drupal vs joomla

Drupal v Joomla

May 4th, 2009 |

VS.

I am a web designer by trade. Been on the CMS circuit for quite a few years. I’ve written actionscript 3.0 since early 2008, PHP, ASP, MySQL, fluent in Softimage XSI, 3-D MAX, Adobe Master Suite pro, list goes on, am a graphic designer, photographer, videographer, video editor, I have 200 units and over a decade of professional experience. Here’s my latest site for giggles: www.playgolfdesigns.com

MONDAY, MAY 4th, 2009:

Drupal vs. Joomla

I began a small undertaking of constructing a web site concept for a client last night. Involved Drupal and Joomla. Here’s my story, my opinions and my pros/cons.

For my client’s site concept, I had to create a site with 50 demographic areas and then sub-areas in each that could be managed by admins for each demographic area, I found a component for Joomla (com_section ex 1.5.0.13) to do this easily making use of it’s “sections”, “categories” and “articles” arrangement of the site. As far as I got with Drupal was seeing I could make categories and pages (and not having any basic site flow control without creating extra work).

12:30 AM: I uploaded CMS install files for Joomla (in a folder called joomla) and Drupal (folder called drupal) on an Apache server and for each step along the way, compared strengths and weaknesses.

12:35 AM: I created a database for each in PHPMyAdmin. One called Drupal, one called Joomla.

12:40 AM: Ran installations. Gave both CMS’s their needed database connection info, created admin accounts, done.
NOTE: I go into Drupal’s admin area, in its warnings/to-do list, it warned cron hadn’t been run and had to be (some servers don’t have cron enabled), I ran it. Said I was good to go.

12:43 AM: Joomla didn’t have any cron stuff to run.

12:44 AM: Drupal has a lot of modules including blog, and forum, you just “turn them on”, create your pages, it does the rest, but it is just not as feature rich as Joomla, Joomla has tons of options that Drupal just doesn’t have, Drupal seems very dry.

3:00 AM: After endless tests for what I needed to do, I got to what I wanted faster and easier with Joomla.

I decided to go with Joomla for this project.