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.
Both Drupal and Joomla! are powerful CMS engines and while Drupal may be overwhelming at first, it is worth the steep learning curve. They each have their purpose. Drupal can be somewhat of an overkill for simple, brochure ware websites. You are better off sticking with Joomla! or something like Expression Engine. On the other hand, while Joomla is capable of scaling up to massive proportions, I find Drupal’s architecture and modules to be more suited for this purpose.