Stephen Downes

Comments

Re: Joomla or Drupal?

, April 27, 2007 8:26 p.m.

Joomla - it is really easy to work with and it has lots of extensions, modules and bots that add to it's functionality. I'm sure Drupal does too, I started out trying Drupal but quickly switched. I just found Joomla much more configurable and have used it on a few sites and got a friend addicted to it too. [Comment] [Permalink] [Previous][Next]

Re: Joomla or Drupal?

Anymouse, April 28, 2007 6:55 a.m.

IMHO People choose Joomla by lack of experience with other cms's. It's just horrible to with compared to others. For example the admin panel m
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Re: Joomla or Drupal?

Anymouse, April 28, 2007 6:55 a.m.

IMHO People choose Joomla by lack of experience with other cms's. It's just horrible to with compared to others. For example the admin panel m
[Comment] [Permalink] [Previous][Next]

Re: Joomla or Drupal?

Anymouse, April 28, 2007 11:41 a.m.

Very easy answer for this:

Joomla = straight forward and very easy way to get a rather static page out with no real smashing functionality that Google will also only poorly be able to read and syndicate, okay if you extend with existing and approved Joomla components but a total mess if you want to code your own components. Components though hardly ever are able to interact with each other (say you want to combine a recipe component with a voting mechanism to have the best cooking recipe elected...) - here you will end up writing yet ANOTHER component that can do the job - but you will have trouble getting the internal Joomla search find content from this component.

Drupal = smooth and fast way to get a personal blog or any type of web page out that Google will be able to index super well and that can be extend to nearly EVERYTHING with existing modules as all will and and can interact with each other, so get the recipe module and combine it with a voting module and you're up and running. Want videos on your site the next day, and combine this with the recipes, hey, just add it up and you're set with no real programming at all, just configuration!

The only problem with Drupal: it might take some time until you will find exactly what you want from the vast selection of available modules (bare in mind, you can in many circumstances COMBINE two or even more modules to do something or else!).

Joomla might be MUCH easier at first to understand but it has its very big limits.

Also, I found out that especially on shared hosting (so the typical GoDaddy stuff) you will suffer with Joomla as it tends to be slower in page generation then the current Drupal 5.x [Comment] [Permalink] [Previous][Next]

Re: Joomla or Drupal?

Anymouse, April 29, 2007 1:11 p.m.

You've inspired me to finally give drupal an extended try-out after a year or more of really enjoying joomla. If you're right about drupal then I can't wait to try out drupal! [Comment] [Permalink] [Previous][Next]

Re: Joomla or Drupal?

Anymouse, July 26, 2007 9:17 p.m.

Drupal is slow and doesn't have the extensions joomla has. I was looking for weeks at drupal before I found joomla and the decision was easy after trying out both. [Comment] [Permalink] [Previous][Next]

Re: Joomla or Drupal?

Anymouse, March 19, 2009 10:52 a.m.

I've tried both, and my opinion is that if you know how to program, you can do pretty much anything you want in either. I'm an beginner / intermediate programmer, and while I can modify code and style sheets easily in both, but I doubt I'd be able to write my own module without having to spend 2-3 days learning how to do it.

The one thing that I have noticed though is that while there are more free plugins for Drupal, the ones for Joomla in general look a lot nicer. While they're not free, they're not expensive either (<$20 for the most part). If you're a small business owner like me who wants to be able to offer your customers (in whatever business) the ability to log in to a customized page where they can view their account balance, see custom media, or whatever, I think that Joomla has a slight advantage. The bottomline is it just looks nicer - a lot of big companies even use modified versions of it for their flashy sites. The video modules and slideshow modules (some of them at least) especially really look sharp.

The bottomline in my opinion is that Joomla looks more professional and gives a novice programmer the ability to create a flashy looking website in just a few days. Once you've worked with it a bit, you could make a site in a couple hours. My experience with Drupal, on the other hand, is that you really need to know what you're doing in order to take advantage of the extra abilities (if they really do exist as this other guy was saying above). My old Drupal site had serious issues with some of my plugins after I modified the CSS to make it look a bit nicer and we ended up spending a couple days trying to get it to work right. In the end, the site looked like crap, but it did work. I know that most programmers don't like to recognize the fact that looks do matter a lot, but form and function do both need to be there, and there's always going to be a trade off between the two. Unless you're doing something nuts, for that reason, I'd say go with Joomla.

Keep in mind I'm something of a novice so some of these other people with very strong opinions may have these opinions because they ran into issues which I didn't with Joomla. I may have just been very lucky so far. [Comment] [Permalink] [Previous][Next]