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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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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January 6th, 2008 at 5:11 pm
And if I made the wrong decission, is there published a script to migrate a website from Joomla to Drupal?
TIA.
February 20th, 2008 at 10:44 am
I haven’t used Drupal yet but may have to soon, I am concerned though that the level of community support & modules and components available isn’t up there with Joomla and I have heard its a lot more tricky to customise template does anyone have an experience with making Drupal sites that could comment on this, Cheers.
May 29th, 2008 at 10:31 am
I’ve used Joomla for several years now and build a lot of websites with this great CMS. Recently I worked with Drupal and I must say it’s indeed better then Joomla, mostly for the 10 reasons listed here. However, customizing templates is easier with Joomla.
June 25th, 2008 at 9:06 pm
Two years back I’d to make a choice between Drupal & Joomla. We created sites with both. But today we only work with Drupal. We are happy of the choice we made.
September 17th, 2008 at 7:37 am
Drupal.org is getting a full professional redesign soon, I’m predicting a sharp drupal rise once this is done.
September 22nd, 2008 at 12:08 pm
I have been using joomla and its great. I am hearing a lot of buzz about drupal. I search and search and search and all I see is all fart and no shit.
I am not saying drupal is bad. Drupal is indeed better than joomla, but what I see with drupal is a lot of articles which can be called PR. All these articles just keep on singing praises on drupal.
Tutorials? Help? or any other resources for drupal………..NONE!!!!!
Joomla still beats drupal when it comes to resources, infact it beats the PR of Drupal with the amount of help one can get on joomla is just amazing.
Drupal seems to me like a community full of selfish snobbish geeks who want to prove that drupal is the best(and It may very well be) and then just go around all “snobby snobby” without giving any kind of help in their websites or articles. It is very closed and selfish community I feel. They want drupal to be popular and they dont want many developers to become and expert in drupal.
Whereas joomla is in the true spirit of opensource. Joomla users just keep on contributing and contributing. There are tons and tons of videos about joomla articles websites you name it.
Youtube i filled with joomla tutorials. No geeks talking about how good joomla is. You get tutorials on anything.
But when you search for drupal all you get is all these drupal geeks telling us how drupal is the best thing to happen to this world.
So in the spirit of opensource I would rather wait for joomla to catch up and I am sure with the help of extensions any of these above mentioned 10 reasons can be tackled in Joomla.
September 25th, 2008 at 10:22 pm
I must say, I agree with Qwan. I’ve used Joomla since the Mambo days and I love it… It has opened so many doors for me. Drupal is a bit more powerful, but comes with more complexity for the average user. Qwan is right about the community… The Joomla! community is phenomenal… the resources are great, the developers are awesome and the spirit truly is, “open source.”
I’ve written several posts about “joomla vs. drupal,” and I continue to fight with myself about it… The list above is perfect… I think you hit the nail on the head, Chase. It’s tough to really determine which is truly “better” because they both have traits that surpass the other…. for instance, the community built around Joomla is far better than Drupal…. Now, that really has nothing to do with the platform or architecture, but it is relevant and has value - especially when dealing with clients.
In summary, they’re both great… and one should determine which CMS is better for each particular project… Joomla! might be better sometimes… Drupal might be better sometimes…
Cheers… great post.
September 28th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
thank you for your comments. You have brought up an interesting subject that I have not thought too much about in the past. And that is the Drupal Community as a whole and how helpful they are or are not. I’m going to take a deeper look into the Drupal Community and find out what’s going on. Expect a new post about that soon.
October 15th, 2008 at 5:52 am
I am actually stumbling with tags drupal and joomla. I’m researching which one is a better CMS other than wordpress. You made a good points. Giving this post a thumbs up!
October 24th, 2008 at 5:42 am
Who needs help? One needs doc and drupal has a wonderful and complete handbook, search for it on drupal.org it has everything you need and more.
And I know for a fact that there are video tutorials out there for basic installation and much more advanced topics, don’t say there aren’t.
