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I talked to a few friends who say that Drupal is amazing, and it is a way better than Joomla. What are the major differences/advantages?
The general consensus is that programmers prefer Drupal whereas mere mortals prefer Joomla. Joomla is praised for having a simpler user interface. (I personally don't agree with that; I think Joomla's UI is pretty painful to use. But then again, I'm looking at it with a programmer's eye.) Drupal, on the other hand, is praised for its high level of extensibility, along with its large library of high-quality (more or less) plug-ins that add features ("modules" in Drupal lingo) and many of which are extensible themselves.
Start using Joomla today, and you'll probably end up with a decent but not quite perfect web site tonight. Start using Drupal today, and you'll be able to build exactly the web site you're wishing for - once you've put the time in.
If you're considering parlaying your skills into a paid job one day, you should definitely side with Drupal.
The community around drupal - theres a module to do just about everything. Sometimes, theres more than one way to do something too.
If you want to change almost anything, from presentation (themes) to function (hooks), its possible. However, its not MVC and it does take a lot of getting used to.
With Views + CCK + Panels Module, you rarely need to touch code to create a wide variety of pages.
Finally, Drupal's User and Roles system is much more flexible.
The API. Every form and pretty much every bit of functionality can be modified via a module that hooks into the API, without having touch core code. This makes upgrades much easier, as your customisations aren't overwritten.
The code it outputs by default is much nicer, as well.
Under the hood, Joomla runs on mostly an OO architecture, whereas Drupal is almost entirely procedural with OO paradigms. Joomla has no form builder (that I am aware of), so you are forced to hand-code entire blocks of html for the form, whereas, with Drupal, you create forms as structured arrays. In Joomla, creating administrative features and front end featured requires that you place files in both administrative directories and in front end directories or create an install file to correctly partition things for you. In Drupal, everything pertaining to a particular module is contained in 1 directory, and you control access and url structure.
In general, Joomla's admin GUI is considered prettier and more user-friendly than Drupal's, but Joomla is, in my opinion, a less intuitive system at the programming level and makes certain tasks more difficult than necessary. 2 areas where Drupal truly outshines Joomla in my opinion is in the ability to create various content types - with various fields - on the fly to easily segment data, and the ability to create pretty seo-friendly urls with path or, even better, with pathauto.
Bottom Line: Joomla tends to look pretty from an administration perspective, but Drupal tends to outperform Joomla and be a more easily customizable system to achieve many of the things you really want out of a CMS.
Starting off, Joomla is fun and easy, from both an administrative and user view, but once the site needs to be customised (naturally), it becomes a pain.
In my opinion, Drupal is opposite. It has a steep learning curve (the pain part), but becomes easier not harder over time. This is from both the admin and user part.
For what it's worth Joomla before 1.5 was pretty ugly, and the API included a lot of very specific calls related to older Mambo code. The most recent version, and all future versions are built ontop of a very powerful OO framework, so if you haven't looked at it recently, do now.
Drupal shines with these two modules.
CCK: Adds custom fields to nodes
Views: Controls how lists of content are presented; it is essentially a smart query builder
What I like about Drupal is the plugin model: you have your core of drupal, and you can customize it however you want it by creating your own seperate template directory and modules (the plugins).
For a complete technical overview you can also tick Drupal and Joomla in http://www.cmsmatrix.org/matrix/cms-matrix
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This is not an opinion based question but rather a technical limits comparison one.
From the various comparison charts about the two CMS I couldn't really find any technical difference between the two platforms. Being a long time WordPress developer I find the supplied arguments about Typo3 technical pros exist somehow in WordPress; Everything you could achieve in one can be achieved in the other as well (plugins & extensions).
Let's take for example the latest versions of both two CMS's, what does Typo3 can do that WordPress can't even with its plugins/extensions?
UPDATE
Please instead of down voting the question, provide at least 1 reason for your vote.
Yes it is opinion base question, so there's my opinion (not an answer).
TYPO3 from the very beginning was considered as a Content Management Framework (that means CMS with possibilities of further custom development) while WordPress was just a blog. Of course with time things changed, as more and more people tried use the WP to doing more serious things. Anyway in WP the main disadvantage till now is "blog way of thinking" - in TYPO3 you have open structure - building services on the unlimited nested tree, while WordPress (probably) is still basing on the primitive structures, category/post/site (note, I'm not familiar with WP, so maybe there are some workarounds for this now).
