Written on December 22, 2007  /  with 35 comments  /  in the Drupal Tips category.

10 Reasons To Choose Drupal Over Joomla

Alright I must admit, I am jumping on the Drupal bandwagon (if there is such a thing). I just have to admit that it is so much better than Joomla (the other CMS heavyweight at the current time). And I mean so much better. My top ten reasons to use Drupal really do stem from my few frustrations of Joomla and how Drupal has solved those frustrations for me. This is nothing to harsh against Joomla! I think it’s a wonderful open source project that I hope continues on. I would love to find reasons to use Joomla more often. There are just some areas that they have need to improve. Anyways, here are my ten reasons to use Drupal:

  1. SEO Friendly URL’s – This is a pain in the butt with Joomla! It’s automatically built in with Drupal and very very easy to use.
  2. Easy To Use Admin Interface - I think Joomla tried a little too hard in this area. Drupal found a way to just make things more simple and not so overwhelming for the beginner user.
  3. Built In Blog – The blog that’s built in to Drupal is very easy to use and customize. Joomla really does not give a good blogging option at all surprisingly.
  4. Web Forms Plugin – This is a terrific plugin that I suggest you use. Just do a search for it on the Drupal.org website. Let’s you create as many of your own customized forms as you need. Very easy to use and very comprehensive.
  5. User Management – User roles and access control is so much easier to manage and maintain using Drupal. It makes multi-user websites easy to create rather than a pain in the neck.
  6. Ubercart – I just recently wrote about this shopping cart plugin for Drupal. Hands down the best shopping cart you will find for any content management system period.
  7. Drupal Taxonomy – Drupal’s way of categorizing content is such much better than Joomla. You can tell that it was way more thought out beforehand. This is important for anyone creating content rich websites.
  8. Meta Tags Plugin - a fantastic plugin allowing you to create custom meta keywords and more importantly descriptions for each page. Do a search for this one. Great Plugin.
  9. Page Title Plugin – Something Joomla does not currently have. A plugin that EASILY allows you to customize each pages Page Title. An absolute must for search engine optimization.
  10. Social Networking – For a major social network I of course choose elgg. However, if you are looking to build a more niche/smaller social network than Drupal is perfect. Again referencing to it’s user management capabilities combined with it’s Drupal Taxonomy to content manage all content Drupal makes for a fantastic easy to setup social network.

Also I find it fair to mention that the templating system for Drupal is much much better making it easier and more reasonable from an HTML/CSS perspective to make customizations and create high functioning themes. This list of Premium Drupal Themes shows some examples of what I’m talking about.

I wrote this post for two major reasons. First and foremost of course, to inform you the reader about Drupal and it’s advantages. The other is to hopefully in one way or the other encourage Joomla to “take it to another level” if you will. Hopefully it will help motivate Joomla contributors and creators to better refine the CMS that they have. If they don’t, people are gonna find out how much better Drupal is and stick with them.

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