Most companies’ rely on their IT professional to guide them on the right choice of technology. It can be frustrating and completely alien for anyone on the business end to understand what to choose. Believe it or not, it’s become that way for the design/development professional.

So what’s the right choice in a CMS solution? There are so many systems available that it can make your head spin. For simplicity sake, I will focus on open source systems that are free. If you want to pay a lot of money for a system, that’s another post – which I’ll touch on next week.

Here are the two contenders:

Joomla

Pros:

• Easy addition of modules
• Versioning is available
• Large community of developers (more than Drupal) for helping with setup and development
• Multi-lingual
• Easy deployment
• More intuitive administration user interface
• Editing content is simple
• Lots of polished modules for things like calendars, polls, etc.

Cons:

• Modules cost you money
• URLs are not search engine friendly (there is a purchaseable module)
• Out-of-the-box blogging functionality is mediocre
• One installation of the software gives you only one website
• Categories can only go two levels deep
• Limited roles and permission allowances

Drupal

Pros:

• Many high profile sites use Drupal (ie – MTV, BBC, the Onion, NASA, Greenpeace, Kleercut )
• Multiple levels of categories allowed along with easily integrated tagging system
• Human readable URLs which are search engine friendly
• One installation allows you to create and manage mulitiple websites (very handy when creating campaign sites)
• Highly configurable user permissions handling
• Easy deployment
• Editing tabs integrated into actual pages
• Editing content is simple as well
• Very flexible in its configuration
• Modules are plentiful, free, and suitable for non-profits
• Versioning is available

Cons:

• Administration area is clunky, but it’s getting better with each version
• Terminology in the administration can be cryptic
• Adding a visual theme to Drupal can be time consuming
• Support for the free modules can be frustrating

In summary:

Joomla is an excellent CMS for basic to complex websites. Blogging features are not refined, nor is the capacity to multi-purpose your content in different areas of the site due to the rigid filing structure it requires. It has a large user base where the websites seem to be more personal, small business, and non-community-building sites. This last point isn’t a cut against Joomla, but only serves to show that it’s mostly being used as a CMS and not for building a participative website. The modules were well designed and integrated nicely with the system.
Drupal an excellent CMS focused on community building. High profile organizations use Drupal and depend on it daily. While there are many non-profit organizations and developers working on and adding to the modules which are free, but you are at the mercy of the developer. This is similar to, for example, WordPress’ plugin developer community, but with less support and organization. Another annoyance is the administration area’s user interface for Drupal 4.7 and earlier versions. As stated, it’s a bit clunky and cryptic with terminology like ‘books’ and ‘nodes’ and ‘taxonomy.’ Fortuantely, Drupal 5.1 was a huge step towards cleaning up the administration area’s layout. Now, they just need to fix the cryptic terminology.

And the winner is:

Both competitors are tough and each has there own unique move and counter moves. In the end, it’s a matter of what you really need in a CMS. Joomla is a simpler product with an intuitive interface and a large variety of themes, while Drupal is a more complex installation with powerful configurations, multiple website capability and better community features. The choice is yours.

If you have any questions regarding this and other CMS related topics, contact us at start@guavagraphics.com.