You should install TYPO3 and compare the way how you put the content on the pages, how you can control the access for both FE and BE users and also such things like versioning workflow. with all my sympathy to WP I'm almost sure that's not so easy to do such things in it.
Also starting extensions with Extension Builder is just matter of minutes, so it allows you to deliver solutions to your clients exactly in the way as they want.
Conclusion, from my POV I wouldn't choose WordPress for most of my clients (car producers, publishing houses, building developers) on the other hand last time when I was asked by cellogue of mine for creating typical blog with TYPO3 I did it ... with WordPress and he's satisfied with it, me too.
As my partner used to say: "CMS is just a hammer, it depends on requirements which size you should choose"
As you write, the technical pros exist somehow in WordPress.
I personally think a major advantage of TYPO3 is the extension framework extbase and the template rendering engine fluid.
Developing (and maintaining) larger extensions becomes a lot easier since their introduction as well as an overall cleaner, fully object oriented code base.
3rd party extension written in that technology are easier to adapt/customize than some extensions in Wordpress which sometimes mix procedural with object oriented style.
Webpages with multiple languages are easier to handle in TYPO3 (e.g. content fallback), which makes it more interesting for bigger projects.
Take a look at the TYPO3 showcases and the Wordpress showcases, to me it looks like Wordpress is primarily used for subsites (like blogs, landingpages etc.) whereas TYPO3 is used more for corporate sites (which probably have a longer life cycle).
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I am a novice for both concrete5 and drupal however I have been looking at Concrete5 and Drupal. I am looking to create a web application that needs to be extensible. Client requirement will start from basic content management and it will need to extend to workflow based web application. I have been looking at the architecture for Drupal and Concrete5. For those who haved used either one which one would you recommend? Thanks in advance.
My two cents... Concrete 5 is far superior to Drupal.
I have over 25 sites using C5 right now. I have had 4 drupal installs in the past and have converted all of them to C5. I have also used Joomla, Expression Engine and PyroCMS extensively.
When I first started using C5, there were some great advantages for my customers in terms of end user updates to pages. It is FAR more simple for an average non-tech user to update content. This was a major win in my eyes. Most users were struggling to update content with the other options because it wasn't fluid or as WYSIWYG. The inline editing of C5 is outstanding.
That said, it was also very easy to convert HTML into templates using the tagging commands of C5. So in no time at all, I could take a site that was static HTML or PHP and convert it into a C5 instance. Again, very simple.
Within the last 6 months or so, I would say the extensibility has increased dramatically. New modules are added to the marketplace nearly daily. Some are FREE and some are paid, but I think ALL of them are cheap for the functionality and worth it. Most are $20 in that range.
If you know PHP well, you can write your own modules easily and not have to pay a dime and also not worry about the C5 core upgrades. There are lots of mechanisms built in that help developers take advantage of the system without having to worry about getting lost in software upgrades. This was another great advantage, that has cost me in the past with other CMS platforms.
In summary... Concrete5 is a top-notch CMS that is widely extensible with a ton of functionality that is super easy for anyone to use.
I've been using concrete5 for about 2 years now and I can wholeheartedly recommend it. Drupal is more powerful, but the amount of work that needs to be done to get to the starting point that c5 gives you right after install is huge. The concrete5 core provides you with a whole lot of stuff out of the box, and adding further functionality is straightforward with its comprehensive (although not always terribly well documented) API and active forums.
In terms of downloadable addons, there are many which cost but I've found that in many cases it's simpler to pay what is normally a low sum to get the functionality I need than to spend all the time (and time = money) coding it myself. Those situations where I've had to code a solution have been pretty painless - any trouble has been my failing, not the CMS'. Hooking into the core is really easy, including adding Dashboard pages for particular functionality (there's a helpful howto from Andrew, the core dev, on the site which explains how to do it).
Of course, the trump card is users' ability to edit their sites without having to understand UI 'metaphors' and 'paradigms'. It just works. You go to the page, click edit, and type away. Simples. My experience with pretty computer-illiterate clients has been very positive indeed, and I feel genuinely confident when I tell new prospects that they can expect to learn how to edit their site in 5 minutes.
