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"Andrea, you promised to bore us with rants about Joomla and Drupal, but that was over a month ago. What gives?"
The sad truth is that I am so unenthusiastic about Joomla that I couldn't even muster up the energy to rant about it.
It wasn't always like this. When I first used Joomla last summer, I thought it was the bee's knees. Compared to WordPress, Joomla is much better for large sites and has lots of exciting third-party extensions. It's easy to make an attractive and professional-looking site, since there are heaps of free templates (themes) available, and if you want to take your graphic design to the next level you can buy great templates for a reasonable price. Admittedly Joomla has a steeper learning curve than WordPress does, but I was able to throw together a really slick-looking Joomla site in record time.
My problem with Joomla is that it's deeply clunky. It's the offshoot of a venerable open-source CMS called Mambo, and I think it's badly weighed down by its legacy interface. When I started using Joomla mid-2008, they'd recently made the leap from version 1.0.x to version 1.5, but it doesn't feel particularly Web 2.0. Come to think of it, it feels very Web 1.5 -- it has a certain amount of AJAX window-dressing, but the back end is bogged down by a lot of slow and inflexible CGI-style forms. (If you don't know what I mean by AJAX, some popular AJAX-style sites are Twitter, Facebook, and iGoogle, in which the page updates dynamically without having to reload.)
Another drawback of Joomla is that many of the extensions cost money. Joomla is open source, but a lot of the cool third-party tools are in the $10-$20 range (or more, if it's really fancy). You could argue that this creates an incentive for developers to produce high-quality tools, but I find it creates a certain disharmony between Joomla extensions and Joomla core. WordPress has a bit of this problem, but not to nearly the same extent.
It's hard to describe what I don't like about Joomla without launching into a discourse about Drupal. Before I used Drupal I thought Joomla was pretty cool, but now it feels like a real drag to use. Joomla's initial learning curve is not as steep as Drupal's, but now that I'm up and running with both tools I find that Joomla is always tripping me up. I'm sure that seasoned Joomla users have no problem with it, but I find it counter-intuitive.
Each CMS has its own basic unit of content: Joomla has articles and Drupal has nodes. The term "article" is way too specific and the term "node" is way too vague, but they're basically the same thing. A node or article could be any of the following:
- The unique contents of a page (e.g. the "About Us" spiel)
- An article or press release
- A single image in a gallery or slideshow
- An event on a calendar
- A blog entry
(Note that a single page might contain multiple articles/nodes.)
Long story short, Drupal nodes are much more flexible than Joomla articles. In Joomla core you can only classify articles into categories and sections, whereas Drupal core has many more ways to work with nodes, including the ability to have different node types. This is ludicrously useful, particularly if your clients want to be able to update the site themselves. The main contributor to the Joomla site I built is always getting confused about how to add a new item to the site and how to make it appear in the right place. He knows how to do only a few things to the site, and without my intervention the front page is getting overloaded. If I'd built the site in Drupal, I could have automated the workflow much better and made the site easier for him to maintain.
Furthermore, user permissions are much more configurable in Drupal than in Joomla. Joomla comes with seven preset roles, four for the front end and three for the back (don't get me started on the difference, because that's another clunky aspect of Joomla which Drupal lacks). There are authors, editors, publishers, etc. The problem is that you can't fine tune the permissions very well. For example, I built a site in Joomla for my sister's mural painting business in Chicago, and we'd like to give her employee Paula the ability to create blog entries and publish them right away (without approval). To do that Paula needs "publisher" permission, but the publisher role also allows Paula to edit any page on the entire site, which is a dangerous permission to give out. Drupal, on the other hand, lets you create custom-tailored user roles, so I could create a "blogger" role which would allow Paula to create blog entries and publish them right away, but she would not be able to edit any other text on the website.
There is almost certainly a third-party extension for Joomla that would duplicate the Drupal behavior, but (A) it would possibly cost money and (B) every additional module is a potential security and stability risk.
Anyway, I should wrap this up before it turns entirely into a Drupal pitch. Joomla also lags behind Drupal and WordPress in search engine optimization (SEO). By default, Joomla URLs are big nasty PHP strings like http://sigmufi.com/index.php?option=com
Pros:
Cons:
At this point, I think the biggest advantage of Joomla over Drupal is the availability of gorgeous templates for a reasonable price. That was the main reason I chose it for my sister's website, and I'm not convinced I wouldn't make the same decision even now. Other than that, I prefer Drupal in nearly every way.
Guess which CMS I'm posting about next!
The sad truth is that I am so unenthusiastic about Joomla that I couldn't even muster up the energy to rant about it.
