Joomla and Drupal Comparison

Ever since the idea of content management online became popular with both general users of the internet as well as business organization, for managing their online identities like a company or personal websites, blogs, forums, wikis and portfolios, the market has responded to the increasing demand of good content management systems for the web by releasing many free and paid alternatives. While all of these are more or less equal in functionality, there are subtle differences between the options available depending upon various parameters. Joomla and Drupal are two such alternatives which are free of cost, released under the GNU general public license meaning that these are open source and provide ample capabilities to manage a small blog to an immensely big and complex website.

Joomla came a bit earlier than Drupal and quickly became popular between communities of web enthusiasts as well as professional users. Both of these are written in PHP. Joomla provides very rich document management capabilities by providing facility to tag documents with different keywords for easy searching as well as the ability to define categories for arranging different content types. The template system is extremely powerful and provides XML based format which is easily editable by any text editor. Different parts in documents created from these templates work as independent widgets, properties of which, the user can configure by rich editors. Apart from this, Joomla also provides options to monetize your website or blogs by placing and managing adverts. But one of the fundamental problems with Joomla is that it was designed with top down approach, the UI was coded first and then code was filled into it to perform the functions. So the code is very much cluttered and produces output that many times do not confirm with the recommended standards of web programming. Therefore the results differ in every browser.

Drupal improves upon the problems that Joomla leaves behind. It’s fully designed with a planned, top down approach in which functionalities are planned and designed before coding any UI and UI is made in sync with these functionalities which makes the user experience smoother with it. The management capabilities are of Drupal are outstanding and the rich editors for editing parts of your Drupal content pages are very good. The tools are somewhat easier to use than Joomla and the organization of tools is less cluttered. Drupal produces very good, clean, well formed html code that confirms to the web standards therefore the code runs flawlessly with any browser available in the market.

So overall, both the systems are great but Drupal has some merits over Joomla due to which is recommended for most scenarios.