Excellira - 1:53 am on Apr 28, 2009 (gmt 0)

If you want to quickly put up a simple, yet inexpensive, stock-theme site that looks professionally designed then Drupal would not be the choice. Style is not what Drupal is all about. It was clearly built by engineers. Joomla on the other hand was, in my opinion, built by designers. As a result, their respective approaches appear to have been guided by that difference. Though there is no reason that Drupal can’t be implemented with cutting-edge design. It would however have to be custom designed and coded.

To keep a constant theme, the learning curve on Drupal is steep. It takes 40 hours to learn something that will take 10 minutes to resolve. Having 10 or 100 methods of accomplishing a single task does make it more complicated to select an approach and then learn how to implement it. And it isn’t always consistent where to establish configurations settings. In some cases it might be in permissions, in the next it might be in content types, the next in a module or perhaps a comination. There’s no one place to set configuration options.

Drupal is complicated. If you’ve work with it enough, you’ll appreciate the flexibility the complexity provides. I would also classify it as a Content Management Framework rather than a Content Management System. You have to build what you want. Right out of the box though it has greater functionality than most other systems and those functions are much more tightly integrated.

Where does it excel? If you have a large site or have complicated user controls. In the forums I’ve seen sites referenced that had 500,000 or more pages. You can’t do that with every CMS. Also, if you’re building a commercial portal, Drupal is robust enough to handle the functionality and traffic. We’re building our new site with Drupal because there is an ecommerce and membership component. These are areas where Drupal thrives. So far I haven’t found anything that it couldn’t do. I can’t say for any other CMS/CMF I’ve worked with. Though I do believe that the site would have taken 1/3 of the time in another CMS. To be fair, Drupal was the only major CMS that could do the job.

Another area where Drupal excels is in modules. Drupal modules interact much better than the modules (plugins, etc) on any other CMS I've worked with. With other systems if you add the wrong combination of add-ins the site breaks. Determining the correct combination on those platforms isn't easy.

Though the addition of a module may reveal a dependency on one or perhaps several additional modules which in some cases may also require additional modules.

Here is an interesting comparison between Joomla, WP and Drupal: [cmsshowdown.com...]
Note the development time that each required. The “simple” application took significantly longer than the more complex CMSs.