James Colin's BLOG MONEY WIKI

When I read forums, sometimes I see people asking for advice on which CMS would be adapted for their particular project, and often there are replies of what looks like Joomla fanatics who answer without any argument that Joomla is the best CMS.

I can't stand it because I know it's wrong, but then I'm not paid to promote any particular CMS nor am I paid by the original poster to convince him to choose the best solution for his project. Because let's be real here, for most common uses, from people who have no experience of CMS, Joomla will do the job as well as a number of other CMS solutions!

I say that Drupal is the best CMS and I can back it up, but anyone who had first hand experience with both CMS can state the same as me: Joomla (and previously Mambo) is not as good a work of art as Drupal, it is less efficient and is less flexible. The positive thing about Joomla is that the graphic design part of their user community is clearly more developped than Drupal's and probably even the total user community is larger than Drupal's because when you look at both projects from an untrained eye Joomla look far better out of the box. Joomla also have tons of modules/add-ons to add features and so has Drupal. In fact there are some "contests" organized on the web and sometimes Drupal wins, sometimes Joomla wins. But honestly if a contest has public vote, then what? You have the biggest user community who can go to a website and vote and then you win? OK, this is lame. The next one in line is the Packtpub Award with voting closing on october 26th and if you vote you could win a..... yes a stupid iPod, of course what do you think? It's not christmas! The award has a total fund of $20 000 in prizes you get to win a stupid iPod, life's cruel sometimes... And if Joomla wins, then life can be really cruel sometimes! Because, come on! Drupal is clearly better, even a canadian recognizes Drupal is the best! Although finally he says that he would recommend Joomla over Drupal for an "organization looking for a CMS to merely manage the pages and content on your website". In fact to merely manage the pages and content on your website, clearly any CMS would do the job, hopefully. But Drupal can do it too :-)

So the user community is more vibrant on Joomla, but the code of the CMS isn't as clean and efficient as Drupal. In Drupal the administration panel is part of the website, it's based on user's rights to see or not to see the administration menus. On Joomla it's more classic, you access the admin panel and manage things from here. The admin panel looks nicer on Joomla too, so you understand why many people believe it is the best CMS, it attracts the eye.

There's is something that will change things a little, it's that Joomla will very soon have a major update with the 1.5 version, and Drupal will continue to improve with Drupal 6 before the end of the year. The major update of Joomla is worth installing and try out. But for sure Drupal 6 is the CMS to install to base your future projects on.

It's simple, several years ago I had one Drupal and one Mambo (before being called Joomla) sites, and after that most of my projects have been done with Drupal, it's so versatile, so flexible, so clear and works like a charm, I never had anything to complain about, it can do so much more than what I have time to implement!

OK, Joomla fanatics can say exactly the same thing as I said, but for me Drupal is the best CMS, if you're new to CMS and want to start a website, you cannot make a mistake by choosing Drupal and start to learn it. Anyway it doesn't hurt to install both CMS and start 2 websites instead of one, but if you have that kind of motivation and time in your hands, then you can learn deeper and deeper about Drupal, you'll love it!

To rest my case I'll send to you to more reading dealing with Drupal vs Joomla:

• Joomla versus Drupal and other CMS
• CMS Showdown Joomla vs Drupal
• Drupal vs Joomla on Joomla.org
• Drupal vs Joomla on Drupal.org

By the way, this website is made with WordPress and MediaWiki, and I could have done it with Drupal alone, but I too want to have first hand experience on famous scripts, so it's my first site using WP and MW :-)

Edit [may 2008] : I know have to scrap my wordpress blog and install Drupal instead. I had a very high traffic and wordpress with cache enabled was too much load for my hosting company. But I suspect one of the numerous plug ins I had to bypass the cache system and provoking the high load. Anyway, with Drupal I can control the cache much better, so I took the decision to move my blog to drupal, it was either that or nothing else since my web hosting company wasn't happy with the load, and I wasn't willing to check plug ins by plug ins which one was at fault. I had enough of the wordpress experience, it was good but now I'm back to drupal :-)