I have been using C5 for over a year now. The core team for C5 is committed to making it better and better every release, and they often implement contributed Code....but the thing I like most over say, Joomla, is that the directive of the CMS doesn't change. while it is open source in that solid community contributions that line up with the overall vision will be included, the core team (original developers) oversee all aspects of the code. So it's more carefully comed over than other "community driven" CMS's.
There is a huge community involvement and help in everything from getting started to deep programming.
And above all other things...Clients pick up using the C5 dashboard in minutes. You'll be lucky to get that in most other CMS's.
I have enough experience with to confidently say that it is pretty extensible. There are modules for most common things that you would want to do. If there isn't you can always create you own module. Downside is that the learning curve can be a bit overwhelming at first. Drupal's UI had been lacking but it's been improved with Drupal 7. But it also benefits from a decent sized community.
I also dabbled a bit in Concrete5 and was impressed with it's easy to use content editing functions. From what I remember, there was a smaller learning curve and the metaphor they used for content mimicked a normal static website with files and folders. The other big difference I noticed was that most of the modules have to be paid for. Not sure if that means they would be of higher quality but something else to consider.
I'm also interested in some perspectives from Concrete5 users.
Concrete5 hands down is the best CMS I have used. I'll second what Chad says about clients picking up on C5 in no time at all. When I demo Concrete5 to potential clients that first thing they usually say is "I can do that." Users also love that amount of functionality that comes rigth out of the box and I like that fact that most of the code that I have worked with in my experience has been pretty solid.
As CTO of concrete5 I'm a little bit biased, but I can tell you that concrete5 does offer a lot of extendability, and we try to do so in a way that scales the learning curve along with your knowledge of the system.
For example, the CMS tools are simple to understand right out of the gate. You can build sites with no customization that clients can easily edit. Then, when you need a bit more, you can go to our marketplace to download free or commercial add-ons that extend the functionality of your site. Once that isn't enough, it's easy to create custom block types which present small, encapsulated bits of presentational content on your site, and let your clients use the CMS to place new instances of them. If you need more than just bits of content, you can use concrete5's custom model-view-controller functionality to start working with full pages and external scripts. From there you can start diving into the framework itself, including our concept of events (similar to hooks in Drupal/Wordpress), helpers, attributes, and libraries, and start working with our file manager, user manager, permissions and interface at a low level. You don't need to know any of that stuff to get started, however, which is what we think makes concrete5 so compelling.
And, as Chad mentioned, when you get the stuck, the community is one of the best and most responsive out there.
For about a year and a half I used Codeigniter to build my sites. Then a client begged me to build theirs in Wordpress. I soon found the joy of using a CMS (if Wordpress can be called that). So for about the last 8 months I have been using Wordpress as much as possible to buld my sites - I made the content fit the design.
Well, I began to grow very tired of the limitations of Wordpress - I needed more control and flexibility over my sites. So, I have recently started using Drupal 7 (not 6.x - I really like the admin panel).
After working with Drupal now for a little under two months - I have begun to feel like I'm using Stone Age Tools to build Space Age equipment.
So my question is: does Drupal get any better? Do you really have to use Views to display your content? Asking for help on the forums is just a shake better than asking a wall. I feel like to do anything requires a module. Why? Is one better off sticking to a framework?
"After working with Drupal now for a little under two months - I have begun to feel like I'm using Stone Age Tools to build Space Age equipment."
Well, my intiial reaction is that this is what you're going to feel like you're doing when you're working with Drupal 7, which isn't out of alpha yet. A good number of the folks who maintain modules haven't started upgrading to 7 yet, and that means that you're missing out on one of the great features of Drupal, which is it's wide and deep space of premade modules.
Try 6.
Do you need to use views to display all content? No, not at all. You can go in, create a new module, and write the sql and presentation that you want. Or you can find a module that will display things for you. Or, depending, you might be able to get the effect you want just by adjusting the theme you're using.
(As a side note, using an admin theme really pretties up the Drupal experience. I'm fond of rootcandy, although Rubik is nice too. Problem with Rubik is that it's not on drupal.org.)
The strength of Drupal is that by using modules, you don't have to re-write code that someone else has written - you can instead take that code and modify it (with hooks) to do what you want. This means you don't have to write an authentication/autherization system again - it's there in core. You don't need to write up openid handlers - it's in core. You don't need to write code to integrate with twitter directly - there's a module that contains an api that helps out. You don't have to write an xmlrpc server from scratch - you can use the services module.
