The choice of the platform for your website is often no less important than building a foundation of a house. It provides a framework for later developments, so you need to think twice before making the final decision. The thing is, there are multiple aspects to consider when looking for a viable solution to best serve for your web project. Let’s take a look at some of them, to help you choose among Joomla, Drupal, WordPress since they’re sharing the top three positions on the CMS arena.
Type of Website
Not long ago, this criteria formed a distinction between Joomla, Drupal, WordPress. WordPress – for blogging, Drupal – for complex enterprise portals, Joomla – for community websites. Now, however, things have changed. WordPress is still choice #1 among them for blogs, but you can also use it for other types of website, like news, presentation website, online store, and even discussion board (using specialised plugins).
As to Joomla and Drupal, they are suitable for complex projects, like social network sites, corporate portals, membership sites with various access levels etc, but can do a good job with simple ones too.
Learning
If you’re planning on building a website with no help from others, think about how much experience you’ve got.
In case it’s your first website – WordPress is the most plausible choice, as it is easier to set up and get the hang of the major functions.
If you’ve got some experience with websites, think about Joomla, its learning curve is a bit steeper than that of WordPress, but there’s extensive documentation and support, so you’ll soon manage it.
Drupal is known as a “developers’ choice”. Basically, if you don’t have any advanced technical skills, it’s better to choose a less complex platform or – be ready to plunge into coding and scripting for quite some time. You can get precious experience and use the knowledge in the future, anyway.
Ease of Use & Administration
WordPress wins here – its interface is so intuitive you can start off literally right away.
Drupal is the least user-friendly out of the box, but has more capabilities. Joomla falls in between, being not quite so comprehensive as WordPress, but more so compared to Drupal.
Even if you’re going to use a hired help for website building, decide what complexity level is acceptable for your website administrator.
Extensibility
With time, you might want to expand your website or add more functionality. How easy it can be done using the three CMSs in question? Here, their popularity is a favourable factor. Each of them has a big community of users, who contribute numerous extensions (many of them are free) to help your site do much more than it originally could.
As to the number of plugins available, WordPress features the most, with Joomla following. Installing the plugins is usually very simple. Drupal doesn’t have so many ready-made plugins, because it’s mostly used for highly customised sites and many plugins are developed for a specific purpose and not available for public usage.
Willing to Change your CMS Platform?
Above are the basic tips that may be helpful in making a selection for your website platform. There are hundredth of other factors that might need to be considered too. Fortunately, unlike the house foundation, it’s possible to change your website CMS platform, even after the site has been built. It’s possible to switch to your website data to WordPress, Joomla or Drupal fast and with no downtime.
Here’s What You Can Migrate To WordPress, Joomla or Drupal
CMS2CMS online service is here to handle the migration automatedly and save you from the hassle. After you register an account, there are only 4 steps separating you and your prospective website. So, don’t wait, set up your FREE Demo migration and get the website you desire faster than you can imagine!
No doubt that WordPress has developed from being only a blogging CMS to now also compete with Joomla and Drupal on more complex sites. However I still think that Joomla is easier to use on more complexe websites. But if you look on the article below, WordPress is actually today the most used CMS in most countries.
http://webmaster-land.com/what-is-the-best-cms-content-management-system/
I would be inclined to say no. Other factors must be
contributing to you increased hits. Matt Cutts says that google does not
care what you use to build the site.
I suspect that the drupal site was indexed and and its mere
coincidence that this occurred when you migrated to wordpress. Though
this is just my suspicion.
How long has the site been going?
Was it drupal only before wordpress? Are you certain that drupal was set
with all the various SEO tweaks you have in WP? (I thought that it was
drupal lacked the plethora of SEO plugins such as All-in-one seo pack
etc that you use – canonical et)
Did you have the same socialization buttons and twitter features then as now?
I hope you have Google Analytics of then and now also so you can see where these links referred from.
I for example came here from cake bakery after reading a splendid
article (table-less passwords) then read 2 more posts whilst here.
Anyway it will be interesting to see what you find. (I had always
written off drupal myself- but that is just me being judgemental :})
Hi. I’m new in this and would like some advice.
I have a web site, based in Linux / Tomcat / MySQL. This site have been working for some years.
I need to develop an application to show part of the contents of the site in mobile devices, including database contents, html, photos and video files.
The question is: Is WordPress suitable for develop this application?
Thank you.
Antolo Diaz
Hi Antolo! Thanks for stopping by! Your question is very specific and I think you will get the answer at the specialized WordPress support forum, as we deal mostly with website migration issues.
Good luck to you!
I always prefer Drupal because in my personal view, Drupal sites are way more work to build, maintain, and update, and take far more server resources. When I host a low traffic Drupal site for example, on the basis that it should be really fast, I charge five times what I charge for a low traffic WordPress site, and consider that a good deal. In building a Drupal site commercially I consider that you can almost ad a naught to the price for Drupal, and similarly with the effort, skill, time, debugging etc that goes into Drupal. There are some very solid technical, organizational and economic reasons why Drupal makes seriously good sense, especially at the enterprise level.
My starting point is that every site I do is Drupal or WordPress, and the test is as follows. Drupal offers infinite possibilities including:
1) Different layout on every page using blocks (with far greater flexibility with some additional modules such as panels).
2) Programmatically assembled collections of content on a custom basis (with Views).
3) Social groups (with Organic Groups).
4) Decent discussion board.
5) Online store.
6) Mapping tools.
7) Multi-lingual tools.
8) Infinite customizable user roles (WordPress has more than one role).
9) Customizable content types (WordPress has two).
If you need any of the above I would be tending towards Drupal. If a site does not need any of the above, I advise a client that they can save themselves a lot of cost, time and heartache by going with WordPress. I tell them they can do the same in Drupal but they should be prepared to expect hosting, maintenance, site building and customization, and debugging, will cost a LOT more time and/or money in Drupal.
Thanks, Saurabh! You did a very thoughtful overview and I totally agree that before making the final decision you should choose what options you need in the CMS platform.
Extensibility: (as of 3/19/2013)
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ – 24,081 plugins
http://drupal.org/ – 20,962 Modules
http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/maps-a-weather/weather/most-reviewed – 6108 extensions
🙂
Thanks for this data, Natsu. We’ll make sure to use it in the following posts.
Hi Antolo,
Seeing as your website is Java (I’m assuming this is the case because of TomCat) based you may have a few problems with compatibility between WordPress and the current site. WordPress has its own database structure. It can read from other database tables and construct pages that way, but you would need to create a custom theme for that really and you would probably be working around the default WordPress structure, rather than with it.
Also, it would depend what you mean by application. If you just mean a mobile based version of the site you could do that with WordPress. You could also do this by applying a responsive theme to the site that you already have, which would probably be much easier and cheaper.
Hi Dan, thanks for your comments. What I want to do is a mobile version of the site, rather simple, to show people some data that is located in an existing MySQL database. Can you tell me a little bit more what is a “responsive theme”? Thanks.