Joomla and Drupal - Which One is Right for You? Version 2

Great post, though Joomla does allow significant Metadata control (Adequate, but not perfect). I'm a Joomlaphile, but I'm always very impressed with the zeal and community behind Drupal. It would be great to see some under the hood analysis to. The last I looked at Drupal(prior to version 6), it was reputed to be mostly procedural code and not much OOP or MVC. I would love to know if this is still the case?

Ubercart is not a weakness - its an incredible piece of software.

Drupal has incredible multimedia capabilties:
http://drupal.org/project/media
http://drupal.org/project/bd_video
http://drupal.org/project/audio
http://drupal.org/project/emfield
and many more...

KarenS is our date / calendar guru:
http://drupal.org/project/date
http://drupal.org/project/calendar - this module integrates with the incredibly powerful http://drupal.org/project/views

http://drupal.org/project/wysiwyg supports all popular editors

Steve, I am simply wondering, what are these powerful features in Nooku that Joom!Fish does not have?
Just wondering...

Steve, imho two things are always missing from Drupal/Joomla comparisons:

1. Architecture:

Drupal has a procedural framework, Joomla has an OOP framework. This is perhaps not relevant for end users, but both Drupal and Joomla have an important developer community. More and more developers are preferring OOP these days, and I believe Joomla's framework is in part responsible for the huge amount of quality extensions.

Which leads to:

2. Choice:

For Drupal, there is (as far as I can see) one forum, one CCK, one community solution, ... In Joomla, there are multiple solutions for each of those. Not only can the user pick what is most suitable, it also fosters healthy competition amongst developers. So I think 'choice' deserves a separate item in your list. There's even a choice in frameworks for Joomla :-)

@Ivo I don't want to go off topic here, but I'm happy to give you a demonstration if you are interested.

Great post Steve. As a Joomla vet, now deep in Drupal (since we'll soon be offering Drupal themes as well), I feel almost exactly the same as you on most points.

I'm definitely w/ @Jonathan on Ubercart: This is a HUGE advantage over Joomla/Virtuemart. It's actually the reason we're rebuilding our store in Drupal right now. Ubercart rox!

I certainly agree w/@Mathias on having choices in Joomla. Drupal's community seems to stamp down competing modules and make them combine. I'm a firm believer in some health competition.

"CCK" in Joomla w/ K2 & FLEXIcontent is saving Joomla in my opinion right now, even though it's not the real CCK as you have it in Drupal. This took me some time to learn but I'm loving Drupal's flexibility and options.

Drupal is smart to include CCK in Drupal 7, I really thing Joomla needs to include it as soon as possible. Joomla 1.6 will have some nice additions, but I think Drupal 7 will be a huge leapfrog of a step for Drupal.

As always, I still feel that every CMS out there has its strength and it's all about what YOU need in YOUR site.

There's a very important difference with how Drupal and Joomla! approach third party development.

In Joomla!, it's every developer for themselves, and the solutions are very good, but very stand-alone. So, we might have a whole collection of Galleries, but those galleries are not easily integrated in with other data.

In Drupal, third-party development is approached much more strategically. So, yes, there is one CCK (which is a collection of Modules, btw), but CCK is intended as a useful tool for any use case where you are adding fields of any type. Having more than one would make very little sense, and, in fact, it would require more resources, people of whom would then not be innovating somewhere else.

The Drupal Mission statement pushes developers to work together and come out with one solution that works for everyone. I see that as a significant long term advantage over how we approach development.

Now Mattias has interesting points on the development structure - and I agree with him. Joomla!'s programming architecture using OOPS is better (some may argue slower, but ok, whatever), but Architecture is a much broader topic than simply procedural vs OOPS. Drupal does a far better job approaching development with API's than Joomla! and with thinking about how to interconnect individual Modules. In the end, that's what makes it easier for developers to pick up and combine the pieces into innovative sites.

From an end-user or less technical user perspective, Joomla!'s approach is much easier. Download and install, and you got your gallery. No PHP coding required. For a moment, imagine how huge of a market reach that is. This is a very big advantage of Joomla! over Drupal.

But, if you want a gallery driven by mashups based on zip code, or one that's pulling data from an Amazon Cloud, then Drupal is in a better position.

