A Comparison of Joomla vs. Drupal
The world of CMS (Content Management System) is very competitive and the top two contenders are famous Joomla and powerful Drupal. Of course we cannot ignore WordPress, but for now, we will let the two giants fight and see who wins.
Let’s start with a brief introduction of both.
Joomla
Say hello to the award winning CMS that lets you develop websites and many online applications. It has many useful features like user friendliness and extensibility. With a number of powerful features, Joomla is the most famous website development software that you can find. Plus it is open source so it is freely available.
Drupal
And on this side we have Drupal, the CMS that allows administrators to manage and display content, and change its appearance along with handling of routine tasks. Drupal is also an open source framework, which makes it a strong competitor for Joomla. Many modules and themes are available for free as well, thus making it a good choice for CMS.
And now, let the battles begin…
Content management
Drupal: It is very sophisticated and permits limitless grouping levels along with categorizations and tagging. You can generate many different types of content, each having different attributes.
Joomla: It is quite weak. There are just three stages for content management: Section, Category, and Content. There is no cross categorization. For flexibility, you have to use content construction kit.
WYSIWYG
Drupal: This might be the biggest complaint regarding Drupal. It does not have a default editor.
Joomla: It has TinyMCE by default.
Templates and Themes
Drupal: It has a few commercial developers. Plus its ‘off the shelf’ options are not very strong. Most of the designs are made to order.
Joomla: The biggest positive factor of Joomla might be the extensive selection it has of commercial and free designs.
Community Features
Drupal: It offers the capacity to increase user profiles effortlessly, plus the Organic Groups allow strong community building.
Joomla: By default there are no such features, but there are powerful extensions. While Community Builder is a free application, Jomsocial is commercial.
User permissions
Drupal: This is a big strength of Drupal as you can make limitless user levels and can customize them with fine details.
Joomla: This is where you wouldn’t like Joomla. It has only three user levels. You will get Public, Registered, and Special user levels. If you want more, you need to install a bulky extension.
Shopping cart
Drupal: The only genuine option is Ubercart. It is a fully featured and powerful platform for ecommerce, but it might be overwhelming for smaller stores.
Joomla: It has one chief shopping cart, that is, Virtuemart. But there are a number of bugs, and it is not user friendly either.
SEO
Drupal: The different kind of URLs can be easily accommodated and improved with the help of an addon: Pathauto. Typically, the code is well-optimized and lightweight.
Joomla: It is reasonable but does not have the ability to actually control metadata or URLs. There are many SEO extensions that you would require if you want to optimize a Joomla site.
Conclusion
For now, it seems that Drupal takes the cake. But there are lots of comparisons that can be done, and the right CMS would depend upon your needs. Take a look over these main differences and see which measures up best for your project.
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Author bio:
Emily Cartman is a serial blogger and a web enthusiast who loves design and technology. She’s into writing because she loves it. She also loves to play on Wii and PSP. Emily works for website builder Wix.com, a free online platform for the easy creation of customized Flash websites.
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5 Responses to “A Comparison of Joomla vs. Drupal”
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according to me both cms have something different and both are good in their way.
I would like to vote for a Drupal….you get a powerful and flexible content management system with many useful features and you can easily extend it with additional modules. You should take a look at the list of modules on drupal.org
according to me both cms have something different and both are
goooooooooooood
admin
I vote for Joomla all the way
I like Joomla, the Drupal is much more complicated and not offer to many option like Joomla!