Perhaps you've reached a point where your website has become too hard to manage. There are too many pages to update and paying a designer to update your site each month is not cost effective. Businesses face this dilemma everyday. Do I continue to pay for a designer or do I have a content management system created for my website so I can do the updates myself and save money over time?

Enter the world of content management systems (CMS). A content management system allows you to manage content on your website by installing premade software on your webserver. It is meant to help non tech-savvy people and tech-savvy people alike to manage and update their website by themselves using a backend interface. Little-to-no programming knowledge is needed. Upon doing some research you will see that there are as many content management systems out there as there are stars in the sky. Every small software company is trying to capitalize on the trend by developing their own content management system and marketing the life out it in attempt to receive accolades; However, it world of content management systems it really only boils down to two or three that are any good. Drupal and Joomla are two of the most widely used Open Source CMS Solutions on the market. Wordpress is also a good but is known primarily for its blogging capabilities, not its content management.

I set out on a mission to learn these two content management systems and write about my findings including the benefits and pitfalls of each of them. This article assumes that the reader knows very little about each of these CMS Solutions. It is meant to help guide you in determining which CMS might be right for you. It is not meant to say that one CMS is better than the other.

(http://www.drupal.org)

Drupal -- Things I like

I had the experience of creating several sites for our clients using this CMS over the past few months and got to know Drupal pretty well throughout the whole process. The one thing that I absolutely loved about drupal is the amount of modules that exist for it. A module Is a plugin for Drupal that extends or enhances Drupal core functionality. They are written by different users in the Drupal Community and downloadable on the drupal website. Out of the box Drupal will manage pages/articles for you without a problem. However if you want more functionality you will need to download Modules. The “Event” Module for example will give the increased functionality of being able to manage events on your website. Modules are easy to install into the Drupal Framework, however, configuring them to work the way you want them to can sometimes become a challenge if the module is poorly written. It is best to look for modules that are widely used and have been tested and proven to perform as desired. Some modules also take a bit of programming knowledge and know-how to install properly. Because of the massive amount of modules being developed constantly Drupal becomes very powerful and expandable to meet growing demands and increases in trends and innovations.

Drupal 6 is only 3.25mb unpacked. Its lightweight and wont clutter up your webserver. If you have size restraints the compactness of Drupal could come in handy. I was pleasantly surprised to see how small Drupal is for how much it can do.

Drupal only takes about 1.05 seconds to load. Pretty fast in my book. However your webserver may have a direct effect on the speed of your site. Caching and database management can also play a role in load times.

Drupal takes into consideration web standards where many other content management systems do not. Out of the box Drupal adheres to Web Standards. Compliance to web standards tends to get you better search engine optimization as well (SEO). To read more about web standards see http://www.w3.org/

One of the awesome things about Drupal is the ability to create levels of permissions for your users. Lets say you wanted to have an employee on your staff manage a certain area of your website. If I worked at the YMCA for example, and wanted the aquatics director to be limited to input aquatics events only into the calendar I would be able to do that by setting up the “Aquatics Director” permissions group and assigning him or her that permission level. You cannot give an individual user permissions that pertain solely to that user, you do have to set up a permission level group and then assign the user to that permission level. Permissions are useful for delegating responsibilities to different employees within your organization and can be a great asset for non-profit organizations in particular.

Drupal is fairly good at documenting everything and giving directions and help when needed.

In your theme folder, Drupal has templates for different areas of the site which are 100 percent customizable to you with a little know-how. For example there is a page template and a template for sections or blocks. With a little help and forum support you can create a homepage template and an event template or profile template or whatever kind of template you want. Drupal gives you access to just about anything that you may want to change and for that reason gets high marks in my book.

Drupal -- Things I don’t like.