But anyway, if you can’t work it out by yourself then yes, stay in the playground with joomla, who cares really???
October 31st, 2008 at 2:56 am
I used to like playing a lot with Joomla, it has very beautiful templates. being a graphic designer and gradually branching into web design, I am glad there are projects like drupal.
But lately after doing a bit more research, what do i find?
Half of all these decent templates are being sold[rather steep if you ask me] by the very same Main Developers of the project.
So I decide, let me buy a book to help me get up to speed with all this Joomla template design.
I will save you all the trouble!!!
There is nothing out there for you if you want to learn how to make a really good Joomla template. Thank you Tessa for your books, but they are really not up to snuff.
With drupal on the other hand[apart from overkill with the style sheets] there are plenty well documented books on theme-ing and basically everything you need. By the time you are done, you will really come to appreciate style sheets and xhtml. I’m glad I made the right choice there.
Drupal doesn’t pretend to be simple[and its not], its a great system and there is a great number of books out there to help you get to speed in a coupla months. Its probably the real reason I want to learn php more, even though I am not a programmer at heart.
And when you are done, you actually wont regret the time spent, you will have learnt a thing or two.
November 1st, 2008 at 3:26 am
Kai.
Hmmm very surprised to hear that, cause I learnt to make a joomla template without reading any book . Just read the documentation saw a few templates(I am too lazy to read documentation) and figured it out.
I tried doing that in drupal and whoa, also in joomla just do a google search on “how to make a joomla template” and you will be overwhelmed by the resources.
but that doesnt make joomla better than drupal :-).
But like I said joomla should learn from drupal and get a new version out soon. That will be the best thing
November 3rd, 2008 at 4:13 pm
The only thing Joomla has is the community. But the joomla community is a community of Amateurs that do not get called out for being so. Alot of the extensions, plug-ins and templates are the first projects of their respective creators and are horribly written and written for a horribly bloated piece of software from a design aspect.
I am actually glad that drupal and other CMS’ do not have the community that Joomla does. Alot of what makes Joomlas’ community great in the average users mind is what makes it a horrid in a real developers mind.
November 6th, 2008 at 6:19 am
I totally agree with you Mike.
Joomla+Bloat-Relevant documentation=Total Mess!!
And Qwan thank you for agreeing with me.
For a sec there you had e going.
November 6th, 2008 at 6:19 am
I totally agree with you Mike.
Joomla+Bloat-Relevant documentation=Total Mess!!
And Qwan thank you for agreeing with me.
For a sec there you had me going.
November 12th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
I have a super simple website builder that I wrote to make it very simple for pastors of small churches to work on their websites.
I have a friend who started doing sites for his clients in Joomla and he loves it. I tried Joomla and found that it was very hard to learn. I started to improve my own system but I really don’t have time so I took a look at Drupal. In the first day or two I was able to do more with Drupal than after a month with Joomla.
I don’t know what all the talk about doing things with templates is about. Both have templates that are relatively easy to modify, although I give the edge personally to Drupal.
It is true that there is more out there on Joomla but Joomla seems to need it more that Drupal. Anyway, both are good systems and it probably depends more on the personality of the person using the system than the system itself. The way my mind works I prefer Drupal so far and my friend prefers Joomla.
What I don’t like is the foul language that some have to use to express their opinions (remember that is all they are) and the way they have to slam the other system.
The best advice is to try them both and use the one that works best for you.
November 12th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
Pierre that was a wonderful comment, I am glad I subscribed to it.
I think I was being too judgmental about Drupal, when in fact you can say that I never tried it.
I tried to work on it after having worked on Joomla found it really difficult to carry on and try and complete a site with it.
I think I was looking at it from a Joomla point of view.
Reading about your experience I think I will give Drupal another try. This time I will unlearn what I have with Joomla and give Drupal a fair chance and try and work on it for atleast a month.
Then I will come back here and post a comment
Thanks