Site builder shootout: Drupal vs. Joomla vs. WordPress
Configuration, in this instance, refers to how easily each CMS put together my fictitious site for Happy Flights. The site, as mentioned earlier in this review, contains a front-page blog, a forum section, a few static pages and an e-commerce section for selling items to unhappy fliers. Articles on the site needed comments and links to social media sites. These are elements the average business site might have, hence their selection.
Each CMS had different strengths and weaknesses for these elements. (I'll review the social media and e-commerce tools a bit later in this article.)
Getting static pages on a Drupal site is easy. Just create a menu option for one of the site's menus, then click Add Content>Basic Page to open the Basic Page control screen. Add your copy, assign the page to the previously created menu item and boom, you're done.
There is a caveat here: The default Drupal setup doesn't include a rich text editor in its content-creation screens, so any formatting you want to do has to be in HTML. You can add a module to get that functionality, so it's certainly not out of reach, but in WordPress and Joomla, the editor is available out of the box, which is a bit more convenient.
There are a plethora of forum and blog modules out there, all of which looked pretty good. Keeping with the out-of-the-box mentality a bit more, I opted to use the built-in forum and blog tools. They were easy to activate and assign to a menu item and while simple, were pretty good for a basic site's needs. If I'd wanted slicker tools, I could have found a lot that met my specific requirements.
Configuring the overall site was very easy. Colors, styles and backgrounds were easy to load using the huge variety of Drupal templates. Ultimately, for fairness' sake, I stuck with the default Drupal template.
Unfortunately, overall site configuration was not so easy in Joomla. In trying to keep with the default template, Beez20, I ran into significant hassles trying to change the banner from the default Joomla image to the Happy Flight banner.
I thought it would be a matter of uploading the banner image, but it turned out that the background image remained in place under my logo. Worse, the solution involved going into the CSS file and making modifications there. Now, I'm no stranger to CSS coding, but there's a rule I have about such things: If the user has to see code, you have a problem. I also had to edit the site's index.php to get rid of the default font size controls that appeared on the top of every page. Again, no big deal, but why isn't this an option in the GUI somewhere?
I had similar luck with getting comments on board. I couldn't find native controls, so I installed the Udja Comments component. That turned out to be a mess, because I had to find and activate the component in the Module Manager and Plug-In Manager, and was ultimately foiled by the requirement to set a position for the comments. There was no "end of every article" position, and this was one place where the normally super-helpful Joomla documentation failed me.
Forums, fortunately, had a much better outcome. I installed the Kunena module, and even though I had to activate the thing in two different places (which really got on my nerves), it worked like a charm.
WordPress' roots as a blogging platform never show more than when configuring site content. Adding and editing pages or blog posts in WordPress is extremely easy to do, since everything is geared around this central premise: make content creation easy.
Theme management was simple. In playing around with free WordPress themes, I found a lot of visual and configuration variety, even though I stayed with the default Twenty Eleven theme for my WordPress site. It took me a little time to figure out how to update site elements like banners, but once established, it was easy to manage.
Because comments are so well ingrained into the blogging mindset, it's no surprise that WordPress comes with a very robust comment management system out of the box. A great freebie for WordPress users is the availability of the Akismet plug-in, which, when activated, taps into Akismet's very powerful comment and trackback spam protection tools. You can get such tools in Drupal and Joomla, too, of course, but having it as a featured out-of-the-box plug-in is very helpful.
Numerous forum plug-ins are available in WordPress, just as in Joomla and Drupal. I opted to use the Tal.ki Embeddable Forums plug-in, because it was widely regarded as fitting the best with many themes and was purported to be integrated well with WordPress user administration. I was not disappointed.
After pulling together various elements of the site, I rapidly got the impression that, while Joomla is really great for managing content, it has some issues with site configuration that don't exist in WordPress and Drupal.
This is a key issue, because Joomla sites will require more coding to get the site to look and feel the way you want -- unless you find the one template out there that matches the vision you want for your website
Drupal had comparatively sedate beginnings. Built by developer Dries Buytaert, the project was open-sourced in 2001 and eventually gained a following of community members that has made Drupal one of the most successful open-source projects to date, with a large ecosystem of add-ons and commercial vendors.
Both Drupal and Joomla are designed to enable users to build websites with template-based management, and both let users plug in add-ons that provide highly dynamic features, such as e-commerce, blogging with comments or mapping. In fact, any Web app feature you might think of should be available with Drupal or Joomla add-ons.
Of the three, Joomla is the newcomer to the CMS scene, first released in 2005 as a fork from the earlier Mambo CMS, which was owned by vendor Miro International. The trouble between the projects began in early 2005, when Miro established a non-profit Mambo Foundation (good) that pretty much kept all control of Mambo in the hands of Miro (not so good). A few months of arguments over the exact nature of Miro's interpretation of free software principles eventually led to the split of what would become Joomla from Mambo and the beginning of a vibrant community-based CMS.
Like Joomla, WordPress also began as a forked project in 2003, gracefully leaving b2, its parent project. WordPress actually has two implementations, which can confuse newcomers to the software. WordPress.com is a free service (not unlike, say, Blogger) that allows anyone to create blogs using pre-built themes and tools. (WordPress.com, along with Blogger, Tumblr and Posterous, will be reviewed in an upcoming roundup.) The other, the open-source WordPress CMS software, is the technology I will examine in this article.
Initially, my inclination was not to include WordPress in this review. Past experience indicated that WordPress, while gaining complexity and flexibility, was still not quite up to speed with Drupal and Joomla. But after re-examining the WordPress ecosystem and tools, I decided to include WordPress in this shootout of the Big Three open source CMS platforms.
So which CMS is right for you?
It's a difficult question to answer. Apples and oranges are both fruit, but it's hard to quantify one feature or another that makes either better. The same holds true for Joomla, Drupal and WordPress. It's easy for site creators to be passionate about one CMS or the other, but from the outside looking in, it really looks like an apple and oranges comparison.
In the past, I've helped build sites in all three CMSes and I have found good and not-so-good features in each one. To get a better idea of what's going on with these platforms, I used each CMS to build a simple business website for Happy Flights -- a company devoted (somewhat maniacally) to making people's flight experiences, well, happy -- complete with a blog, static pages, forums and a marketplace for goods to be sold. Along the way, I discovered some interesting things that challenged my preconceptions and gave me a clearer picture of the pros and cons of each CMS.
