Drupal vs Joomla and templates…
Feb 5th, 2007 by Casey
I have recently installed Joomla and Drupal. Both of them are great open source (meaning free) cms systems and really easy to install. Its actually a bit more difficult setting them up once installed from a user standpoint.
From what I have found it seems like Joomla has a more robust designer community allowing you to customize the look of your site fairly easily. While Drupal has cleaner code and an easier to understand back end I think I will be leaning to Joomla for future cms projects based on the great templates that are out there. Its unfortunate that I was unable to find any good Drupal templates, I really liked the backend and ease of the system.
Some of the better designs that I have seen come from rocketthemes, you should check them out just to see what these things are capable of.
I installed Joomla 1.12 and Drupal 5.1 btw. Joomla has version 1.5 in beta and has many new features though I havent checked it out yet. Will do soon once the templates are supported, as of today there is no time line from the main suppliers. Version 1.12 is the current supported version across the board.
**Please let me know your thoughts on these systems**
**Update: I have recently developing a new Joomla project with the theme Weblogic from Joomlashack.**
Hi,
I read your post and I kinda disagree on the content.
For one, my team has completely switched over to Drupal since a few weeks after much time devoted to trying out Joomla, Drupal and several others.
Things that were tested included ease of installation, quality of modules, internationalization (localization to several languages) but also developer support as well as forum support, like overall friendliness and support.
Sorry to say, but Drupal came out the overall winner on all counts.
Drupal installs like a breeze. Jommla was a little headache.
There were too many discrepancies within Joomla modules and localization to several languages did not work out as expected (problems with other Joomla core modules). Joomla is big but the reliability is not there yet. Maybe too big.
Drupal’s quality of modules is quite outstanding. They are for most very well coded and integrate safely. Support from developers has grown exponetially since a few months because Drupal’s core is excellent.
The support found in Drupal’s forums is also very helpful and much friendlier than Joomla’s. For some strange reasons, there is a lot of noise in Joomla’s forums and moderators intervene too often (is it censoring? it all looks like it and very unfortunate).
The theming in Drupal is much easier than Joomla’s. Theming in Drupal is mostly handled by members of the community and as such are offered free. They don’t sell them… and those themes are quite easy to customize to your needs unlike the Joomla ones.
Joomla on the other hand is starting to have amongst the community a reputation of letting (or favoring… ) third party companies handle the complicated theming. But then you have to pay sometimes a lot for something you still need to work on afterwards. Instead of making the theming process much easier for the end customers.
Now, I was also wondering how objective your post was since you are are also using an affiliate link… back to one of Joomla’s third party template vendor. Hummm… http://www.rockettheme.com/aff/affiliate.php?id=654&group=1
I would sincerely recommend leaving out the affiliation links next time you write an article that compares two Open Source products. It may certainly much improve the post’s overall objectivity. What do you think?
Best,
John Paul
Thanks for the great reply. I probably should of mentioned that I have yet to really use either too much in depth and am still using both on a very light basis.
I will remove the affiliate link, that was in poor taste I guess. The reasoning was that I signed up for the affiliate account with this blog just to get the 20% kick back before I purchased the template therefore I needed to have an actual link up to get the discount. You can do this with a lot of products that don’t have discounts but do have affiliate programs, an easy way to get a discount.
Here is a good review of the two systems: Joomla vs. Drupal comparison
Casey,
Many thanks for your kind reply.
And thanks for your extra link to a quite good, honest and very neutral Joomla vs Drupal comparison – http://www.alledia.com/blog/general_cms_issues/joomla_and_drupal_-_which_one_is_right_for_you?/
I think I agree on more than 90% of the remarks there. And would love to emphasize that on our side, Drupal theming is almost no sweat compared to Joomlas. And the very fact that you do not find much commercial offering on the Drupal theming side probably (and it really does for us…) demonstrates in a way that Drupal theming can be mastered quite easily by any intermediate designer. Joomla is still quite another story. If Joomla’s core team could get their act together and be more disciplined with their developer community to deliver a higher level of bug-free RC type releases and deliver internationalization that works as well as giving every designer the freedom and facility of designing their own layout templates in a more classic fashion, then things could switch around in favor of Joomla. But until then… we will keep the safer and more bug-free road with Drupal.
The mere fact that there are more commercial offerings around Joomla does not warrant any level of quality yet. Open Source spirit has been and hopefully will remain commercial free. In that sense, so far Drupal is a leader, like WordPress and a few others in their own specializations. It really seems that Joomla is experimenting a new concept, a dual way… by mixing more openly free Open Source and commercial offerings.
I agree they are not the only ones trying… but by keeping the templating still very complicated… that might not be exactly what most designers are looking for. Hopefully, one of these days, Joomla’s core team will recognize that strategic error.
I understand though that we all need something to eat by the end of the day… Another story to write about… how does everyone survive by volountering so much work?
Best,
John Paul
Yeah I’d have to agree, there is something strange about the Joomla forums. Too much moderation and way too many un-answered, single post threads.
The community seems much more supportive at Drupal.
Well the way I see it, I think firstly both of them are great tools for any web designer.
However I am more pro for Drupal as compared to Joomla. I have outlined most of my findings on my blog Drupal Vs Joomla . However here are some of the main reasons that I chose Drupal, some of which have been mentioned out above like
1) Powerful theme features
2) Outstanding quality of support
3) Outstanding Code
other than that.
1) SEO Friendly
2) Multi-site features
3) Taxonomy (unlimited categorization)
The first one SEO friendly is one of the features that i look as very important to any website designer who wants some good traffic. Hence Drupal!.
So far it has been good only that the configuring the website can be tricky for a newbie because of terminology.
Btw thanks to Admin for that affiliate and discount idea. It worked for me at some other place, saved 15%, and will be keeping my eyes open from now on.
Good luck
Joomla is a full-featured open source cms, but Drupal is a bit more.
Drupal is more flexible and powerfull, especially Drupal’s theming system (theme is Drupal term for template).
Maybe there are more community contributed themes (templates) for Joomla, but if you wish to make your own (unique) theme, than the Drupal is my choice.
Drupal is Webware 100 Award Winner in “Publishing” category (www.webware.com/8301-13546_109-9729862-29.html)
We are a Drupal shop, but did set up Drupal, Joomla & WordPress to evaluate on the clients concerns for (1) multilingual capabilities; (2) end-user usability; and (3) developer usability.
A client of ours was looking for a replacement for the CMS that we had set up for them 4 years ago – http://back-end.org and brought us on to compare some of the options. One of the advantages of our old CMS was the flexibility a clean separation between the code (php) and the presentation (html). Something that I have yet to see from any other CMS.
Check out our CMS comparison.
Hi!
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I red really many SQL resources and want to
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Thanks,
Werutz