Celebrity death match! Drupal vs. Wordpress vs. Joomla (and any others)

[draggar]

Sunday! Sunday! SUNDAY!!

It's celebrity death match! In this corner we have Drupal! In this corner we have Wordpress! and in this corner we have Joomla (OK, so it's a hexagon).

Let it all out, the good, the bad, and the really ugly!

I've installed Joomla once and never used Drupal so I can only comment on WP.

WP - easy to use and set up. Newer versions have easy "widget" and template installations but unless you have a very good template it can look rather juvenile and very "bloggish" (well, it is a blog, right?). SEO seems good, Google picks it up quickly (I've seen as little as 30 minutes). UI can be a little slow and it is a prime target for more spam than a Monty Python sketch!

Come on everyone! This is a no-holds barred (other than forum rules) cage match to the death (well, not really).

[Poker]

cms death match

just started using WP and gonna try some Joomla after finish some reading...wp nice but Joomla looks good as well

[draggar]

"Out of the box" Joomla looks a lot nicer but I hear it requires more elbow grease to work with it (adding templates, etc..).

[BELLC1]

It is difficult finding automated, name-related content for many domains regardless of platform, particularly if we need multiple feeds to fill in the structure of our homepages.

We all want automatically managed content and that is really time-consuming for more than a handful of domains. Thus, we rely on parking and hope we pick the right words our visitors are looking for.

Personally, choosing between Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal....hmmm, I like Frontpage.

[accomatic]

Well... nice topic that is going to turn into flame wars.

I used all three, and also DLE, PHP-Nuke, SLAED, 2z, etc.

Each CMS has its own niche it fits best. Wordpress is excellent for blogs; Joomla is cool for non-programmers; Drupal is nice for sophisticated developers. Each one can be (mis)used almost everywhere. All require some tweaking and toying before using in production environment.

Myself, I prefer Drupal. It has the most clean and well-structured codebase, is very flexible, supports different theming engines, has tons of modules and great community.

However, I would not recommend Drupal for a really high traffic dynamic website. Actually, no one of the mentioned CMSs can handle high load well. By "high traffic" I mean 30+ logged in users actively working with website at the same time, when website is hosted on a standard shared host. Anonymous (non-logged in) users are not a problem most of the time.

Joomla is not as flexible as Drupal, especially when it comes to custom content management, though its capabilities are enough in most situations. The newer branch of Joomla, released earlier this year, still lacks many useful modules which are being ported slowly, so it's better to go with the older branch if your needs are beyond basic install.

Wordpress is... well, everybody knows it. The latest 2.5.x branch is cool. Haven't had time to explore all the changes in it yet. This is the best blogging platform available for free now.

(shameless ad) If you would ever need an advice on Drupal/Wordpress performance and scalability, or need someone to build a site, just drop me a PM. (/shameless ad)

Good luck! Wish your sites bring you profit no matter what CMS you choose.

[draggar]

Well... nice topic that is going to turn into flame wars.

I'm enacting a no flame war clause in this thread. Stick to the topic and facts.

CMS death match, all varieties of CMS are welcome.

[Tia Wood]

Each has a purpose:

WordPress: Blogging
Joomla: CMS Management. Easy to use.
Drupal: CMS Management. Harder to use. Great for developers.

I use Joomla. Screwed around with Drupal once and didn't feel like learning another CMS. Basically, I haven't came across anything that I couldn't implement into Joomla. That may change. But for now: Joomla!

Joomla is better than Wordpress when using social related sites. Wordpress is better when the site isn't focused on users. Joomla is more extensive and you can script it, using it's backend. However, Wordpress is more lightweight and for sole content management, it's plenty good enough.

So, if you need total development control: use Drupal or Joomla
If your site isn't centered around membership: Use Wordpress
If you don't care: pick one.

[whitebark]

And in this corner - Zikula (formerally postnuke). Watch out for this CMS in the months ahead. I've been running postnuke/zikula websites since 2003 and I've never been hacked, only spammed once and only have to update it once a year or so - quite unlike some other CMS packages which are constantly in a state of needing upgrades. What a pain in the arse that can be if you heavily mod the core.

Zikula is a development platform that will give you great results - but you have to get your hands dirty.

I like wordpress and I'm using it more now than ever before. Mostly for simple websites. It doesn't have the power zikula does for larger projects imo. And if I hack away at the core the constant updates are a real pain. But for new users or simple quick setups, wordpress is better.

So after ten rounds I declare a draw.

[copper]

WordPress - Easy to work with, need to start asap, need to repeat again and quick.
Joomla - Stiff learning curve, full blown site, load much slower than WordPress.

For domainers with hundreds/thousands domains who need to
create sites quickly one after another, go with WordPress.

[fab]

As I mentioned a few times previously, I would not put Joomla & Drupal in the same category as WordPress. WordPress is built for Blogging specifically, not as a full blown CMS with a very broad set of extensions and usage capabilities.

