[Techtalk] Content Management Systems

[Tamara Harpster]

Hi Linda,

I've had a chance to play with Drupal and can provide a bit more input on
the differences between it and Mambo/Joomla

Quick summary:
1. if you are looking to set up a website quickly and are not as interested
in tweaking the insides, I would recommend Mambo. THis is based on my
experience with Mambo before the Joomla split and the current stable of
Joomla, which is before the 1.5 release.
2. If you are interested in a web site, with content editing and content
sharing by multiple users, I would recommend Drupal 5.x, which is what I've
been working with lately.

Longer explanation:
In working with Drupal I can see that there is a lot of power under the hood
that is better documented and easier to get to then Joomla, based on my
Joomla experience from a few months ago. I am using a Drupal installation as
a base package for a shared editing system and I may be writing a plug-in
for an XML editor that would access a Drupal API for checkin/checkout of
XML. At least I hope I get to write such a thing, anyway. There is also a
steeper learning curve for doing the modification, however, the
administrative interface was a bit easier for me to pick up this time
around. My intuitive feeling is that the current Drupal platform is a bit
more solid then Joomla, but from what I hear the Joomla 1.5 release is
likely to change that.

With Joomla, it gives a lot of capabilities at startup but it wasn't quite
so friendly to modification, especially when using the defined APIs, once I
could find documentation. I did find a way to tweak the software for a demo
we did, but ease of customization is part of why I'm working with Drupal
right now. However, my personal website is maintained in Joomla, because I'm
not doing anything overly fancy and was happy to get the site setup quickly.

And on your question about publishing Drupal pages as static pages, I
believe you could, there are some modules already built for exporting
content as Docbook, I suspect that could be modified to export raw HTML as
needed. I'm considering a similar capablity myself, for creating PHP pages,
in order to save on DB queries in a production environment.

This may all change with a final release of Joomla 1.5, especially as I'm
seeing certain features being implemented by multiple CMS software, for
example, version management of the content stored, which is very nice for
business use.

Figure you've probably moved on with your work, but remembered a request for
more info and decided to provide the little bit I've picked up in that last
month, hope it helps out.

tamara

On 1/9/07, Linda de Boer <ldb at swmbo.ca> wrote:
>
> Tamara Harpster wrote:
>
> > hope this helps out some and it reminds me, I need to download the
> latest
> > rev of Druapl myself to see what improvements have been made lately.
>
> G'day
>
> Thanks very much, please let me know what you think of the Drupal. I'm
> running 4.7.4 but am leaning towards the Mambo, even just for starters.
> I can likely use both depending upon level of complexity once I get the
> hang of it.
>
> --
> ldb
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