It wasn't always like this. When I first used Joomla last summer, I thought it was the bee's knees. Compared to WordPress, Joomla is much better for large sites and has lots of exciting third-party extensions. It's easy to make an attractive and professional-looking site, since there are heaps of free templates (themes) available, and if you want to take your graphic design to the next level you can buy great templates for a reasonable price. Admittedly Joomla has a steeper learning curve than WordPress does, but I was able to throw together a really slick-looking Joomla site in record time.
My problem with Joomla is that it's deeply clunky. It's the offshoot of a venerable open-source CMS called Mambo, and I think it's badly weighed down by its legacy interface. When I started using Joomla mid-2008, they'd recently made the leap from version 1.0.x to version 1.5, but it doesn't feel particularly Web 2.0. Come to think of it, it feels very Web 1.5 -- it has a certain amount of AJAX window-dressing, but the back end is bogged down by a lot of slow and inflexible CGI-style forms. (If you don't know what I mean by AJAX, some popular AJAX-style sites are Twitter, Facebook, and iGoogle, in which the page updates dynamically without having to reload.)
Another drawback of Joomla is that many of the extensions cost money. Joomla is open source, but a lot of the cool third-party tools are in the $10-$20 range (or more, if it's really fancy). You could argue that this creates an incentive for developers to produce high-quality tools, but I find it creates a certain disharmony between Joomla extensions and Joomla core. WordPress has a bit of this problem, but not to nearly the same extent.
It's hard to describe what I don't like about Joomla without launching into a discourse about Drupal. Before I used Drupal I thought Joomla was pretty cool, but now it feels like a real drag to use. Joomla's initial learning curve is not as steep as Drupal's, but now that I'm up and running with both tools I find that Joomla is always tripping me up. I'm sure that seasoned Joomla users have no problem with it, but I find it counter-intuitive.
Each CMS has its own basic unit of content: Joomla has articles and Drupal has nodes. The term "article" is way too specific and the term "node" is way too vague, but they're basically the same thing. A node or article could be any of the following:
- The unique contents of a page (e.g. the "About Us" spiel)
- An article or press release
- A single image in a gallery or slideshow
- An event on a calendar
- A blog entry
(Note that a single page might contain multiple articles/nodes.)
Long story short, Drupal nodes are much more flexible than Joomla articles. In Joomla core you can only classify articles into categories and sections, whereas Drupal core has many more ways to work with nodes, including the ability to have different node types. This is ludicrously useful, particularly if your clients want to be able to update the site themselves. The main contributor to the Joomla site I built is always getting confused about how to add a new item to the site and how to make it appear in the right place. He knows how to do only a few things to the site, and without my intervention the front page is getting overloaded. If I'd built the site in Drupal, I could have automated the workflow much better and made the site easier for him to maintain.
Furthermore, user permissions are much more configurable in Drupal than in Joomla. Joomla comes with seven preset roles, four for the front end and three for the back (don't get me started on the difference, because that's another clunky aspect of Joomla which Drupal lacks). There are authors, editors, publishers, etc. The problem is that you can't fine tune the permissions very well. For example, I built a site in Joomla for my sister's mural painting business in Chicago, and we'd like to give her employee Paula the ability to create blog entries and publish them right away (without approval). To do that Paula needs "publisher" permission, but the publisher role also allows Paula to edit any page on the entire site, which is a dangerous permission to give out. Drupal, on the other hand, lets you create custom-tailored user roles, so I could create a "blogger" role which would allow Paula to create blog entries and publish them right away, but she would not be able to edit any other text on the website.
There is almost certainly a third-party extension for Joomla that would duplicate the Drupal behavior, but (A) it would possibly cost money and (B) every additional module is a potential security and stability risk.
Anyway, I should wrap this up before it turns entirely into a Drupal pitch. Joomla also lags behind Drupal and WordPress in search engine optimization (SEO). By default, Joomla URLs are big nasty PHP strings like http://sigmufi.com/index.php?option=com
Joomla Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Better than WordPress for large, complicated websites
- Beautiful themes are available, especially through reasonably-priced template clubs like RocketTheme and JoomlaJunkie.
- The moderate initial learning curve makes it easy to make a professional-looking site very quickly.
- Upgrades, though not automatic, have mostly been smooth.
Cons:
- Many of the good extensions cost money.
- Comparatively rigid administrative interface
- Article workflow is clunky and often inflexible.
- User permissions are not customizable without third-party extensions.
- Search engine optimization can get pretty complicated.
At this point, I think the biggest advantage of Joomla over Drupal is the availability of gorgeous templates for a reasonable price. That was the main reason I chose it for my sister's website, and I'm not convinced I wouldn't make the same decision even now. Other than that, I prefer Drupal in nearly every way.
Guess which CMS I'm posting about next!
