Drupal:
With a fast-growing user base in the non-profit sector, Drupal’s strong online community focus made it an appealing prospect. Most importantly, Drupal was alone among all CMS options in its compatibility with a distributed network approach. The platform is essentially built for exactly this kind of approach: it supports ubiquitous outbound RSS feeds, complex aggregation of inbound feeds, per-feed or per-item non-exclusive tagging, and native support for blogging. Compared to the other options, which are virtually all CMS platforms that have developed distributed community features, Drupal is innately oriented towards community networking and distributed content creation. The following outlines how we anticipate using particular features of the Drupal platform to support core elements of the telecentre.org web strategy.
A great place to start is OpenSourceCMS, a site with user reviews of pretty much all the major players in the CMS space. What sets them apart is that they also provide live demos of each CMS they cover. You can actually log in to the front end or the back end of each one, reconfigure it, and make changes to your heart’s content. Every two hours they “reboot” and put everything back to a fresh install. It’s a great way to experiment without having to go through all the time and hassle of installing each system yourself.
Installing Drupal and Joomla on my host
In addition to testing each platform on OpenSourceCMS, I also wanted to install them myself to gauge how easy they would be to work with. Fortunately my hosting provider, Host Gator, uses a product called Fantastico which makes installing Drupal and Joomla as simple as a few mouse clicks. Both installed successfully with minimal effort. Purists abhor Fantastico, but for my purposes, it was a quick and easy way to get up and running quickly to be able to start kicking the tires of each product.
Installing Drupal and Joomla locally
As I’ll need a test environment before long, installing both products on my local machine is a good idea as well. Before I can do so, though, I need to install the LAMP (or WAMP) stack commonly used by Open Source software. LAMP enables my desktop to act like a web server, so that I can run everything from my local machine just as if it were running on my host.
For the curious, LAMP stands for Linux Apache MySQL PHP, and they are the four products that make up the foundation that Drupal, Joomla, and countless other products use. WAMP is essentially the same thing, but uses Windows as the operating
The local installations of Drupal and Joomla were a bit more involved. I had to understand how to setup MySQL databases, and know the right answers to a number of questions, although the wizards that each product offered were pretty good. A complete novice would probably be overwhelmed, but I found it pretty much a snap to get both going quickly.
Use Mambo(Joomla) when:
* you don't know about the tech stuff at all
* you want easy install & setup with your mouse
* you don't want to learn the tool you're using
* you don't need to integrate other scripts etc. to your site
* you want a candy site and don't mind several other sites using the same template(s)
* you don't need SEO out of the box
* you don't care about server resources
* you're running (or planning to to run) only one or max a couple of sites
* you don't need one log-in to several sites
* you don't need user groups & permissions
* you don't run membership site(s)
Use Drupal when:
* you want a rock solid & high quality platform for your sites
* you want or need a real multi-site-feature (only one installation for several sites)
* you need any kind of user groups & user permissions
* you need to run also membership- and community sites, not only CMS etc
* you want a Powerful templating system
* you're ready to invest a bit of your time in order to realize all the huge possibilities of Drupal
* you understand the meaning of clear, high quality code and API (easy to integrate with other solutions etc)
* you want flexibility and don't like limitations
A number of Major Advantages of Drupal over Mambo(Joomla)
With Drupal, you can set up several sites with only one installation ...think about that, when you have tens of sites and security holes are found almost daily! ...what about then, when you quickly need to uppdate some additional components / modules / themes... you actually face a lot of work in Mambo(Joomla) - in Drupal you do it only once.
With Drupal, you can (if you want to) use the same log-in-details for different sites... in some cases it opens quite interesting possibilities.
Drupal has also SEO-friendly URL's out of the box... for Mambo(Joomla), you need to buy a commercial component from a core developer or use labor-intensive free ones.
Someone mentioned, that Drupal is focused on communities... you're right... however, it does not mean, you can't use Drupal for content sites. Actually, Drupal is a great choise also for content sites. I can't imagine Mambo(Joomla) as a natural community building system, though.
When talking about user profiles and permissions to different parts of the site, Mambo(Joomla) is actually a joke... on the other hand, Drupal is the opposite... it's so easy to set up and fine tune different user-roles and give them some permisssions etc
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