BretWagner.com

It’s been two years since I dis­cov­ered the Joomla! com­mu­nity.  Back in 2006, the core devel­op­ment team had just split from the Mambo group and set off to take the CMS in a new direction.

How­ever, I have been hear­ing more and more about the merit’s for Dru­pal as a CMS.  Actu­ally, it turns out it is more like a con­tent man­age­ment frame­work.  I decided to give Dru­pal a chance to win me over with it’s flex­i­bil­ity and grow­ing com­mu­nity of devel­op­ers / design­ers.  I spent a few evenings search­ing out what I would need to develop some­thing com­pa­ra­ble to ScienceForAmerica.com.

I’m aware of the fact that Dru­pal is more exten­si­ble than Joomla!.  How­ever, after the release of Joomla! 1.5, this advan­tage shrunk con­sid­er­ably.  With the MVC frame­work of Joomla, devel­op­ers can cre­ate plug-ins with con­sid­er­ably cleaner, more com­pli­ant code.

Groups man­age­ment is an area where Dru­pal is a clear leader.  It seems like Joomla! assumes that every­thing on a par­tic­u­lar site will be done with an admin or super-admin.  This is annoy­ing, as it seems a short-sighted assump­tion.  Besides cre­at­ing con­tent, there’s not much you can do.

The other clear win­ning area is for SEF URLs.  Joomla has never han­dled these well.  In fact, many of the com­po­nents devel­oped for Joomla to accom­plish SEF still fail to fully enact unique, well-formed URLs.  Dru­pal has Joomla beat, with the code opti­mized and lean.

When it comes to design and ease of use, Joomla wins hands down.  The larger num­ber of free and pay-for tem­plates, com­bined with the well doc­u­mented how-to’s for edit­ing tem­plates, show that Joomla is really for the design-minded developer.

So I guess at this point things are a bit of a wash.  I don’t see a need to develop SFA any fur­ther– it’s got a decent forum (although severely under­used), a good down­loads man­age­ment sys­tem, and can han­dle mul­ti­me­dia rel­a­tively well.  I’ll keep an eye on Dru­pal, how­ever, for future projects.  If it ends up I need an ecom­merce solu­tion, the Uber­cart mod­ule appears to be a strong Virtue­mart competitor.

I’ll admit — from the moment the intro ses­sion started at Bar­Camp­Mil­wau­kee, I was hooked.  Peo­ple throw­ing around names like Word­Press, Joomla, Dru­pal, and Rich Inter­net Appli­ca­tions and I knew I was in good com­pany.  Granted I’m not very expe­ri­enced in the last, but I can rec­og­nize the poten­tial and am try­ing to grasp the con­cepts of Adobe’s AIR devel­op­ment platform.

The ses­sions I got the most out of were the ones I could use that day.  My pro­fes­sional web site (you’re here, obvi­ously) was stale and the Word­Press ses­sion inspired me to tackle a redesign that made main­ta­nence 100 x eas­ier and post­ing 100000 x easier.

The second-most use­ful ses­sion was Dru­pal.  I’ve never used Dru­pal to build a web app, but when I was try­ing to decide between CMS’s it was Joomla or Dru­pal.  Armed with some new ammu­ni­tion, I might do some more explor­ing of Dru­pal as a robust CMS that has solid code and some cool fea­tures that Joomla doesn’t offer.

Note to self: I need a Nikon SLR.

I just got back from BarcampMilwaukee3, the tech­nol­ogy and cre­ativ­ity “un-conference”.  I wasn’t pre­pared for the cre­ativ­ity side of it, but I found this to be more refresh­ing than the dis­cus­sion about web tech­nolo­gies I had through­out the two days.

It seems inter­est­ing to me the sheer num­ber of pho­tog­ra­phers in the crowd.  I would put this num­ber at one out of five par­tic­i­pants either had a cam­era at the con­fer­ence or were active flickr users for their blogs.  The pho­towalk was one of the most pop­u­lar ses­sions.  Maybe this is a release for the some­times mun­dane tasks of writ­ing code.  But the cre­ative side is impor­tant for pro­gram­ming, so maybe this is another means to fos­ter that creativity.