What are some situations in which you would use Joomla or Drupal over Wordpress?
Also would be great to hear of any examples where you chose Wordpress, but in retrospect felt it wasn't the best choice.
And if your answer is "Wordpress can do everything I've wanted, look at these examples of what you can achieve", that would be cool too.
Links to example sites would be great.
Bear in mind that I know Wordpress pretty well, and while I don't use Joomla or Drupal, I do have a reasonable idea of their features. So it won't help me a lot to just list features like cmsmatrix.org, without saying why something was critical for a particular site you worked on.
Btw, if anyone's used ez Publish, I'd be interested in hearing about that as well.
You can leave an optional "tip" with Mahalo's virtual currency, Mahalo Dollars. If you are asking a difficult question that might require some research, or if you'd like a wide variety of feedback, a higher tip often leads to more answers to your question.
M$6 Answers
I probably wouldn't use Drupal except for sizable social or media sites, and it would require a team of people to produce.
Drupal is really the only full blown CMS in the top tiers of the FOSS WCM market, meaning it truly manages content. Everything you put in it can be an object with a custom view, custom classification, custom permissioning, etc. Problem is, it has a super tough, PITA interface. I don't think the modules that try to make the UI better really help all that much.
Drupal requires enculturation and heavy education to use. Operators must grok it, and that's not easy. The anarchic and not very attractive condition of Drupal.org is sympotamtic of all this. That is why the UI and drupal.org are priorities now for rehab.
I think there's a good chance than in a year or two, Elgg will have eliminated Drupal from meaningful use as a social platform. Joomla, Concrete5, Wordpress and others will dominate the general purpose CMS market. Drupal will be pushed into some kind of advanced needs niche. Acquia will lock that market up. All the fans and small-scale webdevs who have enjoyed playing with Drupal for years will drift away as they wake up to reality.
You can leave an optional "tip" with Mahalo's virtual currency, Mahalo Dollars. If you are asking a difficult question that might require some research, or if you'd like a wide variety of feedback, a higher tip often leads to more answers to your question.
M$
You can leave an optional "tip" with Mahalo's virtual currency, Mahalo Dollars. If you are asking a difficult question that might require some research, or if you'd like a wide variety of feedback, a higher tip often leads to more answers to your question.
M$So if we had a client that didn't show interest in learning something new, fire up Wordpress. If they had a team that had to learn this, fire up the full CMS.
We've had some projects that required very strict SEO. For this Wordpress was the safest bet. We have focused more on Joomla recently and the SEO has improved dramatically from version 1.0.x to the 1.5.x branches.
When ever a project called for extending the software, we would use a full CMS, as it has a better framework/API for this. Joomla in particular has literally thousands of GPL and Commercial extensions out there, so this significantly makes it a better choice when features are a concern.
These are probably the most critical factors that have influenced our decision when choosing Wordpress or Joomla/Drupal CMS.
Web Development experience - http://www.fijiwebdesign.com/
Joomla - http://joomla.org/
Wordpress - http://wordpress.org/
Drupal - http://drupal.org/
You can leave an optional "tip" with Mahalo's virtual currency, Mahalo Dollars. If you are asking a difficult question that might require some research, or if you'd like a wide variety of feedback, a higher tip often leads to more answers to your question.
M$I would only use Joomla or Drupal if you are a developer yourself and aren't quite sure where you might want your website to go--and once you've classified yourself as a developer you might just look at a framework like ROR or django instead
You can leave an optional "tip" with Mahalo's virtual currency, Mahalo Dollars. If you are asking a difficult question that might require some research, or if you'd like a wide variety of feedback, a higher tip often leads to more answers to your question.
M$Joomla and Drupal are full content management systems. They can be modified and extended to be used in a variety of ways. Wordpress, is a blogging platform.
However, the line is a fuzzy, grey one so I understand your question.
If you use the extensions available for Joomla or Drupal (or code it yourself), you can use it as a blogging platform with the same features as Wordpress. If you use the extensions available for Wordpress, you can use it as a content management system beyond typical blogs.
The "right tool for the job" depends on the exact requirements of your project.
For example, if you were building an entire website that listed products, services, contact information, hours of operation and wanted to start blog, you would be best to consider a full featured CMS. This would give you a ton of flexibility and separate the content from the design to make updating both easy.
On the flip side of the coin, if you wanted to run a blog first-and-foremost with daily posts, and widly recognized blog features, I'd suggest Wordpress.
