Joomla or Drupal?

[Ferre]

I need a CMC for a new site and I wonder what's the better one, Joomla or Drupal? I have downloaded Joomla to have a look at it but didn't edit anything yet.

Anyone who has experience with both?

[SEOwizard]

I can't speak for Drupal other than what I read- it's a good solution but has a long learning curve. Frankly, anything that takes 9 months to really learn, we'd rather program exactly what clients want ourselves. (No barking back on this- that's just a team decision!).
Joomla-
design- it was easy enough to implement the design http://rosevinepga.com/
install- simple- we used fantastico
SEO friendly- gotta love the URL's and page by page meta options
admin friendly- it has a bit of a learning curve, but maybe a week at best. Because we don't use it all the time, we created a blog to put notes on for ourselves and clients. Then when we jump back in, it's easy to update since it is usually the same navigational issues.
It is not a snap if a user has admin level access- there's a lot of choices and I think newbies can get confused. So you need to be careful about the skills of who will admin. Adding content as a 'writer' with someone else doing the approve and submit is a snap.
modifying features - in my opinion, it's like all the other opens source CMS- if it does not fit what you need, don't use it unless there are existing plug-ins.

[Michael Allison]

Ferre, I'm liking Drupal a lot... the code is squeaky clean and the platform is super flexible. Mind you, I just started fooling with it, so I'm no Drupal modding pro, but I like what I see so far.

Two thumbs up!

[NeO]

I don't have any experience with the Drupal - but I will agree with SEOwizard on this one... Just playing around last week I set up www.Yahell.net (where all the bad yahooligans go ) Still haven't figured out what I want to do with it... but for the time being it's getting traffic... I have someone to write music news... someone to do a comedy corner... and it has really easy interfaces for the writer level folks!

The only problem that I've run into is that the frames get out of whack about every other time I load that page up... the poll and the adsense are off screen sometimes... which forces everything else down the page...

Banner rotation script is schweet... and it is very SEO friendly! I've been back and forth on the Joomla forums asking questions... and it seems that my frames bustin out to the right hand side problem is fairly common when pics are added... But should be fixed in the next round of updates

NeO

[etech-peter]

I would suggest Joomla. It's Free and constantly enhanced by a great community of developers. Set up a trial site and have a go at it. Some webmasters recommend Drupal for it's SEO benefits. I've not used it and therefore unable to comment on it.

[sarahk]

I haven't used Drupal (but I have demo'd it over at www.opensourcecms.com) and finally went with Mambo (which is almost Joomla, long story) and haven't looked back. It's great.

That said, they are both well respected so you should do well with either. Without knowing your technical ability and the specs for the job it's hard to be more specific.

[Bjorn Solstad]

OK. On this one I actually have some experience..
I use Joomla on 10 sites, and have been using it since Mambo version 4.5. Joomla is great in many ways, but it also has some serious flaws. The devs are trying to figure out a solution for it, but has not found a way to solve it so far. What I am talking about is a tiny little detail called item id. The item id is used in the patway of the CMS, and follows you around wherever you are in the system. The problem with it is that if you move something or make a new menu item for a section, category or whatever - the item id changes.
This means that all the inbound links you might have built going to a specific page might be lost.

Drupal does not have this kind of problems. In drupal you have full control of the urls, and they stay the same unless you change them manually. From a seo point of view drupal is a way better solution.

Every article I have ever read about drupal suggests that it has a steep learning curve. I can confirm that to be very, very true. You really need to play with it for quite some time untill you see the logic of it.

I am currently investigating the possibility of porting our main money-maker over to drupal, but are very undecided still.

With drupal you have to test every single module made for it, and see what it does and if you need it for your project. This is a very time-consuming task.

I believe Drupal is a very powerful tool - if you have the time to figure out it's pros and cons.

[Julie]

I've done both. Joomla has more headaches than it's worth it seems. I used it for about a year and a half. It's very inflexible at times, but if you're looking for something cheap and quick to slap together a site, then it'll work fine.

If you're looking for flexibility and design capabilities, go with Drupal. You can do so much more. If you know about web design in general, you'll be able to figure this out. My one site - www.oasis-news.com - that's the first one I did with Drupal. That's a basic template that I customized a little bit...did a little resizing (only slightly) so it displayed teh same across all browsers, added a new banner, etc. Now I have another site that I'm doing for a friend. It's the same template as the Oasis site, except I changed things in the CSS to make it look different. I'm learning more as I go, and already off the bat I think got it down pretty good and am working on some custom modules right now for the Oasis site. If you know PHP too you can do lots with it!

[Klaas Koopman]

ferre, atm I'm learing joomla. If I got the site done, i'll tell you what I do and don't like about joomla!

[Matthew Doucette]

Originally Posted by basicus

Joomla is great in many ways, but it also has some serious flaws. The devs are trying to figure out a solution for it, but has not found a way to solve it so far. What I am talking about is a tiny little detail called item id. The item id is used in the patway of the CMS, and follows you around wherever you are in the system. The problem with it is that if you move something or make a new menu item for a section, category or whatever - the item id changes.
This means that all the inbound links you might have built going to a specific page might be lost.

