Which is better Drupal or Joomla?

There are a large number of open source solutions for managing content on the website. Unfortunately, each one doesn’t offer everything, but in my opinion Mambo, Joomla, and Drupal are the top 3 cms which are free to download and use. I choose these three not necessarily because of their ease of use, but rather their functionality. If used properly, these systems can provide a wealth of abilities. Keep in mind they are by far not simple; you get what you work for. If you’re looking for something simple, it’s likely that these are not for you. A simple CMS, in the end, will offer a simple result. Joomla is very similar to Mambo, as it was rebuilt from the Mambo structure back in 2005; many bugs were fixed at the time, and a few security issues were addressed as well.

Advantages of Joomla

– Good modules that works as advertised and have many options, supported by the authors, commercial or not.
– Lots and lots of modules, professional ones too. Modules for most everything.
– Access to commercial themes, which can really lower your design-time. After having tried commercial themes, you will never want one of the open source ones (most are offering free commercial themes too which gives you an idea of quality).
– There is SEF and SEO, alas not as good as Drupals, it works and you don´t need too many modules for something decent
– Translation and language support in modules. Works most of the time.
– No bugs. Really. Most of the most popular modules and Joomla itself, is bug-free. Ok, there might be a few work-arounds needed, but you can mostly work around them, or maybe you just misunderstood something.
– Admin interface is good. You may need to understand the concepts, but once you do, it is very intuitive and you realize it couldn´t really be much different.

When it comes down to it, you’ll be deciding between Joomla and Drupal; Mambo is an earlier development that was abandoned in 2005 and has many bugs. If you choose Mambo, you’ll be spending much time searching message boards and modifying PHP scripts.

In terms of installation, Joomla is clearly the winner; Drupal is significantly harder to install, and requires the user to have certain high-level privileges to the server’s database.

Drupal’s appearance is a far cry from that of Mambo or Joomla; although, looks should take no authority over usability. Drupal is, however, easier to customize; often times a simple change in Mambo or Joomla would lead to other elements not displaying correctly.

As you’re sure to find bugs in all open source CMS, in my experiences, I’ve had better performance overall with Drupal; it is tightly coded, which means fewer bugs and a lot less headaches. I’ve never had the pleasure of wasting an entire day looking for a bug fix on Drupal as I had with both Mambo and Joomla. My website 100rupees.com is developed using drupal. Intially I tried joomla for it, but later on I left it because it is quite difficult to be customized, unlike drupal.

While both Drupal and Joomla can be search engine friendly, I’ve found that Drupal offers SEO without sacrificing security as Joomla has been known to do; in addition, Drupal has a more logical URL structure that we would call ‘search engine friendly.’

In terms of community support, Joomla clearly has a larger following; with this, advantages include overall better support and more add-ons (ie. modules, themes).

One major advantage Drupal has is its category structure known as taxonomy; this is by far Drupal’s strongest feature. With Mambo or Joomla, content is added into a SECTION/CATEGORY/CONTENT structure; this limited method of sorting content has numerous disadvantages when users are navigating your site.

Taxonomy allows you to cross-categorize all content across your site globally, and will classify content automatically in virtually an unlimited amount of ways; as an example of taxonomy, you could set up keywords (known as a vocabulary) to cross- reference pages that contain those keywords to greatly aid in category management and information distribution.

Drupal has many problems mostly due to the change from 4.7 to 5.1. I have used Drupal for the past few years and version 5.1 is a major step forward especially in the organization of the admin.Currently about 70% of user contributed modules have been updated for 5.1. however if you need a model still in 4.7 you are out of luck and must either code it yourself or stay with the old version. Basically Drupal is falling apart. Some models like Ecommerce 5.1 are so buggy they are unusable. Other modules require second modules to work and some of these have not been updated.

In order to make the decision between Joomla and Drupal, I suggest first trying both out at opensourcecms.com. However you can try any cms, photogallery, forums on this website. Ultimately, the decision should come down to how you’re going to use the CMS.

For a site that mostly offers static content with very little updating, such as tutorials, static information, and directories, I would certainly suggest Joomla.

If you’re looking to have ‘real-time’ content on a day-to-day basis, such as a blog, news, or review sites, it may be in your best interest to use Drupal; it is slightly more difficult to learn than Mambo or Joomla, but will surely prove more satisfying in the end. The best drupal website which I have seen is theonion.com It is a news websites developed using drupal cms.