After a 4 year love affair with Joomla! we have given in to temptation and begun romancing Drupal.
We have not by any means stopped loving Joomla – we have merely widened our horizons and now we are having two love affairs instead of one.
So what made us want to scratch the itch and try something different?
We have developed close to 50 Joomla web sites over the last 4 years. Some of them have withered and died, most are still up and running and some of them are award winning sites. Undoubtedly, Joomla! has been our bread and butter and we have many happy clients.
The last 12 months have been quite critical and many companies have opted for their first ever web site and many others realized that a static site was not the way to get a competitive edge.
Choosing a CMS site has been a financially rewarding decision for many of our clients. Our advice was always ‘Go with Joomla!’ – and go with Joomla! they did.
‘Navega Bem – Web Design‘ has grown both in expertise and in size. Subsequently, the type of projects that we develop have also increased in size and we find ourselves being asked to do bigger and more complex projects. It’s this shift in our development diversity that brought us face to face with the seductive Drupal.
Being commissioned to do a large property portal and other similarly complex sites that require granular access control and are forecast to carry heavy traffic – we saw that Drupal was the prefect solution.
So what are we now recommending to our clients?
Surprisingly, it’s not a case of which is better; Drupal or Joomla! Both open source solutions have distinct advantages and disadvantages, so each and every project is analyzed on its own merit and conclusions are then drawn. We can’t say that one is better than the other. They are both excellent CMS tools and are made for different things. They are both reasons why commercially developed CMS solutions have increasingly more and more limitations.
Joomla is very straight forward and easy to use out of the box solution (the term ‘easy’ being relative).
Drupal can do what Joomla! does – but the learning curve is much steeper. Drupal is however, a web application framework that offers massive extra scalability.
We were initially reluctant to go for Drupal. We did feel a little disloyal to Joomla! But we are now enjoying them both. The fact that Drupal has now won the best open source PHP CMS for the second year in a row – made it all the more sexy.
What are the big boys out there using?
Well, the United Nations website runs on Joomla! The White House website runs on Drupal.
