NYCPHP Meetup

[Mitch Pirtle]

On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 1:53 PM, Gary Mort <garyamort at gmail.com> wrote:
> While this is a bit of sour grapes, and I am overall thrilled to see a high
> profile website[the White House] switiching to an Open Source CMS[Drupal],
> it does make me think a bit about just what is it with about Drupal that
> makes it penetrate a bit further at the government level.
>
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/26/whitehouse_website_goes_open_source/
>
> By the same token, the local county spent the past 6 months building out
> their tourism associated website.  In the end, the functionality leaves me
> underwhelmed:
> http://www.ulstercountyalive.com/
>
> For example, the lodging directory is fairly basic functionality - and no
> rss feeds.
>
> I have found Drupal to have a stronger community of tech geeks using it, but
> a weaker community of functional users.  A lot of components for Drupal tend
> to be "proof of concept' type's, where I can see how they could be extended
> to something functional, but their not quite there.
>
> Joomla, by contrast, has a lot of apps which from a technical perspective
> are exactly the same but by changing labels and gearing, they are fully
> functional drop in apps to do something.
>
> So why is Drupal making inroads while Joomla seems to be lagging?  Any
> thoughts?

A note of research: Is there an advisory board for open source
technologies to the government, and if so who is participating there?
This is pretty much the case behind the White House website, AFAICT.

That said, this is a good time to compare the state of Joomla versus
the state of Drupal.

First off, I think Dries' blog post about the White House website
using Drupal is an absolute case study in how to perfectly word a
major success.  His tone, writing style, and message are all dead on
the money. Perfectly written.

Drupal is very aggressively growing their community as an area of
focus, and as such is generating tremendous buzz which in turn feeds
their efforts. As well, their approach with the 3PD market is totally
opposite what Joomla inherited from Mambo (albeit some major changes
these past years). Combine the two and comparatively there's not a
whole lot of outreach from the Joomla project, nor aggressive
encouragement or enabling of the community for advocacy.

Lastly, having a well-funded, well-connected business like Acquia is
high risk, high reward for Drupal, as they can focus all of their
efforts through one organization, making it easier to target events
and get the most out of their available resources. Joomla's commercial
developer community is distributed over many small, non-funded
businesses that simply don't have the media or executive clout; and
lack incentive to band together to be one larger resource to the
project (and community).

In Joomla's defense, the project is a clear market leader and probably
does not see all that outreach work as priority; and it's clear from
the outside perspective that they are actively looking for more
volunteers to help with the project itself, and need those resources
for other things than outreach and PR. Different problems, I'd say.

* Drupal - focus is gaining market share, has tons of developers
* Joomla - owns the market, focus is looking for more developers
(needs reorganization)

That also means Joomla will not be a "hot topic" while it is in a
somewhat low-key phase, working on all these relatively internal
issues.

One totally random point that is key: Drupal comes out of the box with
loads of social features, and Joomla has NONE by default. With
everyone scrambling to be the next big social media hype magnet, first
impressions will always lead them to the platform that has all the hip
and trendy features out of the box, and that ain't Joomla.

That said, my personal take is that Joomla needs to provide some of
these features at a bare minimum, and I do believe some of them are
targeted for 1.6 at least. Chances are, as the base Joomla
distribution closes that social feature gap with Drupal, this
perception will change.

-- Mitch