The epic battle of the PHP-based open-source CMS’s. And the winner is….
Drupal! Here’s why:
I spent 5 hours this morning trying to get just one simple, clean page up with Joomla with a google map embedded (using the full API, not just a linked frameset). Uhm, 5 hours later, I had managed to find a theme that wasn’t sensory overload without paying 49.99, and was still trying to figure out how to remove all the stupid polls and user login boxes and etc, etc, etc, without f-ing up the formatting. All I want is one page, two columns with margins done, a header menu, and a good color scheme… that’s it! Why is the most basic thing so hard? Isn’t that why I’m using a CMS… to make the simple things trivial?
I took a breather, thought outside the box yadda yadda yadda…. and tried cvs’ exporting Drupal to my dev environment. I was immediately impressed at how clean Drupal is. Rather than give you everything you might want up front, they only give you what you will need. You can add more as you see fit. The default css and styles are perfect – simple, clean, clear, and impressively customizable. I had my g-maps working a few hours later.
They say Drupal is better for developers and Joomla for non-techies. I dunno about the second half of that, but this developer definitely agrees with the first half.
Try not installing sample content if you try J!, again. Drupal’s great, too, though and you should be very happy with that choice.
Curious… why wasn’t WordPress considered? PHP, and it does a lot more than blogging alone. I have not compared the three directly, and not sure what the criteria was. Just interested in your decisionmaking.
Hope all is well,
John
@John – I thought about going with WordPress. The site I’m working on though, won’t have a blogging component…. so that being WordPress’s fuerte, I figured better to go with something that’s not focused on the blogging. Though I think it could have done the job fine.