If you're thinking about using an open source CMS to build your website, no doubt you've come across Joomla! and/or Drupal. These two popular open source CMS platforms have an old rivalry, and if you're starting to learn about them the inevitable question that pops out is: "Which is better?", or, even more importantly, "Which one should I use for my website?"

In this article we compare the two most popular open source CMS platforms and review some of their features according to ease of use, flexibility, security, and other aspects of interest.

A bit of background:

Joomla! sprang up as a fork from Mambo, another open source content management system, starting out in the year 2005 and currently in its version 1.5 release. Its increasingly growing popularity can easily be attributed to its intuitive, simple, ease of use, a large community of designers and developers, and the wide range of templates, modules and plugins available (not all of them open source).

Drupal started out as a messsage board project written by Dries Buytaert, and became an open source project in 2001. Its flexible, highly customizable framework has made this the open source CMS of choice of many large organizations including NASA. It is currently on its version 6.14 release (September, 2009).

O.K., this sounds great, you think, but how do I choose between them? Let's consider a couple of aspects of interests and compare between the two:

Ease of Use:

When you install Joomla!, it is ready to use right out of the box. Log in to the administrator panel, create some categories for your articles, and then start typing away. As soon as you hit “publish”, your page appears on your site. With such an intuitive, simple interface, you’ll have your website up in no time.

With Drupal it is a different matter. Once it is installed, the administration back end is a veritable cornucopia of options, none of which is particularly informative. If you try to create content right out of the box, you’ll have to write in direct HTML. If you want to use a WYSIWIG editor (something that already comes pre-installed in Joomla!), you’ll have to find the module and the editor on the internet somewhere and install them yourself. The bottom line is that a raw Drupal install will hardly allow you to do anything useful. In order to build your webpages, you have to figure out what modules you need to make this possible, and many of the modules you will need are “backend” modules that make the administration and content creation of your website possible, but your visitors will never see or use. Because of this, Drupal requires a bit more time investment to understand how it works and what modules can make content creation and management easier. But on the other hand, the flexibility that Drupal affords thanks to this is unparalleled, and unrivalled even by Joomla!

Flexibility:

In Joomla!, all of your content is classified under a “Section” and a “Category”. For instance, let’s say you have a site dedicated to cooking. You may have a section for “Recipes”, and the categories in this section might be: “Soups”, “Meats”, and “Desserts”. So long as all your content can be classified in this manner, then Joomla! makes managing your content very simple: any new article or content within a category or section can be listed and searched by category or section view automatically.

But what happens when you have content that cannot be easily classified only two levels deep, or when your content can be a member of more than one section or category? In this case, Joomla! will require you to create “dummy” categories or sections so that you can force them into the Joomla! paradigm. This may be inconvenient, confusing, and laborious.

Enter Drupal. With Drupal, you can define your own categories, classes, and sub-classes via a module called “Taxonomy”. Your categories and members of categories can share types and be sub-classified limited only by your needs and your imagination. This affords great flexibility in how to organize your content. However, this also provides a webmaster with so much freedom it is easy to create a messy system that becomes difficult to use or understand. Additionally, in order to display sets of content under a common class, or “vocabulary” as Drupal calls it, you need to install an additional module (called “Views”) to display them. This module is again very flexible, allowing you to customize, filter, and list content and even alter the look of the displays, but it takes some time to learn how to get it to do exactly what you want.


To be continued....
Stay posted for our continuation of "Joomla! or Drupal? Which is better?" where we compare other aspects including security, documentation and support, look and feel, and search engine friendliness.