Drupal, Joomla and Plone! Oh my!
April 15th, 2007 | Published in Web Tools | 4 Comments
At NTC, there was a lot of talk about the “big three” open source CMS packages that most people these days in our sector are using: Drupal, Plone, and Joomla. I’ve had a fair bit of experience with Drupal - nosi.net is run on Drupal, and I’d done a Drupal install once, and helped with some now and again. I hadn’t had experience with either Plone or Joomla, but in talking to folks both at NTC and Penguin Day about Joomla, I got intrigued.
I have a new endeavor (see the last post) that needs a new website, and I figured, why not? I hear Joomla is dead easy to install, and I need dead easy right now, so let’s try it. Well, guess what? Installing Joomla is dead easy. I could do it with my eyes closed. I set up a mysql database in my standard generic virtual hosting setup, copied the downloaded and unzipped Joomla folder into my webspace by FTP, and fired up my browser. Four or five clicks later, tada! A website.
Um, sorta. I guess that’s where it gets interesting when you work with a CMS, right? What are all those content types, and where do they appear, and how do you get things to look exactly like you want them? It’s the same, really, with Drupal, only different. CMSs do share that pretty serious learning curve - but I’m getting over it, slowly.
So I like Joomla. Do I like it better than Drupal? I’m not yet sure. It definitely focuses a lot on the eye candy, which is nice, actually - I like that the admin interface is pretty. I know, that’s silly, but it’s true. In some respects, it’s easier to use, although in others, Drupal can be a bit easier. It’s a tossup, so far. They both seem to pretty much have very similar feature sets. We’ll see how I feel as I progress with it, and see how far I can go. I hear that all of the “cool chix” use Drupal, though (Linuxchix is about to launch it’s new Drupal-based website.) There is, I think, a bit of a geeky bias toward Drupal. So, maybe since I’m becoming a bit less of a geek, Joomla’s a good pick? But Joomla is pretty darned geeky. Like what is a mambot, anyway?
Technorati Tags: cms, drupal, joomla
Tags:
April 17th, 2007 at 8:52 am (#)
Sure, the install is dead easy.
I’m revamping my website in drupal after trying out both drupal and joomla (both available on my web host) and deciding that drupal looked easier and had more easily found plugins for what I wanted to do.
And we use plone for a lot of things in the organization I work for now. So I’ve poked a bit at all three of them.
And NOWHERE have I been able to find a good, basic, user-oriented “what are these content types and what do I do with them?” area. Eventually, I might know them well enough to write one, but at the rate my spare time keeps going right now, I don’t hold out a lot of hope for intense blogging time in my future.
April 17th, 2007 at 4:31 pm (#)
Hey Michelle,
So most of my experience has been with Joomla, and 1.5 is looking AWESOME… I’m just waiting for Compasspoint to come out with their new manual…
[and they got rid of the word 'mambot' completely!]
April 19th, 2007 at 5:36 pm (#)
My choice of drupal is biased by a preference for using postgresql databases over mysql.
I’ve found the drupal community more approachable than Joomla (easier to start contributing).
Plone i found slow to respond to patches, but that was a while ago now.
May 9th, 2007 at 7:36 am (#)
My take on Plone is that it is really, really powerful and ZOPE is nothing like Apache or PHP or MySQL. If you are a programmer who likes to complain about how PHP isn’t really object oriented, you might be in a different place than I am, but I found that I couldn’t seem to get my head around an entirely new webserver framework.
One thing that worries me about drupal is the pace of change, and the lack of a long term support release. I haven’t looked closely at the others in this regard, but if you’re setting up websites for other people, you want to be able to tell them that there’ll be security patches available for some decent length of time.
I know too many folks who are stuck with Drupal 4.5 sites and can’t upgrade because they have a lot of flexinode content.
Meanwhile, PoppyPhoto is right, there does need to be a lot more “what are these content types” writing, at least about Drupal (I dunno what is out there for Joomla).
I keep a little tech support blog on Mayfirst[0] and I’m always game to answer questions like. That might be my next post, “What are all these content types and what do I do with them?”
–Amanda
[0] http://mayfirst.org/blog/81