Drupal rulez Joomla sux!
February 7th, 2008 | by Sajal Kayan |
I am perhaps the newest entrant to the growing number of Drupal fanboys in Thailand. From what Ive seen most geeks in Thailand use drupal, usually for community building projects and also for personal blogs.
The first I was introduced to Drupal was while chatting with John Berns and Sugree on the BarcampBangkok IRC room. In a short chat session, these two people managed to convince me that Drupal can easily do the stuff ive been trying/wanting to do for the last 2 Years.
The worst thing about Joomla is that to do many things, you need to get your hands dirty and hack the core files. This for people like me is not good at all. I am a very untidy person, often leave the hacks un-commented and never document my changes. Now, when the next version of Joomla (or some components) come by, Im unable to upgrade due to the fear of breaking my hacks. This blocks me from taking advantage of the latest security patches or code improvements.
Some might say that Joomla is more user friendly, I disagree. The only way in which Joomla is better than Drupal is in looks. Joomla is more of eye candy. Drupal presents a very simple admin interface, all the admin functions is available from the “/admin” page, whereas in Joomla I would need to navigate complex menus n stuff to get to where I wanna be.
The USP for Drupal is its taxonomy system. It effectively gives me the power to categorize my content however I want it. Unlike Joomla where we have only a “Section” and a “Category”, only 2 levels deep, and one category can be only inside one section, no one-to-many relationships.
Let me give a small example : I am making our travel portal Chalo Thailand in Drupal. I want to be able to list information on various destinations (eg Cities or Towns). Then I would also need to list down various tips specific to that town, What places to see, recommended hotels, travel packages, etc. Would be a hell of a task doing this on Joomla! it be copy/pasting… linking… for months, still not get the site ready.
Here what I have done is made 2 vocabularies “Destination” and “Guide“.
Destination would contain terms like “Bangkok“, “Pattaya“, etc…
Guide would contain : “Getting Around“, “Sight Seeing“, “Shopping Tips“, etc
Now on the page listing introduction about Bangkok, I can easily list getting around tips with this few lines of code (don’t get scared. the code is really easy, even non php coder like me can figure it out):-
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<h3>Getting Around in Bangkok</h3>
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<?php
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?>
taxonomy_select_nodes(array(6,7),”and”) selects node (any content) which has terms 6 AND 7 specified. 6 states the the Guide is Getting Around and 7 means that the Destination is Bangkok. Now I can happily add a new Getting around article for Bangkok and it would automagically show up in the Bangkok introduction page. Another neat advantage of this would be when im listing travel packages. A person viewing details of a “Sight Seeing” location, can see the list of Tour Packages which include this venue. On clicking on a particular Package, they can see the list of Sight-Seeing Venues which are included in this package. This is something which is not there in Joomla (please forgive me if some add on component does this, but chances are there that it would be crappy or some non-seo friendly hack).
The bottom line is that Drupal is better than Joomla in every aspect. You do not need to be a PHP coder to use Drupal. In fact you can do more in Drupal than Joomla without touching PHP. With some knowledge of PHP combined with Drupal (CCK+views) and some time you can effectively make any kind of portal system.
Enough of ranting for today, back to kicking myself in the ass for not starting my main portal in Drupal.
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16 Responses to “Drupal rulez Joomla sux!”
By Africangeek on Feb 11, 2008 | Reply
Sound good to me. i just fresh from Joomla. Dont be to harsh on Joomla I guess there are somethings it cannot do as well as drupal. Having said that see this and give your advice
http://drupal.org/node/220073
By Bob on Feb 25, 2008 | Reply
I think joomla is pretty amazing for what it can do and how it does it. It makes webdesign more accessible for novices and still has many robust features. But once you get into any sort of community/categories/blogs/comments/views/ or customization, drupal really flies ahead.
By Amy Stephen on Mar 20, 2008 | Reply
The change Joomla! needs to make is to move way from sections and categories. But, not for the reason that you mention - that it limits people to a three level structure.
The real problem is that people *believe* sections and categories are hierarchical structures and that is not the intent or purpose.
When you design your websites with Joomla!, think of the menu item as “the node.” You can create unlimited levels of menu items in Joomla! by stacking unlimited category blogs, individual articles, and other components. There is *no* limit.
Sections and categories are merely for helping organize articles for those individuals who maintain content. Use a category for a group of articles you want represented as a group on the front end.
Given your example - if your articles will be written for “Getting Around“, “Sight Seeing“, “Shopping Tips“, etc, then that is your category level.
If you one a set of those types of article for each of those for “Bangkok“, “Pattaya“, etc, then create a category for each. “Bangkok - Getting Around,“ “Bangkok - Sight Seeing,“ “Bangkok - Shopping Tips“. Those categories are where your content providers would create, manage, archive, schedule articles.
You could create a single article for the upper layers to serve as a landing page for those broad themes. (Unless you need multiple articles at those levels, and, if such is the case, create a category.)
Drive your hierarchy from your menu. Those are your nodes.
Starting from the top of the hierarchy, using menu items, you can create an article menu type for “Destination” and “Guide“, linking to those articles.