1. For content only, and simplicity, go with WordPress, unless you are extremely comfortable with the others.
2. Pick Joomla or Drupal, and stick with them. They have learning curves. Don't like the term steep.
The more you work with them, the more comfortable you'll feel.
3. I personally work with WordPress and Joomla.
4. Joomla has a massive set of extensions, and templates.
5. One problem I have is going overboard. Don't overkill, i.e., plan on too much, this is very easy with Joomla due to the massive set of extensions. Blogging, articles, rss feeds, static pages, e-commerce, forums, multi-templates, multi-lingual, etc.; background - stats, etc.

Here is a Joomla-Drupal comparison link,
http://cmsreport.com/node/543
which I posted here:
http://www.dnforum.com/f472/easiest-...ad-227954.html
You should look here as well:
http://www.dnforum.com/f123/content-...ad-282113.html
I've heard that the Joomla and Drupal teams work together.

Also, I would suggest getting a paid template. Look at one of the template providers, for a solution your interested in.

Here's another link:
http://drupal.org/node/101507

[myst woman]

ControlNuke will play the champ.

Joomla rocks all these. and wp can be very insecure and limited within its scope.

Drupal actually is sleep medication for me.

[onlinetv]

I use php-nuke, post-nuke, custom programs, along with Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress.

They all have some purpose although the nukes are a bit old and drained I left them behind over a year ago for the Joomla Drupal world. Wordpress is bland and I have only seen a couple good implementations doing more than a blog. I only have my fathers blog on it now.

Joomla is pretty nice with the granular Meta tags and page control. I hate WSIWYG editors and you must use them on this beast or it blows out the pages.

Drupal's pages are not as granular with the title. description and tags as Joomla but you have finer control over where it appears and if it appears.

Drupal has a great support community as post nuke does also.

I like Drupal better but am pushing more with Joomla to find the finer points within it. I just put up 5 sites with Joomla to test and install modules and themes.

There are so many things with each of these it still makes a difference only when you know what you want to do with it. I would be back to php-nuke if I wanted a kids gamer site but for a financial and investment guide I am using Joomla and music sites with Drupal (better video integration). Everything is relative. I use Zen-Cart as a CMS too for stores.

I still have not found a lot of themes or modules for Joomla can someone point me in the right direction?

[accomatic]

joomla24.com joomlart.com rockettheme.com cmslounge.com siteground.com compassdesigns.net joomlashack.com joomla-templates.com joomlashine.com joomlatemplates.com joomlatemplatestyle.com joomladesigns.co.uk gavick.com ty2u.com joomlajunkie.com bestofjoomla.com yootheme.com etc.

Joomla is fine, however the supplied free modules are not (or it was me unlucky -- had to spend hours researching forums for bugfixes). It seems to me that free modules, for the most part, are just teasers for commercial versions or require paid consultancy services available from developers; some important functionality is unavailable for free (for example search engine friendly URLs module is sold by one of the core developers; the free version produces bad style URLs). IMHO the only exceptions are great fireboard and community builder modules. I realize that developers want to earn money, I just dislike the way they do it. Other opensource projects somehow provide most of the functionality for free and earn providing value-added services.

Here is a Joomla-Drupal comparison link,
http://cmsreport.com/node/543

Here's another link:
http://drupal.org/node/101507

Nice points fab, but I must note that these links are rather outdated, and many things changed since these comparisons were made. Joomla released 1.5.x, Drupal released 5.x and now 6.x versions. Module developers were working hard during these 1-2 years too.

Wordpress has evolved too, the latest 2.5.x branch is a real competitor to both Joomla and Drupal.

I do really like the competitive nature of opensource projects.

Actually, I believe that almost everything can be done using any platform, and the real question is the developer competency and/or availability of quality third-party development services.

[whitebark]

Actually, I believe that almost everything can be done using any platform, and the real question is the developer competency and/or availability of quality third-party development services.

Couldn't be said better. And if you choose one of these cms packages imo, it's always good to become an active member of the community. It makes finding help, developers, pieces of code etc just that much easier.

[Poker]

fab, thanks for the Joomla-Drupal comparison link.

[accomatic]

fab, thanks for the Joomla-Drupal comparison link.

This comparison was posted on Dec 5, 2006. A lot has changed since then. Unfortunately I don't know of any recent similar unbiased report.

[sashas]

Interesting.

Never used Joomla (still learning Php ), Wordpress is nice for content related sites...very easy to install and tons of great free templates and plugins available.


A question, but wouldn't you require a completely custom built CMS for larger sites (I'm thinking sites with several 100,000 members)?

[elfsites]

WP has more free templates and is faster to setup is the main reason it's popular I think.

[PeterMan]

All I can say is this...

WordPress hands down...

[TravisW]

I use Wordpress and Joomla on a daily basis. I love Wordpress for the ease of setup and for how quickly I can get a site up and running. On the other hand, I like Joomla for how I can make it do about anything I need it to do by adding a few plugins. I guess it really depends on what you need your site to do.

I've only tried Drupal once and found out that I didn't have any room in my brain to learn anything new and so I gave up and installed Joomla.