Wordpress Joomla or Drupal

Wordpress Joomla or Drupal

Content Management System (CMS) websites with dynamic content that can be updated with ease are increasingly becoming a popular choice to build websites. When scouting for CMSs there are a plenty of out-of-the-box solutions out there. So, once you decide to use a CMS to build your website, which one do you choose? In this article I will focus on – WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. These three are the most widely talked about and used open source CMS packages. Also, all the above three CMS are pretty stable, have extensive support and large user groups, and they are all feature rich with access to number of readymade templates and plugins. I usually use Joomla but I also use WordPress and Drupal all this CMS is powerful..

You may choose:

WordPress – for corporate “billboard” sites, wordpress is the most apt. If there’s less interactivity and more browsing and information dissemination, we’ve found wordpress to be the best for such sites. It has a friendly backend panel with all the tools you need to run a small site/blog and has a few added extras to keep things interesting. It is a powerful CMS don’t get us wrong, it just doesn’t have everything you need for long term/heavy development.

Very simply put WordPress is very user friendly to install and have it running as a blog. Any blogger with little or no technical know how can set WordPress up pointing to his domain name and have it up and running in a flash. But, the downside is that WordPress allows no real flexibility in accommodating anything more than blogging. It is not very developer friendly either.

Joomla! – Joomla! would say is the most client friendly of all the CMSs. The backend panel is soo friendly with all the “managers”. Article Manager, Category manager, Module manager. It’s a bit difficult to grasp at first since even menus are modules and you would think of using Menu Manager to add a menu but apparently you do that in Module manager. However, if you have a client who wishes to only add articles and other content once in a while, this CMS is perfect. Just don’t give them 100% access to the back end. Content management only.

Joomla on the other hand can be used to develop a robust dynamic website. It goes beyond blogging and can be the ideal solution for building an e-commerce websites. The one serious drawback with Joomla is that it is not easy to customize. So if you are looking to customize the look and feel, the functionality and the operability of the website it may not be easy to accomplish.

Drupal –  It has very impressive community backing and you never have any questions unanswered in the long run. However, it is not the CMS for people new in the field. I highly recommend Drupal only for extensive web development particularly web applications and very dynamic websites. It’s not friendly for clients as well since the backend is quite a doozey to operate.

Drupal is a highly customizable CMS. A web developer with background in PHP can modify and customize Drupal like putty clay. The downside is that if you have little PHP knowledge then you will have to rely heavily on a developer or a development team and it might end up becoming an expensive proposition. But, if your website requires content contributions from many people and has a wide audience Drupal would be the ideal solution.

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