During the last few months, we've had a lot of clients who are have been after picking up on the buzz around CMS systems and Drupal and Joomla in particular. With the upcoming releases of Drupal 5.0 and Joomla 1.5, both systems are poised to make a big leap forward. However those launches may not happen for several months and many companies need to make a decision now, balancing the pros-and-cons of both solutions.
After talking and developing answers for several clients, we decided to put all we'd written into one document to help other people with this decision. Some disclaimers before we start:
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| Content Management | 
Very sophisticated. It allows unlimited category levels, tagging and categorization. You can also create multiple types of content, each with different features. | 
Weak. There are only three levels of content - Section >> Category >> Content is available. That's it. No cross-categorization. To get flexibility, use a Content Construction Kit extension. |
| WYSIWYG Editors |
Probably the most common complaint about Drupal - it has no default editor. |
TinyMCE comes by default. |
| Template / Themes |
Very few commercial developers and off-the-shelf choices are very poor. Most designs are custom-made. |
Perhaps Joomla's biggest strength. Joomla has a wide selection of free and commercial designs. |
| Community Features |
By default it offers the ability to expand user profiles easily and Organic Groups allows for powerful community-building. |
Non-existent by default but there are two powerful community extensions. Community Builder is free. Jomsocial is commercial but a powerful social application. |
| User Permissions |
A huge strength of Drupal wins hands-down. You can create unlimited user levels and customize them in minute detail. |
Perhaps Joomla's achilles heel. Most Joomla aites will only be able to use three user levels (Public, Registered and Special) without installing a cumbersome Access Control Level extension. |
| User Subscriptions |
The only real option is Ubercart, a shopping cart which allows recurring billing. |
Multiple options via extensions. CB Subs and are two of many. |
| Shopping Cart |
See above. The only real option is Ubercart. Its a powerful, fully-featured ecommerce platform but may be overkill for small stores. |
Joomla has only one major shopping cart: Virtuemart, but it considered buggy and difficult to work with. |
| SEO |
The out-of-the-box URLs work well and can be improved with one easy addon: Pathauto. The code is generally lightweight and well-optimised. |
Reasonable out of the box, but lacks the ability to really control URLs or metadata. Various SEO extensions are needed for those who really care about SEO. |
| Forums |
A native and very smooth forum, but lacking in the high end features of the best modern forums. |
The choice is between Agora and Kunena (native to Joomla but short on features) versus RokBrige (a bridge to phpBB3) and JFusion (a bridge to almost any forum software). |
| Multimedia |
Not by default but several multimedia modules for video and podcasting are available. |
Yes, the default WYSIWYG editor allows video and there are plenty of podcast and video extensions. |
| Photo Galleries |
Definitely less options than Joomla. Decent galleries require several modules to be combined. |
Yes. there's over a dozen excellent galleries. |
| Event Calendars |
Not great. There are options but they are far behind those available for Joomla. |
Yes, multiple native and high-quality calendar extensions. |
| Document Management |
Would need to be constructed from other modules. |
DocMan and Rokdownloads are both reliable document managers. |
| Blogs |
Good default capabilities, although not a natural blog in the manner of Wordpress. |
Some out-of-the-box capability (we use Joomla for our blog here on Alledia). Good native blogging extensions plus a port of Wordpress are available. |
| Internationalization |
Yes, Excellent. |
Not by default. Joom!Fish allows for sites in multiple languages but isn't as powerful as the commercial Nooku. |
| Standards Compliance |
Yes. Excellent out-of-the-box. |
Not great. The Beez template does provide clean output but most Joomla installations still use a good number of tables. One company has produced a full set of table-less overrides. |
| Multisites Management |
Yes, out-of-the-box. |
Weak. There are some multisite options but they're either unstable or very expensive. |
| Commercial Community |
Drupal's commercial talent pool is very high-quality but also very shallow. Most commercial developers work with large-to-medium size business and charge accordingly. |
Very strong. Perhaps the best in the Open Source CMS world with a wealth of developers, designers and consultants. |
| General Community |
Good community. Often more non-profit than business driven. Excellent forum support at Drupal.org. |
The community as a whole has a tendency to argue and fragment but its also highly dynamic with 1000s of companies offering support and services. |
| Ease-of-use |
Definitely a weakness. Terms are confusing and overly-geeky. The admin interface is text-driven and often overwhelming to beginners. |
Joomla has a very good graphical interface but still retains quite a few quirks and oddities. |
| Documentation |
Not too bad. (Click here for documentation and here for an API reference guide |
Pretty good. The main Joomla wiki has a lot of highly-detailed pages but also some with very little information. |
| Learning Curve | Steeper than Joomla. Drupal's strength is in its flexibility and power, not its ease-of-use. | Shallow. One of the easiest CMS systems to learn and customize. |
| Current Situation | Clear development path. Currently working on Drupal 7. | Joomla 1.5 is the current version with the possibility of two new versions (1.6 and 1.7) due next year. Roadmap is not always clear. |
| Overall | Drupal is flexible and developer-friendly. It also benefits from a coherent and stable community led by several large and reputable companies. | Joomla 1.6 will focus on improving two crucial areas: Joomla's inflexible systems for managing users and content. It may become a little more complicated as a result, but it will remain relatively easy to produce a good-looking site with plenty of functionality using Joomla. |
joomla is too complicated!!