For starters, the Drupal administration menu is laid out in one big page which for a novice user can be a bit threatening and confusing at first glance. When I installed Drupal for the first time, I was overwhelmed by my options. Visually they do not guide you through the steps to achieve anything or give you any insight into how blocks and views and many other elements must work together to achieve your desired output. Once you get used to the interface and the flow of how drupal works its not quite as bad. Its my opinion that Drupal could organize and layout the adminstraition area much better. Throughout the course of installing modules, creating views and blocks and managing settings a novice user can get him or herself completely lost and frustrated in the process. I found myself going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. The massive amount of control however is good for those who know what they’re doing, but if you’re a beginner it quickly can turn into a headache. The learning curb is slightly steeper than some other CMS’.

Joomla -- Things I like.

The administration area of Joomla has an incredibly clean and elegant design and is quite easy to understand. I had never used Joomla previously and was able to go in with no knowledge about how it works and find my way through different tasks with ease. The interface is laid out in a sort of categorical listing style which makes it easy to understand even for users with limited knowledge of a CMS.

The Joomla interface allows you to simply upload your downloaded module or extension as a zip file and it will do all the installation work for you. Wordpress also has a feature similar to this. This is a nice feature that makes it much easier on the user. Drupal for instance makes you download the extension, unzip it, place it in your modules folder, upload it through ftp, and then go back into your modules section to activate and configure it. I love how easy it is from a novice user’s perspective through Joomla.

There is a large selection of Free Templates and Themes available for Joomla. It has an excellent community of designers and programmers for template and theme development. Like the extensions, Templates and themes are also very easy to install.

Joomla, just like Drupal loads extremely fast. The default load time for Joomla 1.5 is 1.33 seconds.

Version 1.0 of Joomla did not adhere very well to Standards Compliance. Its been around since long before Standards compliance was even an issue. Version 1.5 of Joomla however takes a step forward in compliance and allows you full control over the HTML that is output from core extensions. If you want to have standards-compliant XHTML and CSS, you can simply override the default layout with one of your own. The default is still a little unfriendly but can be overridden to adhere.

Joomla -- Things I don’t like.

Something that absolutely drove me nuts about Joomla is that everytime I went to download a module I needed I found out I had to pay 20 or 40 bucks a pop to get what I wanted to make my site work correctly. Don’t get me wrong, I believe that people should get paid for their work but what a hassle. There is too much commercialization and not enough open source modules. If you want to make a good looking site your going to have to pay a good amount for it, which seems to defeat the purpose of using a content management system in the first place. Talk about nickel and diming you! Not so happy about module commercialization in the great lengths Joomla has taken it too. To be fair and honest though, the people that do make modules im sure put time and effort into developing them so maybe it’s fair, I just prefer the open source method personally.

Joomla’s User Permission control is very limited. From the looks of it, it was intended to be geared more towards a small group of individuals who would be responsible for controlling the content. There are a few things that a user is able to do such as controlling the content, blogs, forums and so forth but when more user permissions and control are needed you will run into a brick wall. Joomla is not real good with user permissions.

Not very much documentation exists in Joomla. If you need help you may have a hard time finding it . However ,Joomla has lots of Forums that may be able to help you with a problem.

Joomla is massive at 13.8mb Unpacked.

Overview of Joomla and Drupal

My experiences with these two content management systems has led me to this conclusion. Both of these content management systems are without a doubt very useful in their own regard. From my findings I would say that Drupal is much more geared to a developer or someone who has more knowledge in the field of programming and design. That is not to say that a person with no knowledge of Content Management Systems couldn’t use it, but it would require more learning to use it effectively and have a much higher learning curve. Drupal gives the user far more control over every aspect of the site than does Joomla and for that reason I feel it is better overall for those who get into details, who like to have that control over every part of their site. I also like the community of Drupal users better than the community for Joomla. I feel it has far more free modules that are of good quality and large support base if you get stuck and cannot figure something out.

If you are new to content management systems and are looking to just experiment with what you can do and get your feet wet, I would recommend Joomla to you because of its clean design and user friendliness. It will also get you used to the”ins” and “outs” of how content management systems generally work. It is relatively easy to build a nice site in a short amount of time with Joomla without having the headache that you might have starting with Drupal.. If you master Joomla you may want to try your hand at Drupal and compare and contrast them for yourself. You fill find their both great for different things.

So you want my opinion? I’d take Drupal anyday, but that’s just me.