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Monday, May 27, 2013

Drupal Vs Joomla

I've been using Drupal for almost 4 years now and although I like it, I'm not really a Drupal fanboy.

So IMHO :
1. How easy is Drupal to get your head round and learn to use
- It is VERY hard to learn Drupal, There is no centralized configuration page. No centralized content creation page, it is the responsibility of you (the site developer) to make things easier for your user.
Never think of Drupal as a ready to use CMS, it is a "lego block" available for you to build your CMS.

2. Availability of add ons (components/modules etc)
- Tons of modules available to download for free, but not all of module is built with the same quality (code wise, usability wise), and not all of the module will be updated or fixed eventhough you submit bug / patch, it all in the hands of module developer, some dev is nice and listen to user, some dev is too busy to fix etc etc. so most of the time, if you need X function that available to X module but not working right = PAY someone to fix them for you.

3. Ease of adding shopping cart functionality
- Ubercart is very easy to install and configure for most e-commerce site, to fully customize it is another story. Drupal commerce is new and supposedly is easier if you want a fully customized shopping cart, but IMO it will take longer time to build and most of its supporting modules is still in dev state.

4. Quality of forum support
- It is the geek world, they talked code and code, very contrast to wordpress.org support forum. So if you like code and fluent in php, Drupal.org forum is your sanctuary.

5. Ease of updating, maintaining sites for those with limited knowledge
- maintaining drupal site is hard, Drupal it self is slow, you need advanced caching, varnish, memcached, etc etc.
- updating drupal to any major version change (eg 6 to 7) will BREAK things, you will need to sort it manually and it will vary from case to case.
- updating drupal from minor version (eg 7.6 to 7.7) most of the time will not break things, but updating contrib module is another story, some module will not break some module break some module destroy site.

In short, Drupal equips you with nuclear power, and with super power comes great responsibility (and headache).


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