Drupal does not have this kind of problems. In drupal you have full control of the urls, and they stay the same unless you change them manually. From a seo point of view drupal is a way better solution.

Wow, basicus, thanks for posting this. This is a very serious flaw in my opinion. Well, it matters a lot to me at least. In looking for a new CMS, I almost completely forgot to consider if the CMS allows control of the URL structure, and if you are allowed to make changes, and move things around, without affecting the URL. Anyways, thanks for point this out. I hope I understood it properly. If so, Joomla is not an option for me just for this one reason. Drupal is still in!

[Bjorn Solstad]

Originally Posted by Matthew Doucette

Wow, basicus, thanks for posting this. This is a very serious flaw in my opinion. Well, it matters a lot to me at least. In looking for a new CMS, I almost completely forgot to consider if the CMS allows control of the URL structure, and if you are allowed to make changes, and move things around, without affecting the URL. Anyways, thanks for point this out. I hope I understood it properly. If so, Joomla is not an option for me just for this one reason. Drupal is still in!

No problem. I struggle with this flaw constantly. On the other hand, Joomla is very good in the way that it's really fast to develop with it. For that reason I am running 10 sites with it. I feel Drupal is to rigid in the sense that you really have to get into it. Also, I don't like too much the comment system in Drupal. Your users can comment on just about anything, and that might be a problem for a corporate-type of site.

So I guess it all boils down to what you need the cms for..

[Julie]

Originally Posted by basicus

No problem. I struggle with this flaw constantly. On the other hand, Joomla is very good in the way that it's really fast to develop with it. For that reason I am running 10 sites with it. I feel Drupal is to rigid in the sense that you really have to get into it. Also, I don't like too much the comment system in Drupal. Your users can comment on just about anything, and that might be a problem for a corporate-type of site.

So I guess it all boils down to what you need the cms for..

Turning off comments is simply a matter of checking off a box.

IMO, Joomla is for beginners who need everything "just there" and ready to go. Drupal is for more advanced people who don't neccessarily want an out of the box solution.

http://www.drupalshowcase.com/

Check out that site to see what others have done with Drupal. It's pretty neat seeing what people can do.

[Matthew Doucette]

Thanks for the info on these CMSs. It helps me out a lot.

Originally Posted by basicus

So I guess it all boils down to what you need the cms for..

Indeed.

I need it to showcase software products. Just screenshots and text description. Very simple. The best example off the top of my head is Terminal Studio's website:

http://www.terminalstudio.com/

They showcase their games via teasers on the main page, then click on a game to visit the game's main page. No commenting should be allowed.

(But, commenting would be nice for a potential article section of my website, something I may concentrate on in the future.)

---

The URL structure I would want to be clean and permanent. So if I had a game called "Pong" on my xona.com site, I would want its main page to exist at http://xona.com/pong/ , forever.

[paulgregory]

I've used both, and my opinion is that Joomla is the better, more rubust of the two. I am just finishing up a couple sites if you want to see the functionality. www.portalgermany.com and www.opensourcdesigns.com

I have been able to find Joomla components for just about any project I have worked on.

Paul

[MadKad]

I use drupal on my site, I like it and its easy to install and update there are lots of easy to add adon's and you can make your own templates very easy as well

and the best bit when you have done making your drupal website go to the drupal website forum and post your site in the drupal show case the hits are very very good from there

[Dom]

Originally Posted by Bjorn Solstad

OK. On this one I actually have some experience..
I use Joomla on 10 sites, and have been using it since Mambo version 4.5. Joomla is great in many ways, but it also has some serious flaws. The devs are trying to figure out a solution for it, but has not found a way to solve it so far. What I am talking about is a tiny little detail called item id. The item id is used in the patway of the CMS, and follows you around wherever you are in the system. The problem with it is that if you move something or make a new menu item for a section, category or whatever - the item id changes.
This means that all the inbound links you might have built going to a specific page might be lost.

I use Joomla with the free Open SEF component which allows you to map almost anything to any URL you like. Highly recommended and I would have thought a solution to your problem (it automatically 301 redirects the 'normal' Joomla URLs in both SEF and standard forms to the new addresses).

[Bjorn Solstad]

Originally Posted by Dom

I use Joomla with the free Open SEF component which allows you to map almost anything to any URL you like. Highly recommended and I would have thought a solution to your problem (it automatically 301 redirects the 'normal' Joomla URLs in both SEF and standard forms to the new addresses).

Yeah. If it only was that simple. OpenSEF works very poorly on a high volume site, and slows down the server quite a lot. The slowdown is due to the way all requests has to be done way to many times with the current version of Joomla.

[Dom]

Originally Posted by Bjorn Solstad

Yeah. If it only was that simple. OpenSEF works very poorly on a high volume site, and slows down the server quite a lot. The slowdown is due to the way all requests has to be done way to many times with the current version of Joomla.

I agree that the software does end up doing more than it should, but so far I've not noticed any problems with the server or with loading times in general. That said the site I'm running it on isn't getting a huge amount of traffic yet, so I'm sure you've got a better idea than me just how capable it is in more extreme situations. I do stand by the fact it's a good solution for SEF URLs for people running small to medium sized Joomla sites though.

[Bjorn Solstad]

Agreed. It works okay if the site is a small volume one