I am guessing Steve is not going to disagree when I say the title of his post "Which one is right for you?" is now outdated. These are two different tools, both very good for specific use cases, and you can use them both.

Also, Steve, I wanted to tell you, that other post was the first post I read from your site. Thanks for all of your great blogs. You have been an important part of the care and feeding of the Joomla! community. I like seeing you branching out into Drupal and WordPress training, too.

Amy’s assessment is dead on. I thought I would chime in on the OOP vs. procedural issue. I am an old Java programmer and thought I would never leave OOP. When PHP 5 came out, we built our own OOP CMS. In retrospect a bad decision. We then moved to SilverStripe. A very good OOP PHP CMS with very elegant use of OOP patterns. The problem; not much community.

At the time we were building a fairly complex music community trying to use SilverStripe and Magento – and really struggling with lack of documentation and support. When we learned Sony BMG and Warner Bros. were using Drupal for their musician sites we re-evaluated Drupal.

My primary area of concern was its non-OOP architecture. Two years later I am a huge Drupal fan. I still like to complain that it’s not OOP, but it is a very elegant framework with its own patters that work pretty well. It has a great API and hooks system. Drupal’s core code is very well structured and most contributed modules contain surprisingly good code.

One interesting dynamic I have found with procedural code is you get more young programmers that build all kinds of cool edgy stuff.

Cannot agree.

1. Content Management
If in community part you place V for joomla with words "Not available by default but..." Then you should for first compare use the same . For example "V - not available by default but there is number of extensions like Mighty resources, ... than can create unlimited category levels."

2 - Shopping Cart. Virtuemart not only shoping cart. Theer are number of commercial components very powerful.

3. Forum
You place V for drupal but there is only one forum option and you mention it lacks hi end features. There are 2 native and more then 5 integrated forums for Joomla. Native also lacks features but integrated are top and you give X. Not fair I think.

A couple of updates/omissions for Joomla.

CCK - Mighty Extensions Resources is far more powerful than any other CCK. THE Joomla Killer App! K2 is best suited to the average user as a tool for glorified Blog's
Community Features - Mighty Extensions Touch again much more powerful than JomSocial, less established but Huge potential.
Document Management - JoomDoc from Artio (1.5 Native update fork of DocMan)

Thanks for the work! Very helpful as we consider which CMS tools are worth supporting.

PS- any chance you can turn on the print/PDF icons?

Is this still Joomla v. Drupal or should i just leave products advertisements

I am Project Manager and programmer my self, but i still prefer joomla, the reason is the final product which will be release as website will be used by my clients who are not so technical.
Dose that make sense

@Kyle

We looked into Drupal/Ubercart but, the geeky backend and verbs clients had to adjust to create way to many support calls and repeat training sessions.

We also went through/evaluated MANY carts and finally standardized on Virtuemart as well even with all the warts since it was easier to customize and there are thousands of hacks already in place to solve most of our challenges.

Other than Magento Enterprise, Joomla and Virtuemart are the combination to beat on CMS/Cart systems. The VM addons list grows daily and the products from http://www.interamind.com are a hit with our customers.

BTW, APLite continues to rock and our customers love it. The tabbed interface is way more natural for them to use than the Joomla drop-downs. The sidebar control is a great tweak for those components needing all the screen real estate they can get.

@Eric

I totally hear ya. We went w/Ubercart bc it offers the best "out the box" features and is in Drupal so inherently customizable (also bc we're starting Drupal themes, but no more self-promo)

Very glad APLite is helping w/customers. We hope to learn more from using multiple CMS's and create a standardized theme for each to make it easier to jump back and forth for admins.

VirtueMart is constantly blasted by Joomla devs (including me), but this fact remains: It's all about the solution that works best for you and/or your clients. I don't care if which CMS it is, open source or not. Hosted or not. At the end of the day it always boils down to the solution.

@Kyle, we definitely both agree to the logic of right tool for the right job! My angle is somewhat selfish with you. I want to see Joompraise keep it's focus on Joomla

I to blast VM constantly but, with the new change in ownership and the MVC conversion already well on the way, I think the product will turn around. Every client funded VM addition we do, we contribute back to the devs. Whether or not they use it is up to them. We are also experimenting with Magento but, that product is a beast and needs the right project for a product of that complexity.

