Drupal vs Joomla
Submitted by steven on Sat, 12/15/2007 - 01:00
Which is better - Drupal or Joomla? It depends on what you are trying to do and how much time you have to do it.
I have used Mambo, Joomla 1.0.x, Joomla 1.5, and now Drupal 5.x. When I thought I had to upgrade from Joomla 1.0.x to Joomla 1.5 due to server issues (I was wrong... but I upgraded anyways), I did research into the best / easiest CMS to allow me to have a blog and allow Adine to showcase her art.
At first I tried to install and configure Drupal. The learning curve is much, much steeper than Joomla's. After two days, I scrapped Drupal and installed Joomla 1.5. It took me less than a day to build my site in Joomla. I was happy with the results. That is until I realized that I could not get any type of SEO out of Joomla. And since I have given a couple talks on SEO, I was embarrassed for my blog to be that bad with SEO. I also wanted tags and comments. Neither one looked possible with Joomla 1.5rc3 at the time.
So I went back to Drupal. It's taken me about a month to build out my Drupal site the way I wanted. No, I did not work non-stop on the project. Yes, my Drupal site does a lot more than my Joomla site did. But still it took me a month.
Once again, which is better? Drupal or Joomla?
If you need to put something together fast and don't want to worry with customization, then Joomla is the way to go. If you want the ablity to customize your site and don't mind getting your hands dirty, then Drupal is worth considering. For the features I wanted, Drupal is the way to go.
The table below compares the issues that I have run into over the past month while working with both Joomla 1.5rc3 and Drupal 5.x.
| Joomla 1.5rc3 | Drupal 5.x | |
| Ease of setting up | Joomla is very easy to install and configure. | Drupal is very easy to install and configure if you want a basic blog. It gets complicated for a new user if you want multiple sections on your site. |
| Creating / Editing content | Built in wysiwyg editor. Very easy to use GUI for site administration. | Wysiwyg editor easy to add as a module. Site administration takes some getting used to. |
| RSS | Out of the box Joomla supports different RSS feeds for each section. | Thus far I have only been able to have a single RSS feed for my site. |
| SEO | Joomla will allow SEF urls, but I could find no way to configure Joomla not to have tons of different URLs for the same content. | Out of the box, excellent SEO capabilities. |
| Modules | Modules are easy to install via GUI interface. Once installed, the administrator does not need to have access to the file system. | Modules are installed and updated by ftping the modules in to the correct directory. The admiistrator requires access to the file system. |
| Sitemaps | None. | Automatic sitemaps provided via XMLSitemaps module. |
| Comments | Requires modules | Out of the box support. |
| Photo Galleries | Module available for Gallery2 intergration. | Module available for Gallery2 intergration. |
| Templates / Themes | Templates are widely available. There appear to be many consultants who give away free templates to encourage people to by custom templates. As best as I can tell, one template for the site. | Far fewer available free themes. Excellent module support for having different Themes for different pages of the site. |
| User Permissions | No real way to give people granular roles. | Excellent control over different users level of access. |
| Taxonomy | Only allows for one section and one subsection per article. No ability to assign content to multiple section. | Excellent ability to tag and assign content to sections of the site. Allows for assign content mulitple tags/sections. |
| Muiltiple Sites with one installation | No. | Out of the box, excellent support. |