Joomla or Drupal?

by Karoli on May 2, 2007 · 5 comments

I’m back to working on this church website relaunch that has been haunting me for over a year. I was originally going to use WordPress as a hacked CMS, but the more I played with it, the less it was working for me, since I couldn’t really find a way to aggregate several separate WordPress installations into one site for navigation, etc.

So I’m looking at Joomla or Drupal. I’ve got a local installation of Joomla going, but the administrative interface seems very kludgy to me — four or five clicks to get one entry up and published. I haven’t played with Drupal yet — I’m a little intimidated by all of the blog posts I see about how complex it is. Chris Pirillo built the Gnomedex site on Joomla and it looks great.

When I get this thing built, I want to hand it off to the various leaders and ministers to post their own content, so it needs to be robust enough to build properly and simple enough to easily train people on the care and feeding of their content.

Any suggestions? thoughts?

Update 5/2/2007: To those of you who recommended Joomla: All I can say is that it must mirror how a Mac works, because I about went nuts trying to do the simple things, just like I do whenever I use a Mac. Drupal isn’t all that simple, but it makes more sense to me, so Drupal 5.1 is the final choice.

Technorati Tags: joomla, drupal, cms

Tagged as: Internet, Technology, Web

http://flamingohouse.net Denise

As someone who has recently been exposed to the backend of Drupal on that blog I write for… I vote no to Drupal.

ugh
http://www.TeachingHacks.com Quentin D’Souza

I have done and worked with a few sites using Joomla. They worked out great – one warning though. Do not use the third party modules etc without checking out how they rate, security wise.

http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic,79477.0.html
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http://kmilyun.com kmilyun

I am so glad to know that i am not the only one that went nuts – joomla was not intuitive to me LOL. Good luck with Drupal! Keep us posted.
http://fergustan.net Fergus

I recently installed drupal and am using it some sort as a blog on my site (sort of to get used to it so that when I implement a content site, I would be more familiar)

Its really quite powerful once you get used to it. The first few days were horrible. Learning curves were crazy steep. More because they have weird lingo. I would recommend following the steps at http://drupal.org/node/120612 to go through the basics of setting up a site with drupal.

I think drupal might work for you because of the user access settings where you can define permissions for different user groups.

Overall, quite happy with using drupal. The community is still much much smaller than joomla, but I think its looking good!

(That said, you need about 2-3 clicks to post content up. Somehow, cms tend to require more clicks to get content up than blogs)