Apologies for this questions, I can imagine to comes up in conversation all the time.

I was after some very strong biased opinions about Joomla vs Drupal.

I started using Joomla when I first dwelled into CMS. Recently Drupal has caught my attention and I am thinking of giving it a try. I do not want to get stuck in a situation where half my work is in Joomla and the other half in Drupal or other Content Management Systems.

My main CMS/ Web Site goals are:

1.) Simple Web Site (Small Business)
2.) Social Website (eg. Car Club, forum)
3.) Reviews Site (lots of vids)

Any opinions and words of advise are very appreciated.

My short answer is that if you want a plug-and-play site, then Joomla is the better choice in terms of ease of setup, choice of addons, etc. An expert will be able to use either well in the entry level space, but the novice (aka, usually meaning the customer) will find Joomla much easier.

In terms of choice and ease of customisation of templates, Joomla wins hands down.

Drupal's sweet spot, in my opinion, is where you are constructing a customised web site solution with very specific goals in mind (you are trying to create the next YouTube or Basecamp). But having said that, Joomla competes equally well with it in that space as well so either is a good choice.

Culturally, and as a generalisation, Joomla tends cater more for the needs of the user (while making life easy for the developer), and Drupal more for the needs of the developer. What that means is when we do an upgrade, we like to keep things backward compatible to the last version as much as possible. Joomla's culture is also geared toward commoditisation of extensions (we are more like Apple) whereas Drupal leans more towards implementing whole, custom solutions extended from the base product. Neither is necessarily right or wrong, just difference approaches. The end result though is that Joomla's market starts at the very bottom of the pile whereas Drupal starts a bit off the bottom (and for comparison, you need a ladder to get to where Typo3 starts).

That's my opinion but for empirical data we can look at the SXSW shootout between Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress. While the judges did not have the courage to call anything but a tie (rimshot), it was clear from the evaluation criteria that Joomla was the best system. Certainly it stood out as taking the least time to build (aka, best productivity score).

For your site examples #1 is definitely Joomla's sweet spot. For #2 you want to be looking at Kunena for a forum based site and probably Jomsocial for a social network. For #3, there are many commenting systems (shameless plug: jxtended.com/extensions/comments.html) and you've got plugins like AllVideos or similar to easily handle the video content.

In all cases, you will be able to find off-the-shelf Joomla templates that suit easily.

Finally my last comment would be if you don't want to tinker with the code, go Joomla. If you do want to tinker with the code then either is a good choice but I would argue that Joomla's code is easier to learn and develop with than Drupal's.

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Andrew Eddie
Core Joomla Developer
www.theartofjoomla.com

First of all, i would like to thank you for your reply, it was very insightful and really took some stress out of my day. Thank you for the clear explanation and your point of view, it was much appreciated


Although Drupal was tempting, I have decided to stick with Joomla. I became aware of Drupal's Coding requirements very early and became quickly disgruntled.

I have to agree that Joomla was nice and easy to understand as I was able to develop my skills at a quick pace. It didn't take long before I started to reach out for all kinds of fabulous Joomla extensions that surprisingly actually satisfied my requirements. Love the variety of templates available and the ability to design a professional Site in a short amount of time.

I had two follow up queries on developing a Web Site and experiences/opinions:

1.) Hosting a Site: Web Host (eg. www.bluhost.com) vs VPS (eg. www.mammothvps.com.au)

2.) foundation for developing a Web Site design: Local Virtual Machine (eg. JumpBox www.jumpbox.com/promo-joomla) vs unpublished directly on the Web Host

Not sure about the web hosting, maybe start a new thread asking about that.

with regards to developing, you may want to use something like xampp, to test locally or a local VM works well to, the local VM would probaly be good to test with before going live to make sure the target enviroment is as close to your hosting as possible to detect errors.

So you could do a developmenet site(xampp), staging site(VM), live site (Host)

I haven't had much experience with Drupal but I can say that Joomla will accomplish all of the things you mentioned with ease.

Needless to say that I have been thinking about the same issues in recent months - Should I offer Wordpress sites if someone wants a blog, should I offer Drupal sites and so on.

But after working with Joomla more and more - I am now going to focus entirely on it as my CMS of choice, in fact when a client came to me recently wanting a Wordpress site for a blog - I convinced them to go with Joomla (even though I've built a few Worpress sites) and they haven't looked back. JComments is a great comments system for Joomla btw.

Great job Andrew and the team behind Joomla - it's bloody brilliant and getting better all the time.