Joomla and Drupal
Sunday, February 26th, 2006Recently, I’ve been reading up on the popular CMS (content management system) Drupal while waiting for Joomla 1.1 to be useable as a development platform and the Joomla core devs to approve a project that Michiel and I have been speccing out. I’ve been getting really tired of sitting on my hands. When I get bored of a technology, I start thinking about alternative technologies.
I looked at Drupal back in September when the Mambo/Joomla fork happened. At the time, I barely understood enough about Mambo to know how to compare its features with another CMSs. Like most people, I was immediately pulled in by its gorgeous back end interface and simple installer for components and modules. Plus, I was able to build a template for this site in just a weekend.
Now that I’ve spent 6 months with Joomla, here are the reasons that I’ve been looking elsewhere:
1. I don’t publish Joomla content at all. I use this WONDERFUL bridge to Wordpress, but it exists completely in its own space. In other words, I can’t use any features of Joomla content because they won’t apply to me if my content doesn’t exist in Joomla’s content tables. The same goes for my forums. They exist completely within their own database tables. Basically, besides the BSQ Sitestats documentation, all of my content is created in 3rd-party modules.
2. I’m getting my ass kicked as far as SEO (Search Engine Optimization), which is killing my page rank. OpenSEF looks promising, but it is very database-intensive, and they have problem after problem with 3rd-party components (Remember, all of my content comes from 3rd-party components).
3. RSS isn’t there yet. A 3rd-party component is require to do RSS feeds of content categories..etc. This is moot for me though because I don’t deliver my content through Joomla content.
4. XML-RPC is just an infant in Joomla. The hooks for XML-RPC look pretty spiffy in the 1.1 code, but there is no code behind the hooks. Other CMSs have tons of hooks coming off of XML-RPC that allow you to sync users, content, etc between CMS instances. Bots will certainly be coming to perform such tasks in Joomla 1.1, but they will have to go through rigorous testing before being released to the general public.
Reasons why Drupal kicks ass and has drawn a lot of my attention:
1. All third-party tools publish items as nodes (similar to Joomla content), meaning that anything that applies to nodes applies to all 3rd-party content that is created as nodes. Think about articles, forum posts, galleries, blogs, etc all being:
- text indexed for searching
- categorized in multiple categories
- available for editing via the bloggerAPI / some other XML-rpc protocol
- syndicated via RSS
2. Everything is done without classes and objects. Being an ANSI C programmer by day, nothing is more familiar than namespaced procedural code and callbacks. This is how you hook into Drupal when you want to make a request. Plus, the only PHP compatibility issue you have to deal with is whether or not the function you want to call is supported by your version of PHP or not, which can be done easily with a function_exists() call. I don’t need to rant here. Just read this document.
The next month or so should be interesting. I’m still hanging around to see what 1.1 has to offer once they actually freeze the code. After that, the future, cloudy is.