[Techtalk] Fwd: joomla or drupal

[Kendra Schaefer]

I do Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress site design for a living - it's hard to
tell which CMS you need to use unless I know exactly what the project is,
but I'll try to flesh it out.

If you're just creating a five or six page website with maybe a contact form
or small calendar or something, and only 1-3 people will be logging in and
using it, like an "about us" website, I would suggest using Wordpress
instead of Drupal or Joomla (any host that offers one-click install of these
should offer WordPress as well), as it's pretty flexible for small sites,
and the learning curve for other users is very easy to handle.

If the site needs to do anything special, like take reservations, integrate
event booking, send out automated emails to all users in the system, or if
the site is going to be large, with 5-10 categories, and hundreds of
sub-pages, or will have dozens of news categories in which content is
updated multiple times per day, or if you intend to manage a large number of
users, you should use Drupal or Joomla.

Drupal is best if:

1) You and/or only tech-friendly people will be admining the site. Despite
the fact that the Drupal community INSISTS this isn't true, the learning
curve is steeper for first-timers than it is for Joomla.
2) You are comfortable doing a LOT of set up - on a fairly basic Drupal
site, I will install 30 plugins to get it functioning the way I want it to.
While Drupal and Joomla both use modules / plugins to expand their
functionality, Drupal leaves some pretty basic functions up to the plugins.
3) Drupal is the "developer's CMS" - it's much, much more flexible than
Joomla in terms of code, but this is only useful if you're planning to do
any fancy data routing and logic (for example, "Every time I post a Recipe,
the first 10 words of the recipe show up in the sidebar of the Category
sub-page that it's attached to, and the whole recipe is posted to the RSS
feed and just the title of the recipe goes to a "Newly Posted" list on the
front page" ... that's the kind of thing that Drupal is good at.)
4) You will have more than 3 levels of sub-pages or categorization. Out of
the box, Joomla works with three levels of categorization: Sections,
Categories and Articles. You can't categorize outside of those groups
without modification. So if you're planning to have data route all over the
place, and you need lots of different data types, Drupal is best for this.
5) You need to input some kind of specialized item or data type, like
"recipes", "
6) You don't want a separate back-end login. With Joomla, users get a
back-end login screen, and an admin area that looks completely different
than the front end of the site. With Drupal, there is no "admin back end".
You just login to the front end with your username and password, and then
you get a new menu item called "Admin" - you admin straight from the
front-end.
7) You need FULL control over user permissions - in other words, you need to
allow some users to do some very detailed things, but not other things, and
other users need to do some things, but not other things, etc.


Joomla is best if:

1) You want your site to look shiny right away. Though the Joomla community
INSISTS this isn't true, Joomla is a bit less flexible than Drupal, so as a
consequence it's easier to design for, and so companies like RocketTheme,
JoomlaArt and others have created some really amazing, pretty cheap
templates. There are many more beautiful Joomla templates out there than
there are beautiful Drupal templates. To get a Drupal site to look great,
you usually need to hire a designer.
2) Users that are less comfy with tech will be adding content to the site.
Joomla has an easier learning curve, and is a little more intuitive for a
first-time user to get. It's a little easier to set it up as the tech
person, then hand the keys over to other other users to manage.
3) You want a separate admin back end.
4) It's enough to have 6 levels of user permissions, and you don't mind if
you can't control every tiny little thing the users do.
5) You are only really going to be adding article-y data types, like blogs,
news, pages, etc.. You don't need, for example, a bunch of different data
types, like "downloads", "recipes", "reviews", "reservations", "products"
all on one site.


Hope that helps.

Kendra Schaefer



On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 9:58 PM, Christine Bussman <olearyck at geek-den.net>wrote:

> I'm starting to set up a website for a nonprofit that I'm involved in, and
> I'm thinking of using either joomla or drupal for the main site.  My hosting
> company has one-click installs of either one.  After a quick look over their
> websites, I don't see any differences between them that would help me
> decide.  I don't even know what questions to ask myself to decide which to
> use.  I'm going to start very small and add as needed, but I don't want to
> change what I use later.
>
> Thanks in advance for any thoughts.
>
> Christine
> _______________________________________________
> Techtalk mailing list
> Techtalk at linuxchix.org
> http://mailman.linuxchix.org/mailman/listinfo/techtalk
>