You don't need to write a website from scratch. Instead, you can start with Drupal, add most of the functionality you need, and then spend your time making it fit what your client wants.
Firstly, you can install the Admin module to pretty up Drupal 6 admin. You don't have to use 7. 7 is still in alpha, by the way. Garland sucks, but, Garland is just a theme- its not 'the' admin itself. The Drupal admin can take the form of any Drupal theme, which is useful in its own right, depending on the use-case.
In Drupal, you can create content types clicking through the interface in Drupal 6 or 7. As far as I can see in WP3, you have to script it. A few clicks vs scripting, the choice for me is not hard there. The first way is a lot more efficient, and a task you can hand off to a non coder to get done.
You don't HAVE to use Views to display content.
You -can- use Views to make the display of content easier, by telling Drupal to gather data and provide a Page, Block, or Feed to display . This lets you create specific sections of content for areas of the site. Otherwise, you would have to create a node, and hijack its template, run a direct sql query yourself AND write the pager functions just to show something easy like the latest 10 "Press Releases" content type. Then, if someone added a new field to that content type, you have to update all that SQL code and display code. Views makes your life easier in that respect. In minutes you can flesh out site sections and arrange content in a myriad of ways. In Wordpress, this method of arranging content without functionality of Views is/was a modern nightmare and a reason I do not want to use it at all unless its a blog and nothing more.
The Drupal Support Forum is tricky. Not all modules are as active as say, Views or Pathauto (being two of the most popular modules). However, SO is also at your disposal. I answer a lot of Drupal questions here. The trick to the Forum there is you have to ask it in the right spot. True, sometimes you may have to wait a few days to get an answer, then again no one -owes- you an answer for a free product. Thats the nature of open source.
Every developer has their favorite modules to use with Drupal, and more often than not, its the same 20 or so modules. It depends on what you are doing, what you are trying to implement. It's not that 'everything needs a module' its that Drupal is such a vanilla install because Drupal does not want to assume your purpose nor overwhelm with options. The UX is something they are trying to improve anyway, and popular modules are making their way into core.
Well, I began to grow very tired of
the limitations of Wordpress - I
needed more control and flexibility
over my sites. So... I have recently
started using Drupal 7
Why not go back to CI? Drupal certainly has it's strengths, but I don't think Drupal will give you any more "control and flexibility" than Wordpress.
If the standard modules/plugins, themes/templates, from WP, Drupal, or Joomla, fill your needs, then using a CMS can be a lot faster than building a site from scratch. But, if those CMSs do not fill your needs, you could find yourself "fighting the framework" and never really getting what you want.
You're just coming out from WordPress, which has great support and is relatively easy to extend to overcome what you call its limitations, if you know basic PHP, HTML, CSS & JavaScript. Every framework has its own potential/limitations.
As a user of WordPress my humble opinion is that you should have stayed with it.
As of you last question, It depends, to stick with one and only one framework has its advantages and disadvantages, the best of all is that you get to know it very well and eventually learn how to extended it. The bad part is that very often frameworks lose popularity and you are left to you own without an active user community and support.
Regards.
All of the popular CMS products (I'd maybe add Expression Engine to the mix) are great for 80% of what you want to accomplish and a huge pain to handle the other 20%.
That's just the nature of the beast.
On the plus side, it's OS so there's lots of people hacking away at it just like you which opens up the potential for someone else already having invented the wheel.
And with bulky enterprise CM solutions like SharePoint I find that you have to reverse the equation to 20/80 (ugh!).
If you're discouraged with Drupal and prefer to stick with WP, WordPress has many thousands of plugins, including ones that can overcome the limitations you're running into and make WP behave more like a normal CMS.
Just do a Google search for "top Wordpress CMS plugins." There's a lot of articles out there that can recommend ways to get WP to do exactly what you want.
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I am planning to build a training site which will accommodate multiple users. It will also have lots of custom pages with videos in them. Which CMS/CMF is better suited for this project? Please advise..
Wordpress is designed from the ground up to be a blog, but also to be modular. Drupal is designed to be a complete CMS out of the box, but there are also extensions for Drupal too. Both are CMS systems, but again, Wordpress is really designed to be a blogging platform. Also, Drupal is a little more complicated at first and has a higher learning curve.