Then, beneath Destination create child menu items for “Bangkok“, “Pattaya“, etc…, each linking to the single article or category, depending on your data needs.
Finally, at the lowest level, create menu items for the Category Blog type for “Bangkok - Getting Around,“ “Bangkok - Sight Seeing,“ “Bangkok - Shopping Tips“.
Joomla! does not limit one from creating deep content and site navigation. The Section - Category organization around articles is misleading to many people, obviously including yourself. If you focus on driving your hierarchy from your menu, you’ll find there is no limit and never has been.
Kind regards,
Amy
By Sajal Kayan on Mar 20, 2008 | Reply
Dear Amy,
Thanks a lot for clarifying the hierarchy issue, but the problem is not just the front end presentation. The flexibility taxonomy gives me is to use these labels elsewhere.
I need “Getting Around”($guide-type) to be under “Bangkok”($city) I just define taxonomies in drupal, then I can inform Drupal to make the urls in the format /$city/$guide-type or use the variable any how I want it. Say if I make “Bangkok - Getting Around” and “Pattaya - Getting Around” then i make a page(call it A) showing stuff from both these categories. now i make a new category “Phuket - Getting Around” , I would have to go back to A to add this information. Now think how cumbersome this would become if i had many different pages like A.
Based on your comment, it seems you feel that “hierarchy” is my main concern, its not. My main point is to be able to have one content in any number of different categories.
An example that I would be using. : I will soon be listing venues for outing. A venue might be at a particular city or in multiple cities. A venue could be a bar, pub, disco, restaurant, cafe, or any combination of these. A venue could be smoking or non-smoking. now if I want to show a list of say “Restaurants which allow smoking in Bangkok” - all I would need to use is something like the 4 lines of code outlined in my post.
By Max Stirner on Jun 14, 2008 | Reply
I have been trying joomla 1.5 for a couple of days, and I’ve been frustrated by the fact that the built-in SEF-friendly URLs are still not pretty, there is no plugin forthcoming, and it seems impossible to produce a multi-language, SEF-friendly site (joomfish 2.0 will not make the URLs any prettier), and there are no 301-transfers available. I want to keep my SEO credit across updates to the CMS. For obvious reasons. I have even been considering to just build a site straight from html on a css-template which would meet my two simple conditions above (multi-language and SEF-friendly URLs). Do you think drupal/or any other CMS could work for this? The multi-language on drupal still seems to be a mess.
By Sajal Kayan on Jun 18, 2008 | Reply
@Max : I dont know much about the miltilingual capabilities of drupal, it is one thing i never really looked into and would be exploring more for a potential client. The SEO aspects of Drupal is amazing. You have full control of the neat URL structure and even manually set URLs if you like. Joomla has OpenSEF which is kinda OK, but i believe it doesnt play well with joomfish.
My journey to Drupal is as follows.
1) Start building site in Joomla
2) Get frustrated and move to static HTML (generating the static files using a perl script)
3) Give up and move to Drupal
4) Lived happily ever after
By Max Stirner on Jun 19, 2008 | Reply
thanks for your response. am on drupal 6 now, the multi-language support is still not fully native (i18n module), but it all appears to work out of the box as it were. there are still some minor quirks though.
By Przemek on Jul 24, 2008 | Reply
I like Drupal and I like Joomla. Joomla lacks taxonomy, for me it’s a real pain. But hey, com_taxonomy, a free extension, is under development (http://iteaconsulting.com/joomla-taxonomy), that will go beyond Phil’s tag module, and will be free as beer. Efforts are to make it extendible (you can taxonomize anything, content to users) and efficient. It’s still under development, but who knows, maybe it’ll live up to the promise? I really hope so (at least until native taxonony in joomla is properly done).
By vaibhav dugar on Mar 12, 2009 | Reply
dude, whats the final verdict.? considering its been a while of experimentation for u… i am planning to start using some CMS that requires less tweaking of code etc.. suggest? mail me if possible.. thanks
By Sajal Kayan on Mar 31, 2009 | Reply
Vaibhav : The final verdict is all CMSs suck… or rather none seem to fit my bill… Right now playing with the web framework Django… but its not for end users…
For CMS final verdict :-
If u want something thats easy n works nice : Wordpress (esp if u wanna blog too)
If u want something robust n usefull for most purposes : Drupal
If u want something that look good and you go “wow” when u login as admin : Joomla (but its a resource hog n not very usable)
By Mike Fatica on Apr 25, 2009 | Reply
Interesting article. I completely agree that Joomla’s section and category design paradigm is useless, except for, as Amy mentioned, organizing articles on the back-end to make it easier for administrators.
But let’s be pragmatic: Drupal is better at some things than Joomla, but the opposite is also true. So let’s sink the fanboy zealotry and focus on what solutions work for what problems.
By Antti on May 8, 2009 | Reply
Today I have tested both joomla and drupal. At first I tested joomla. For me it was hard to understand sections, gategorys and other things. It was really hard to manage example pages. When I removed example pages, I couldn’t do a new front page. After that I tested drupal. It was great, I didn’t need to read any help-file. Now I have a working website on my localhost.
By E-procurement software on Oct 24, 2009 | Reply
Joomla is the best! Promise!