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[joomla] Drupal first impression

Gary Mort garyamort at gmail.com
Tue Jun 22 12:15:25 EDT 2010


Ok, so I have to use Drupal on a project[it just makes sense with 6 domains
already in Drupal to use Drupal and not Joomla for another 3].

On the impressive side, Drupal makes multi-site EASY. Out of the box it
assumes you might want to run multiple domains and has a directory structure
setup to accomodate this. Everything gets installed to the /sites/all
directory, and if you want something installed for one host only, you create
a new directory, sites/mydomain.com and put it in there.

With the addition of the Domains module, you can classify virtual anything
form content to products in the online store as to which domain they should
be displayed on[or all domains!].

With a simple configuration change, you can set your cookies to a root
domain, so one.mydomain.com and two.mydomain.com will both save and access
cookies for .mydomain.com [so within a single set of subdomains, you have
single sign on].

And with another simple config change you can specify specific mysql tables
as being shared between domains, or unique to one domain.

All in all, an impressive set of features.

Now the downside: this is not Joomla.  Installation of modules and themes
includes a number of manual steps.  A lot of things are 80-90% done but you
need to do a few final tweaks.

In order of ease of use by the end user, I'd say you have WordPress -->
Joomla --> Drupal

In order of ease of customization by someone without a lot of technical
knowhow, Wordpress --> Joomla --> Drupal

In order of complex bits of functionality[online store, special modules,
etc] I'd say it's Joomla --> Drupal -- > Wordpress

In order of extremely complex customizations available, it is Drupal -->
Joomla --> Wordpress

In order of having sane database layouts and extensibility, it is clearly
Drupal --> Joomla --> Wordpress

In short, each CMS has different types of people it can appeal to, and
different circumstances where it really really shines.


I think that from a 3rd party point of view, there is a lot that could be
swiped from Drupal and Wordpress and brought to Joomla.  For example, the
whole content editing process, I'd say a nice management template, outside
the normal admin structure, and a couple of components to ease asset
management, could be created for Joomla that mimics the way Wordpress looks
and feels to make life easier for the end user.  And at the other end of the
extreme, some of the nice complex functions Drupal has could be redone to
make them work for Joomla, assuming one is willing to bypass using some core
functions[ie install a new search, installation, and template manager and
disable the core ones to enable the multi-site functionality that comes with
Drupal].
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