, aren't we? :) I found Joomla far more difficult to set up and manage than Drupal.
Drupal is what you make of it.
~silverwing
*ahem*
"Drupal is elitist!... If your not a developer in PHP and MySQL then GTFO."
I'm not a developer in PHP or MySQL but I've just released a site that uses Drupal. A site that went through formal testing by our QA department. I couldn't write a line in any language other than HTML. So I'm going to have to disagree with your claim that Drupal is for developers only.
But then, this whole topic of "drupal and joomla" is one of personal preference. And all any of us can offer is our .02c. Nothing wrong with that, but ultimately caveat emptor (sic).
I'm lost. If you don't like
I'm lost. If you don't like Drupal, and you know how to use Joomla! (and find it easier for your skillset), why not use Joomla!? Why rant at all? Use what works for you and be happy there are great choices.
Seriously, the point of your post is lost on me.
Eh?
What makes you think he doesn't like Drupal? That's not the impression I got reading his post. I don't agree with everything said, especially that you have to be a programmer to use it, but it didn't sound like he was ranting at all.
Michelle
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Actually there are over a dozen books offered for drupal. The Barnes and Noble you shop at that are not carrying them or having them in stock seems more likely the problem.
http://drupal.org/books
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a bit off-topic, but I checked my local regional library system and they have three Drupal books (two copies each) and three Joomla books.
~silverwing - reporting...
I just looked up Drupal on
I just looked up Drupal on amazon.com and it came up with books on Joomla. lol
#33
On the third page, Amazon had Joomla books at #33 and #38 when searching for Drupal. I won't bother searching for where Drupal books show up in Joomla searches - probably about the same.
The issue is this. As
The issue is this. As discussed in many other places on the web over the past few years, many people agree with me here, Drupal has a much steeper learning curve than Joomla. I was just saying the reason for that is the Joomla community encourages third party plug and play commercial module development much more so than Drupal. On the flip side, the lack of the commercial third party addons to Drupal pushed the development community to create a very powerful CMS framework.
I need certain things that Drupal has. I need revision control, a native taxonomy system, and a content construction kit that isn't still in beta testing -- none of which Joomla does well. I also need something that is light weight. I could purchase the modules that I need for the Joomla system for about $500. Unfortunately, if I want to have the same functionality in a Drupal site I'll have to pay several thousand dollars to a developer or build it myself.
I'm at a cross roads and I don't know which way to go. I'm actually very close to dropping Drupal all together and build in Joomla because I don't want to waste my time. However, the month I spend developing a Joomla website is one month I'm not learning how to harness the power of a much more versatile and flexible CMS, Drupal. Where is my time and money best spent? Not just now but also looking a year or two down the road.
The reason there are a lot more more books on Joomla than on Drupal at the bookstore is because there is a lot more demand for books on Joomla. Those big book stores are very good when it comes to the laws of suppy and demand.
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Not sure I buy this ideology without hard facts to back the sweeping statement up. I checked my Barnes and Noble and Borders in Langhorne, PA, last night, while picking up some text for college and the offereing of books between Drupal and joomla was balanced. Demographics happens to play a role in supply and demand as well. Without demand there isn't much reason for a supply.
Ultimately you do what suits you best in this case. It's your site. Many don't care about underlying architecture. While both tools compete in the same arena they aren't necessairly built for the same consumers. This holds true with each project in the arena for the most part, not limited to Drupal or Joomla.
as an aside, the time it takes to write up these posts, read the comments and post followups is less time learning either system. A brief intro or refresher on opportunity cost may be of benefit in this case ; )
I'm frustrated because
I'm frustrated because learning Drupal might be one of the hardest things I've ever done. My head hurts so much right now. It should be fun, but it's real work.
I vow when I'm a Drupal Guru decades from now that I won't forget what it was like to learn the system and will do my part to make it more accessible. The more people involved the stronger the community which benefits everybody.
I think that I'll write a comic book with characters like 'Bootstrap Bill' (always the first into battle), his trusty sidekick, '.htaccess Kid' (superpower: cloaking | bad habit: nicknaming people | alias: Mikey) , 'The Incredible Hook' , and the wonder twins, CCK (we all know what his day job is) and Views (superpower: shape changing) all working together to rid the world of evil corporations that shove certain web browsers down our throats which lag years behind open-source solutions or something.
Do it now
Don't wait because you will forget. Trust me. If you struggle with docs and finally figure it out, add a comment to the page on how it could be clearer (or just fix it yourself if you have time). That newbie perspective is lost fast and you'll find yourself wondering what those new folks are fussing about since it's all perfectly clear. ;)
Michelle
Where am I going to put stuff
Where am I going to put stuff like this? I would have to make my own website.
What is an action and what is an event? I don't know much about computers. I do know that the processor only works on one piece piece of information at a time. (Don't mention threading here.) The marble in this video is an event triggered by the user when she makes a URL request to the server. It sets off a series of events. Each function on the path of the marble takes a state of kinetic energy and transforms it into an action. Each function in a computer program transforms static electrical states. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RhTumSfBwI&feature=related
If I had the time I would build twenty different functions for a marble machine each being analogous to a function in Drupal so that people could visualize the process of Drupal. Of course, I could reuse a function -- different implementations of the same class of marble machine functions, I'd call them marble machine objects -- so it could be an introduction to oop too.