However, you can do what you are trying to do with either one. In addition to out of the box functionality, you can customize both Drupal or Wordpress. People tend to specialize in one or the other, and the choice comes down to personal preference (people make a living off of being Drupal or Wordpress developers, that's what's great about open source!). Once you become proficient in PHP and the CMS platform of choice, you can build your own extensions/modules and have a very custom website, but I would minimize customization to only what you absolutely need. If you are creative in using the framework and freely available modules, you may not need to write any code.
Lastly, Drupal is getting a complete re-write with version 7, which people have been waiting a long time for! If you want to get into Drupal, you may want to look into the newest version.
Edit: Personally, I prefer Wordpress, I think the admin section looks great, gives you a lot of control, but without being overwhelming (however, my opinion doesn't really matter). I really think Wordpress has a lower learning curve. I'm also pretty sure, although you haven't given many details, but if you are planning on having simple pages with videos on them, and want access to those pages to be restricted only to authenticated users, I'm pretty sure you can do that without any custom PHP coding, just some HTML.
Here's a couple helpful links for Wordpress:
Restrict Page View to Authenticated Users
Setting your Posts or Entire Blog to Private
It can be confusing trying to decide which CMS to dive into; I hope that helps a little!
The answer is Drupal.
I've been running various websites, and few years ago I decided to use Drupal as my main CMS engine and I never looked back.
I used Joomla, phpNuke, Mambo and WordPress before and nothing is as flexible, as maintainable as Drupal.
My biggest website – www.mugen.pl has 14853 registered users so I can confirm Drupal is just perfect for big, heavily used web portals.
Drupal has few wonderful 'social-networking' modules I make an excellent use of to make sure my users are keen to stay on the website, sneak preview: (sorry, I've got only screenshots in Polish):
(source: mugen.pl)
Unfortunately for Drupal, sometimes it takes a while to understand this system. Some theming stuff is not that obvious at first, but the online community is huge and always helpful.
Additionally, Drupal has excellent support for SEO. It’s built-in “path” module allows to set custom URLs for every item on the page, and other available modules (i.e. Nodewords) allow to set custom meta data for every subpage.
When you decided to go with Drupal, you should have a look at the following modules:
Content Construction Kit - http://drupal.org/project/cck
Views - http://drupal.org/project/views
Custom breadcrumbs - http://drupal.org/project/custom_breadcrumbs
Last Node - http://drupal.org/project/last_node
Nodewords - http://drupal.org/project/nodewords
Fivestar - http://drupal.org/project/fivestar
Go with Drupal ;-)
With the new release of WordPress 3.0, I would have to say WP. Many useful updates just came around the bend (menu system et al) that make it even easier to create a "site" out of a WP installation instead of just a "blog".
Drupal is extremely powerful and accommodating to the time-allowed developer, but falls short on the ease-of-use-side of things (at least from my experiences.
In short, if you're looking to make a site that's easy to install, update, and maintain - especially for posting media, go with WordPress.
Hope that helps.
Read both JohnB's and Lance May's answers. The choice is quite tricky so the only way you can make a good decision is to do your own feature comparison/score matrix.
List all the features that you need and assign importance score to them - then objectively go through both systems (or ask again on so) to get their scores.
This will also help you if you have to justify your decision later.
In the end both are good, both have quirks and both will get the job done.
WordPress is just easy to understand, for both the developer and the content editors.
WordPress is best suited for sites with:
1) Typical CMS needs - Pages, Posts, Menus - I would also include embedded videos in this list
2) Low to Moderate Traffic Loads - I know there are sites like Smashing Magazine that user WordPress under high-load, but I am sure there is some custom code added to introduce a better caching architecture and multiple servers
3) Hand off to Client for Content Editing - In my opinion, the best feature of WP is the admin user interface. The sleek visual design, smart use of ajax controls, and the simple layout makes it possible to hand off content editing to "non-technical" people
When I start a WP site, I create a new theme with two files, index.php and styles.css. Then I build my own, custom theme, that is uniquely designed for my project. Examples of my work are http://perqworks.com, http://janemonheitonline.com and http://generalordersno9.com. As you can see, these are not blogs, but CMS sites. I agree, WP was a blog platform, but it has proven itself as a CMS-lite application.
