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Warning: This post is slightly longish.
Drupal is often described by the Drupal community as a Content Management Framework as opposed to a CMS. Drupal’s power comes from its more abstracted approach to handling web content and functionality.
Joomla on the other hand is pitched as being a one-stop solution for everything from simple websites to complex corporate applications. It’s easy to install, simple to manage, and reliable.
Joomla and Drupal have many things in common. Both are market leaders amongst all the open-source CMS solutions available. Both these open-source CMS's are PHP-based, using MySQL database with GPL license (open source). The question as to which is better is best answered by analyzing which one suits the website requirements better.
Target Audience
Drupal is for web sites that are "highly dynamic" in nature, "community-driven," with lots of interaction. Whereas Joomla is better-suited for websites that are more static in nature.
Support for Multiple Websites
Drupal supports multiple site instances (and sub-domains) with only one instance, on the other hand Joomla can support only one site per instance. To realize sub-domains using Joomla, separate instances of Joomla (for each sub-domain) are kept in the main Joomla directory on the hosting server. But this solution is known to create problems in certain cases.
SEO friendliness
Drupal 6.x and Joomla! 1.5.x both support Search Engine friendly URLs. Drupal provides Pathauto(extended functionality) for search friendly URLs support, while Joomla includes this as part of the core functionality. Similarly editing met-tags is also provided with Joomla core as opposed to Drupal, where you would be required to install modules such as, ‘Meta Tags’.
Understanding the CMS
The Joomla interface is easy to understand for non-geeks and newbies. But the flexibility Drupal provides comes at an added cost as it makes it much tougher to understand how the system works. The learning curve for understanding and operating the system is much steeper in Drupal as compared to Joomla.
Usability
Joomla wins hands down when it comes to a clean user & site administration interface. The Joomla administration navigation is elegant and much simpler than Drupal. This is the prime reason for the focus on usability during the ongoing development of Drupal 7.
Content Hierarchy
Drupal provides a flexible content structure, which is also extensible. Joomla supports only three levels, section/category/article, however flexible category structure support is planned for Joomla 1.6. At export2web, we have extended the Joomla content structure to four levels.
Usability
Joomla wins hands down when it comes to a clean user & site administration interface. The Joomla administration navigation is elegant and much simpler than Drupal. This is the prime reason for the focus on usability during the ongoing development of Drupal 7.
Extension Development (extending core CMS)
The Flexibility & Power of Drupal gives it a huge advantage over Joomla. You simply can’t get that flexibility with Joomla. Joomla developers design around their own paradigm with little flexibility. You can get up and running much quicker with Joomla, but you will hit the wall sooner or later.
PS. We port legacy websites to Joomla and Drupal. Drop an email at sales@export2web.com for any assistance in this regard.
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