As far as APLite, it lowers our training and support costs so, keep that design in the hopper! We looked into the Joomlabamboo admin template but, the sidebar takes up to much real estate and not having clearly labeled tabs kept us from evaluating that further.

Back to the blog post, Joomla is still somewhat of a steep learning curve for newbies/site owners because the definitions are different from what people are used to like Articles instead of Pages. People grasp the word pages but Articles isn't the first thing off the tongue. I have trained around the Section/Category terms (i.e. a Section is like a filing cabinet and the Category is like the drawers in the cabinet, this logic takes).

We have developed close to 100 Joomla sites and the key thing we found is backend ease of use (i.e. APLite), training and top notch support. Without those 3, it's just another big piece of software that confuses people.

We're so confident with Joomla that we invested in Jentla (jentla.com) as our core deployment and support system so that we can setup and manage like a large company without all the overhead. Jentla has saved our bacon on maintenance and support.

Thank Steve and everyone for the quality post/comments. I will keep this bookmarked for future clients.

@Eric

Might want to check out http://www.cloudaccess.net/ and compare that to Jentla.

@Sean, thanks. We cloud host at Softlayer.net. Jentla isn't a cloud hosting system, it's actually a Joomla management product (component actually) that with the push of a button, you could deploy 10,000 sites per server. Then you can push component, module, plugin, etc. updates to groups of sites or all of them.

That's been our major headache, pushing updates/patches to new sites. Plus with the click of a button, new site is up and running and being managed by Jentla.

Well, in the end, Drupal still the best

I keep reading these features comparison..but still can't make a choice..everytime I try I end up using Wordpress (I know it's not a CMS). About Joomla I can't understand why the core is still table-based, about Drupal I can't understand why the back-end is still so tought and so not user-friendly.. why these two don't get improvements each other?!
What I mean is that one of these two would get the Wordpress easy and friendly approach they might be the best ever without any doubt.
IMHO

Joomla's tableless with many templates, and the core will be in 1.6.
One of Drupal 7's main updates is addressing the User Interface and workflow.
So both CMS's are addressing problem areas, which is a very good thing.
It's been said over and over, and I agree with the fact that:
WordPress is easiest to learn and most simple
Joomla is moderate to learn and in the middle of complexity
Drupal is tough to learn and most complex

Early in 2009 I read this article (and others), and eventually I choose Joomla as the CMS that I offer clients. I have no regrets.

But as I monitor some job boards, I see many requests for experience with Drupal and not much mention of Joomla. These posts are coming for projects with sizable teams, so I assume their development processes are heavy-not-agile and their end project is large and somewhat complex.

So I'm trying to interpret why these posts are focused on Drupal much more than Joomla. Could it be that Drupal is more robust for large-scale projects? ...or... Could it be that the decision makers of these larger projects are now biased based upon their choice of Drupal and perception of web development from a few years ago?

My questions are sincere -- not intended to take a jab at any point-of-view. Does anyone have any insight into this? Mostly... Is there a reason to choose Drupal over Joomla for larger projects that require a team to develop?

Looking at the interest (searches in Google) Joomla and VirtueMart strongly dominate compared to Drupal and Ubercart.
I guess the user friendliness just wins over as it allows a much faster start.

In short: I would bet my money that Joomla will win on the long run.
Ease of start always beats complex features on the long run in the open market.

I think the only winner is the end-user to be able to have choices. As the post title says, it's all about "Which is right for you?"
In the past, VirtueMart was right for our customers that needed a quick, cheap shop. For us Ubercart is right bc it's got a million more options and granular control.

Even though as a developer I can't stand either of them, I'd have to go for Joomla as I really have no idea* who Drupal is for.

Drupal is far too complex for most clients to use properly and is in my experience slower and frankly painful to develop with, so why any developer would choose it over a framewrok is also a mystery.

Joomla, is a least understandable (although nowhere near as accessable as Wordpress) for non-technical people, hence it is tha tbettter system.

* - I actually do know who Drupal is for two small groups:

1 - People who run sites that are technically minded yet can't programme.

2 - People that call themselves developers, can barely programme, so using somethign like Drupal is their only option.

There is always a trade-off between simplicity and flexibility. The simpler something is, the less flexible it is.

If you need to create sites which are more complex then you need the flexibility of Drupal. If you don't, then you suit the simplicity of Joomla.

(these are relative terms)