Aldous Huxley was interested in meta-data as it pertained to meta-physics. He and other members of his Modernist culture such as the poet T. S. Eliot where very interested in the metadata of words, that words themselves don't carry much meaning. Huxley described a word like an iceberg, a word only carries a partial of the user's meaning and the rest of the meaning lays hiding in obscurity like most of an iceberg lays hidden beneath the surface of the water. Eliot explained the role of the poet is to take words with meaning and combine them in new ways to create a mechanism to move the reader to experience new feelings, emotions, and thought. He said the words of poets were not supposed to reflect reality but to create a new reality, new feelings in the mind of the reader.
What does this have to do with Drupal? The people who write Drupal books are very aware that there is such a thing as metadata in Drupal and that it is very important but lack an understanding of the metadata of the words they use to describe abstract concepts such as -- go figure -- metadata in Drupal. Words have layers of meaning ranging from concrete to the abstract. Poets are very, very important, their function is to communicate making the ineffable heard by using words -- they make the abstract concrete. Poets are the 'abstract database layer' of wisdom, the bolus of human knowledge.
I hear all this talk about hooks in Drupal. I imagine that Druplers get together with these conventions and talk about hooks all day. If you think about it long enough you will realize 'get together with these conventions' is a double entendre. That's great that everybody can talk about hooks but it doesn't mean a friggin' thing to me. I'm sitting here with the rain beating outside my window reading books on Drupal wondering my mind keeps wandering to and day dreaming about fishing trips that I've taken in the past.
You can't just throw the word hook at me. It doesn't mean anything except something to catch fish with. Your not speaking my language. Word meanings come in two different types. Words denote something like the word Christmas denotes December 25 the birthday of Jesus. Words also connote something like Christmas does caroling, time with far away family, warm apple cider with a cinnimon stick in it, chestnuts on in the fireplace, Handel's Messiah at Midnight Mass (which my friends and I have been doing drunk every year since high school), a baked ham, and opening presents under the Christmas tree. The word Christmas has a ton of metadata associated with it, just like the word hook has a ton of metadata associated with it to a Drupaler.
If your going to write a book on Drupal you have a job, a social responsibilty to communicate the metadata of all the words you use before you start using them. You define your terms before you start using them your programs, why are you not defining your terms before you start using them in the books you write? At every epoch there is a person who comes and shows us the way. There was the Buddha, Jesus, Shakespeare, Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Your time is now, you are the ONE! Show us the way.
Books vs Handbooks
Actual books that people are being paid to write generally do define the terms they use. The handbooks are organically grown by thousands of people adding knowledge and there are often gaps. There is no one person writing the handbook. The handbook is written by all of us, including new folks making notes where they don't understand something to give guidance about where it can be improved.
In this case, you'd want to make a note on http://drupal.org/node/937 that "hook" needs to be defined. That said, using hooks isn't basic Drupal. You use hooks when you write modules. If you're a newb and jumping right into writing your own modules then I can see why it would be overwhelming. I've been a programmer for 20 years and used Drupal for over a year before I got into the hook system.
Michelle
Drupal lightweight?
As a developer I find the notion that Drupal is lightweight hilarious, Drupal attemtps to be all things to all men (and thereby fails to be really good at anything) hence in order to do that, it has to go through a lot of hoops and requires a lot of code, hence why you see people being suspending from their shared hosts for too many dB queries or unable to install things properly because they are limited in teh memory they can use. Drupal is far from lightweight.
The only way to get lightweight is to write things at a lower level using a framework or use a CMS / solution that is far more specifc in nature.
Hey, you opened pandora's box
Hey, you opened pandora's box again. Do you know what's more hilarious than Drupal being lightweight? Joomla still processes more code to do less.
Never even looked at Joomla,
Never even looked at Joomla, but if this guy thinks Drupal is light then god knows what Joomla is like, the only way to get light is coding it with a framework / yourself or maybe a more niche CMS.
My original argument was that
My original argument was that Drupal is best served as a framework. This time last year I didn't know what an a tag was so I've come a long way. I have great fun learning PHP and am looking forward to when I can custom code sql queries. Personally, I like to use the Devel module to find variables and to code tpl.php files with little snippets of php. Bypassing panels I think really speeds things up.
The website I built is in a very specialized niche market. There are a couple of vBulletin forums in the market and our main competitor's site runs on ektron CMS serving asp pages at half the speed my poorly coded Drupal site does (see first paragraph for obvious reasons.) Their site is much better than mine in some aspects -- most I think. I just feel that my Drupal site by October of next year will just be badass. I'm just very competitive and will be giving everyone a run for their money.
Out of the box, Joomla offers -- this is within the last seven months -- the same functionality as that site, our compitition, uses with the ektron for about $400 in licenses. (Here are two Joomla sites I'm working on out of the box, fluxgatemedia.com/bridge and fluxgatemedia.com/moxy).
I had to consider not only what I can do now but also what I will be able to do in five years. For a publishing company, Drupal is, hands down, the single best way to go. Granted getting a Drupal site up is hard to do, I am amazed everyday at the potential it has. We sit and dream of all the ways that we can help get useful information to people. Instead of thinking, "Crap, I wish I could do that but can't," I now think, "I can do this, but it's going to be hard work, it's possible."
well, i am not a developer,
well, i am not a developer, just a masochist.