mywebsite = DRUPAL 6.2 ¦¦ JOOMLA 1.5.2

[charlee]

Hi, I have been looking for some info in the last couple of days and I need to make a final decision for a project I need to start this week for a client. He wants a media website with a forum, video gallery, photo gallery, a beautiful design with standard coding and web 2.0 concepts.

Now, I thought a CMS was the best choice for this kind of project but well diversity is still part of the internet and I want to make sure I will make the right choice. After looking for some information these 2 CMSs came up as the most-popular ones and with an extensive community of developers:

JOOMLA & DRUPAL

The latest releases were DRUPAL 6.2 & JOOMLA 1.5.2, the thing is that before these new version of each CMS were available I thought DRUPAL was a better option but now they both were upgraded and I can see a very extensive change in Joomla mainly in his architecture, Id like to know some opinions from developers who have tried these platforms and accordind to the kind of site I want, which option you think will better fit my project.

thanks in advance.

[mirozake]

My two cents from research and a little hands on: I concluded that Drupal and Joomla were really close. The thing that separated Joomla was that it had modules I wanted to use (i.e. Community Builder), which was a big deal to me because having a bigger base of different modules I can plug him gives me more flexibility. On the other hand, if you have one specific project and you have what you need with either. I'm not sure that you could go wrong either way.

[rogerd]

Drupal has a reputation for having a slightly longer learning curve than Joomla, but I'm not sure how significant that is with the current versions.

[g1smd]

Watch out for the massive Duplicate Content issues inherent in Joomla.

[charlee]

so you think is easier to learn joomla than drupal? What im most concerned about is the template, i will create my own design of course for this project and its going to be full of css rules for the whole site. Im not sure which CMS is faster to add a customized template at :$. Im studying both right now, cause im late for the project but some hacks will be really useful.

thanks for the comments

[cmarshall]

I'm assuming that you have decided that a LAMP approach is what you need (PHP). Look at the included templates. I know nothing about either, but I've customized a lot of CMSs. Some use Smarty, some rely on a PHP file to generate code, while others have a template with placeholders (or a combination of all 3).

Just my $0.02.

[ergophobe]

>>What im most concerned about is the template

I don't know joomla, but I've used the drupal, wordpress, Gallery and modx templating systems fairly recently and for me drupal is actually the easiest, but all are pretty straighforward. Some (e.g. Gallery) require you to learn Smarty, whereas others just use PHP vairables and functions (e.g. Wordpress). Drupal lets you choose which way you want to do it.

So Joomla may or may not be easier to theme, but drupal is definitely easy.

Where people get hung up on drupal, and what will be more important in your decision, is more the site architecture end - drupal basically imposes no limits on depth of navigation, how menus relate to page relate to URLs relate to different content types relate to what it is you're actually trying to achieve. If you need the flexibility, drupal is for you. If you don't, then you need to decide on other factors and by offering you fewer choices, Joomla makes things a bit easier to get started.

The theme is typical. Drupal tries to be templating system agnostic. So you can actually use smarty, phptemplate (the default), PHPTAL, or some others in older versions of Drupal, or write a new templating engine if that floats your boat. Always flexible, but also more complex.

The default is phptemplate, which is basically a variable/function substitution engine that avoids having to learn Smarty markup as well as the added overhead of such a templating engine. If you know enough PHP to recognize a variable ($variable), the default engine is very intuitive for basic theming.

... but then again, it's drupal, so you can move on to advanced theming, where the theme calls custom fuctions that override all kinds of behaviors, but you do NOT have to learn that.

Typical of drupal, there are always nine ways to do anything. The answer to many questions is "it depends". If you're happy to find one way that works and then move on, that's not to bad. If you get hung up on the optimal way to do something... it gets painful (and yes I like drupal and use it by default unless I have a reason not to).