The difference is again fuzzy because the differences between traditional blogging platforms and full featured Content Management Systems is blurring.
Personally, I like Drupal and the Expression Engine. Wordpress is my go-to for quick and easy installs that form fast blogs. If you're looking to extend your knowledge and move into an advanced world of web development where the content is always separated from the design, look into a full CMS.
I hope that this helps!
You can leave an optional "tip" with Mahalo's virtual currency, Mahalo Dollars. If you are asking a difficult question that might require some research, or if you'd like a wide variety of feedback, a higher tip often leads to more answers to your question.
M$
Got some examples?
I understand your answer, but it doesn't tell me anything I didn't already know! :)
"Also would be great to hear of any examples where you chose Wordpress, but in retrospect felt it wasn't the best choice."
Examples for this requirement? No, I'm sorry I don't have any examples of those. While I have a nasty habit of looking back on the majority of my projects and thinking that I could have done them better, I can't say I've ever thought this about a CMS choice.
Choosing a CMS is usually based on experience. Generally, if a developer has used Drupal in the past he or she will use it in the future. The consideration for most folks who are just starting to consider a CMS are the features, functions and process of each CMS and how they relate to the specific project at hand.
In development, I like Drupal because I find it easy to extend. I choose the Expression Engine when I'm focusing on U.I. and need something that will scale well.
I'm sorry that I can't give you the specific examples you're requesting. However, any examples I would give you are project specific and would be negated based on the exact requirements of your specific project.
Maybe you didn't understand what I was after. A link to a site you made with Drupal, or your own site that features a portfolio of your work would have been helpful. Extra helpful would have been pointing out "this is what I did on this site with Drupal that would be awkward with Wordpress".
The most helpful thing you said was in talking a website that lists lots of products, services etc. Take those couple of lines, expand on them, illustrate with links, and you'd have the perfect answer to what I was looking for.
Anyway, thanks for all the effort you put in!
You can leave an optional "tip" with Mahalo's virtual currency, Mahalo Dollars. If you are asking a difficult question that might require some research, or if you'd like a wide variety of feedback, a higher tip often leads to more answers to your question.
M$
Nice answer. And I like your site as well! (Though it does load a little bit slow for me....)
Never heard of Concrete5, but it looks very good. And you have to love someone whose strap line is "Content management is a human right".
What you are saying about Drupal I do not see as being true. I mean I am not a large firm developing Drupal sites, but rather we have created some great functioning sites that would have only been possible by the ease of use that is within Drupal.
Now one thing to mention here is just like chocolate vs. vanilla ice cream. I believe to each is own on this subject Joomla vs. Drupal vs. Wordpress. I personally use Drupal for everything. Why? Because it simply can do all that Wordpress does and still do all that Joomla does and then if I require it to do more it does it.
Are there issues with the UI and Drupal.org right now...Yes! However, the Drupal.org redesign and upgrade to the latest version of Drupal is almost complete. Also coming closer to completion is the new Drupal 7 which is going to have significant UI updates that will not kill Drupal but I'm confident allow it to take even more market share over Joomla.
I know this question has already been answered, but I did want to throw my 2 cents in because I believe in what Drupal can do. I also know that most people don't really understand the power of Drupal on a UI level and what it truly is capable of.
Check out some of my portfolio to see what I mean about theming out Drupal websites at http://www.YourGeekGuy.com
yourgeekguy... thanks for your input, which is interesting.
Some points re how we do things on Mahalo...
1) "Refuted" means conclusively disproven. Just because you disagree with someone's answer, or even if you have some evidence that undermines it doesn't mean it's refuted. Refuted means you have shown solid gold proof they were wrong. It's just not very nice to go throwing "Refuted" around.
2) "Go and look at my site for examples" is not a very helpful answer. If you want to answer the question you'd need to tell me some examples of things that you've done that would be hard to do with Wordpress. Don't count on me to be able to figure it out myself. If I could, I wouldn't be asking the question in the first place.
3) Also the question wasn't "Can you build great sites with Drupal?" I'm sure the answer to that is yes. The question is about situations in which to pick Drupal or Joomla over Wordpress.
A lot of people's answers to my question boil down to "I know X very well, and I can do what I want with it, so that's what I use all the time".
The reason this guy was chosen as the best answer is he's familiar with all three and compared their pluses and minuses, and said something about when you'd want to use one over the others.