Why is Joomla better than Wordpress and Drupal CMS systems?
Why is Joomla better than Wordpress and Drupal CMS systems?
Quite simply because Joomla is just as easy to use as Wordpress (Especially in the J3.0 release) but it does not limit your scalability for future growth. The Joomla CMS and Platform offers rich features that are equal to and often superior to those in Drupal but because Joomla CMS has such a large Global community of developers and service providers you do not have vender lock in due to the often complex nature and higher cost of managing a Drupal site. Joomla sits right inbetween these other top contenders as the best of both worlds and currently powers over 2.8% of all web sites on the internet.
We have considered many times the idea of supporting Drupal and Wordpress and to some extent we do but we have kept our focus on being the best at Joomla. We do help many folks with their migrations from Drupal to Joomla or Wordpress to Joomla. In fact our team was the first ever to migrate an enterprise level Drupal site to Joomla and in doing so created several tools for making this process more practical and more affordable.
So there are two appealing factors for folks considering Wordpress; one is that typically for starting a simple blog site Wordpress is relatively easy to implement and manage for a non-technical end user and like Joomla can be downloaded for free and if your set aside a week end you can pretty much get a site set up if your hosting provide makes this easy for you. The other approach is where developers that like building custom sites will use the Wordpress framework to build custom sites where they only want the end users to put in content vs taking a more hands on approach. I do have friends in the industry that appreciate some of the simplicity found in Wordpress for building client sites but they typically are building very custom instances that require some type of ongoing support anyway. This is fine but it to me loses the real value to the end client because you are then for the most part working with a custom environment, thus defeating the purpose in many cases of using these empowering technologies.
We have found that the trade-off between a little more learning curve in Joomla vs Wordpress, which is easily overcome with a little training, offers our clients a much better long term solution. It ends up being less cost to maintain, you can do so much more with your online tools and the benefits of working with a service provider to compliment your skills and expertise through the process of building any web site can bolster your potential for success.
Ok so now lets’s think through Drupal…
Drupal is a noble platform with many features and has proven to be very scaleable. They kind of beat Joomla to the punch in a few areas in earlier releases but the NEW Joomla 3.1 (due out the day of this article is being published) offers not only many of the options that are most requested but Joomla has evolved to be much easier, less expensive and just as scalable as Drupal. Things like content tags (Tags feature is new in Joomla 3.1 release), mobile ready, intuitive user interface, easy installation, unlimited access control level management (Introduced in the 2.5 release), easy to learn sample content models, easy upgrade parameters and a host of other great features combined with the largest collection of extensions and templates of any other open source CMS are making Joomla stand out by far as the best choice. There is a small niche of their (Drupal) developer community that clings to Drupal because it gives them a bit more vendor lock in (job security). We all hope these folks whom are often quite talented will change their perspective to think more towards the value to their clients and make sure they chose the right tool for the particular situation vs what will give them more ongoing work.
I sat in on a presentation at the CMS Expo last year where the vendor that built the whitehouse.gov site which was built using Drupal. I do have to say I was very impressed and this is definitely a fantastic site. However, it was not Drupal that made this a great web site, since all of the features could easily be accomplished using Joomla CMS, it was the talent and insight of the vendor that executed the project. Drupal perhaps just happened to be the tools and platform they were the most familiar with. Larger scale or enterprise level portal implementations can be built in either Joomla CMS or Drupal effectively and at this level it matters most who you chose as a vender and perhaps the environment where it will be hosted rather than the specific CMS platform. Most of our business that comes from folks using Wordpress either came to us because of security issues or the in ability to scale adequately with features or volume users. Most folks that come to use to migrate from Drupal to Joomla sites want to keep the scalability but to gain more control on managing costs and content effectively. All n all chosing the right vendor is often a greater contributor to a successful implimentation than the platform but for us Joomla has never let us down.
Ok so I am not going to knock Wordpress or Drupal because they are valid tools and there are times when they can add value to our clients or yours. However, overall, hands down after careful consideration we have found Joomla to offer more value and flexibility to our clients. There are few exceptions where Joomla has not been able to deliver either all or part of the intended business solution and done so at less cost or greater benefit. Since today is the official release of Joomla CMS version 3.1, I wanted to reiterate why we are excited to continue our support for Joomla CMS as a first choice framework and platform for our customer and hopefully yours. Joomla offers powerful, fun and easy to use tools to grow their businesses or to communicate and distribute information effectively.
If you have not done so already jump over to www.joomla.org and get a look at the latest Joomla release.
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