I prefer WordPress because of its extensibility and easy install and modifications.
Version 2.0 has introduced a bunch of features (like custom post types) that makes using it as a CMS easy.
Wordpress is mostly use for blogging and Drupal is used for creating websites. YOu should consider using drupal for that ;)
You may be lured to WP immediately from how quick it is to get started. But in the long term, do yourself a favor and use Drupal. It's a proven CMS framework and less prone to security issues from contributed modules. I can count on two hands how many times a WP plugin has bit me in the ass, even highly rated ones. It has very granular security also, so you know exactly what your users can and cannot do.
I've used both and Drupal is just easier to extend and configure. I don't get why people think it has a huge learning curve.
I also think a big deal breaker is the end user experience - WordPress makes it just so damn easy to manage your website, all whilst looking (in my opinion) rather beautiful at the same time.
Every client I've handed a WP site to has been impressed with it's simplicity - as the iPad put it;
You already know how to use it!
I prefer Drupal over Wordpress . Drupal is made for flexibility . But you must know how to do it , ie all . You may need some time to read how to do with that module x and how to with module Y . But once you have learned you will be comfortable to do any site.
The main advantage of Drupal is CCK and Views . Wordpress 3 have come with CCK , but Drupal has it from version 5. Now we are moving to 7, and it still misses Views :) . Yes ofcourse wordpress is a wonderful tool for blogging with ease. But when talking other than blog, you may want to opt for Drupal . Once you have learned how to do with drupal , you will never say wordpress .
If some one is against Drupal then he may have not used or learned it to the extent :) . So my suggestion for you to checkout Drupal 6 for now , as Drupal 7 is still in alpha for the present time.
I'm going to be moving my website to a CMS in the coming months I'd I need some help on choosing an appropriate CMS. Many of the websites I've seen tend to say "use Drupal, hands down". However, my website truly doesn't have a need for commenting or community features. Its pages will need to be modified occasionally, but not extensively. My website will also consist of many programs, each with their own sub-pages and menus.
There are probably 25 people that will need access to the content on my website and will need the ability to update it.
I do like the idea of being able to tag and categorize the content, and the modular aspect of Drupal but is it really right for my website? If not, which CMS may fit my needs better?
It sounds like Drupal would be an excellent solution to your company's needs. I used to recommend WordPress for smaller, single-blog type sites, but now, even for those, I recommend Drupal because you can start small and scale up as your needs grow. It has a very dedicated community and there is a module for just about any need you may have.
I would agree with Drupal. The thing about Drupal is that you start out very small and add on as you need things. There is a ton of documentation, it is well coded, always being expanded on, good forum support, and free. It's the easiest to install, most problem free, and most maintainable CMS system I've seen so far.
You can turn Drupal commenting off with the press of a button, and if/when you decide to add onto your website, perhaps you want an ad rotator, more extensive user permissions, etc, etc, it is all already developed for you and ready to go.
I am not sure if Wordpress supports multiple users on a site.
The smallest you can go for a CMS is something like 10kCMS or the more popular TinyMCE
If it is something small I will go with WordPress as it is easily themed and extensible. There are a lot of community plugins and support. Their documentation is also fairly simple as they don't have a thousand of functions and stuff you need to remember and understand. With some creativity the basic functionality of WordPress is sufficient to solve almost all problems that might arise in small to mid-size website.
I also like Drupal, but you may consider Umbraco as well. http://umbraco.org/ I'd use Umbraco over Drupal if your team is stronger in .Net than PHP. (Really, I think that's a larger concern - what are your organization's strengths? Play to suit them. You are making a decision that will pave the way for many developers besides yourself, and business decisions of your company.) Both are extendable and open source so you can write your own modules/components to customize. It may be cleaner to import into Drupal tables than Umbraco, since it goes down to xslt files. (EDIT: This looks to be no longer the case in the new version - http://umbracohosting.com/umbraco-4---get-excited/one-cms-any-database) From a front end dev perspective, both offer great control of the final output.
From working on legacy stuff a lot, you may end up hiring interns to do the gruntwork. There's bound to be tons of inline tables and all sorts of un-reusable code in there, it may be easier to scrape the content manually and start w/clean markup for the content portions.