Ask HN: Drupal or Joomla?

by digamber_kamat on 7/7/2009, 3:00 PM with 6 comments

I have won a contract to build a site. Given enough freedom I would have chosen to implement it in RoR. Because the features that will be required in there are best built with RoR.

But the client wants to me to use either Drupal or Joomla. I have worked with Joomla and I know whatever he is asking for is doable with Joomla. But with significant amount of Pain.

I hear that Drupal is framework rather than a CMS. Since people call it a framework I felt that it might be easier to implement my project in Drupal rather than Joomla.

Can a wise man quickly tell me the difference between Joomla and Drupal?

  • by bgnm2000 on 7/7/2009, 3:13 PM

    Drupal is about 1000x more extendable than joomla.

    I used to solely develop sites in joomla, moved to drupal, and will be moving to RoR.

    The freedom drupal allows is like night and day over joomla.

  • by troels on 7/7/2009, 4:47 PM

    Both systems have gone through a transition from an amateur cms/portal system, which has matured over time. Drupal has come a lot further in this process that Joomla has, which means that today it's closer to be a general purpose framework. It still holds some of its heritage, so you'll probably find it somewhere in between Joomla and RoR. That's not a bad thing, if what you're building is some kind of cms.

    Compared to other general purpose frameworks, Drupal has a lot of stuff out-of-the-box, and it's quite easy to get in to. The community has been gaining a lot of followers recently and in some areas it is becoming the cms of choice for larger businesses. It's especially popular in the news paper world.

    Judging from my observations, I would say that Drupal is a much more mature system that Joomla is (although I must admit I have limited experience with Joomla). I think they are about equal in how easy they are to learn. Both of them are fairly low-tech, procedural systems. I would pick Drupal of the two.

  • by aasarava on 7/8/2009, 4:06 AM

    If you'd find it helpful to read up on what features Drupal offers, so you can compare with what you know about Joomla, I just wrote an article on this last night: http://returncontrol.com/what-does-drupal-provide-out-of-the...

    In the article, I actually address the same point you make about Drupal being a "framework" (or "platform") rather than a CMS. In summary, it's probably best to think of Drupal as a "Web construction kit" rather than a CMS because its modular architecture allows you to plug in all sorts of features that go well beyond typical content management.

  • by mikeytown2 on 7/8/2009, 3:02 AM

    I actively develop for Drupal (boost module). This 10 min demo should give you an idea on how fast sites can go up with it: http://acquia.com/what-is-drupal. I recommend Drupal.

  • by _giu on 7/7/2009, 4:03 PM

    my partner set up Joomla for the Seminar Paper we wrote last year. don't know why he did that since later in the project we had to code, but after using it for a day or two I immediately asked him to set up Trac. it just was a pain viewed from the usability point. so, my advice is to stay away from Joomla if it's an option. I can't say if Drupal is better or not since I've never worked with it, but what I can say is that it can't get worse than Joomla! conclusion: use Drupal.