Seemingly today Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal are considered the three best open-source Content Management Systems (CMS) and with that being said, I will keep my thoughts on that track. I’ve had experience using each, and know the general ins and outs of using, developing, configuring, administering and deploying the systems. I’ve done a bit of reading about what others have encountered between the systems and what I have laid out below is a mish-mash of my own experiences and the experiences of others.
Wordpress was built as a dedicated blogging application. In the past year or so it has only really begun to emmerge as a CMS build on top of the architecture originally developed for blogging. While Wordpress is considered the absolute best applicaton for blogging (I heartily agree), it is considered the underdog in the world of open-source CMS’s. Drupal and Joomla, on the other hand, were designed under the framework of a CMS from the get-go. Both Drupal and Joomla have huge user communities of thousands of developers around the world that are constantly tweaking existing add-on modules and developing new ones.
It is important to consider that each system has its inherent strengths and weaknesses but ultimately they all perform the same general tasks. The key is to define your needs and pick the CMS that best will help you accomplish your goal. Lets take a look at the systems:
Wordpress By far the quickest setup and most user-friendly CMS out there. The problem again is that Wordpress just is not a native CMS. If you are looking to get some info out on the web ASAP, use Wordpress. Wordpress has the greatest number of themes available for use by far and allow you to quickly “customize” the look of your webpage by downloading and installing one of these themes. Wordpress, again by it’s very nature, is the clear frontrunner in its blogging capabilities, supporting categorization, commenting, pinging services, multiple blogger profiles, trackbacks and more. The problem with Wordpress is that it is a system that was built to work out of the box without any modifications. It is not developer-friendly and is as such not a flexible system for expansion and growth. In fact, many users complain that once a core system has been built and launched, adding new features or plug-ins to the site often times causes the whole thing to break and/or disappear. For your investment in a CMS, I’d recommend staying away from Wordpress and choosing it only as a driver for the means of a dedicated blogging website.
Joomla Joomla is what I like to call the “middle ground” in the CMS world. Joomla users love the user interface because of its ease of use but it is still not quite as intuitive as the user interface that is built into Wordpress. The sections and categorization systems are a little bit counter-intuitive from the beginning but once you understand the basic organization, its smooth sailing all the way. From the development standpoint, Joomla is much better than Wordpress but is not quite as versitile as Drupal. Joomla’s user community is huge and that is an advantage when creating full-on websites, allowing you to pull from a larget talent pool for add-on modules and the like. There is a bit of a draw on the development side, however, in that Joomla’s core code isn’t quite as flexible and able to be modified with the ease that you can with Drupal. As such, this presents some limitations within the framework of the system.
Drupal Drupal is the clear front-runner in the CMS world for developers. Developers love Drupal. Many feel that being given a fresh Drupal is like being handed a mound of clay and being asked to create. Drupal provides the flexibility that Wordpress and Joomla do not from the standpoint of tweaking the underlying core code to achieve the results that you desire. The draw to Drupal is that just because it is developer-friendly, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is user-friendly. The system itself isn’t overly complex or unfriendly and it can be easily learned but from the get-go, the system is admittedly not as intuitive to non-developers as a system such as Wordpress. Drupal, like Joomla, has a gigantic user and developer community, making life grand as you need to expand your site to grow with your needs. Drupal can be used to create anything from a simple informational site to a complex site that can outperform many other existing sites out on the web.
Conclusion If you’re looking for a true CMS, stay away from Wordpress - the risks highly outweigh the benefits of your investment. Wordpress is your go-to blogging tool - use it for that - it is amazing! Between Joomla and Drupal, I tend to highly lean towards the use of Drupal. Drupal provides the greatest amount of flexibility, functionality and the ease-of-use is just as simple as Joomla after about a 5-minute lesson from your friendly and knowledgable web developer.
Some articles to check out:
- Drupal, WordPress, or Joomla? (A Trick Question) from Aaron Winborn (August 14th, 2008).
- Wordpress vs Joomla vs Drupal from Good Web Practices (March 9th, 2009).
- Drupal VS Joomla VS Wordpress - Which Is The Best CMS? from Slayerment (December 17th, 2007).
