Drupal vs Joomla vs Wordpress

[rpeters]

I decided to make this post to help people to make a good decision for a cms for their churches. I have seen many posts of different cms's and the ones they use. For those who do not know what cms is, it is a platform that someone can create a website. I could have blogged about this, but I thought it would be important to see why certain churches have chosen one over the other. I use both Drupal and Joomla to create church websites. It all depends what the church needs and wants. I use Drupal for my community based church websites and websites that will have multiple people adding content and I want to restrict people from adding other content. I use Joomla for informational based websites. What is the difference? There is a huge difference! Informational website just relays information about your website. This I feel this kind of website is dying and in 5-10 years will be nonexistent. A community based website has information plus things like blogs, communication between members. What are your thoughts?

 

[Semper Fidelis]

I've built websites on all 3 platforms. Joomla has great community support but I've found it very time consuming to get it up and running and configured. Drupal is nice but the module support is hit and miss. I've also found that the whole taxonomy and category aspects of Drupal are very limiting.

For my purposes, I've found Wordpress to be the easiest to configure and turn over to people for Church websites. It's far more than simply an informational platform. Years ago it was only really good at blogging but it's morphed quite a bit into a very powerful CMS. The community support and breadth of plugins is unmatched as far as I'm concerned.

 

[LeeD]

+1 for Wordpress as well. It is quite powerful yet simple to use (even for a guy like me with no coding background).

 

[rpeters]

I guess I have leaned more toward Drupal in the past for one reason the resources to learn Drupal is amazing. There are tutorials galor! I agree that Joomla's support is hit and miss. I understand how someone might say their modules are hit and miss. If there is a problem with a module I normally fix it for my needs. Have you have any problems with Wordpress?

 

[Semper Fidelis]

I guess I have leaned more toward Drupal in the past for one reason the resources to learn Drupal is amazing. There are tutorials galor! I agree that Joomla's support is hit and miss. I understand how someone might say their modules are hit and miss. If there is a problem with a module I normally fix it for my needs. Have you have any problems with Wordpress?

I have problems with all Open Source stuff. I'm a tinkerer but I don't have a bottomless amount of time to mess with things. Wordpress has a module for the kinds of things I want in a Church website. I have an active Drupal site but I often find the modules to be weaker and the WYSIWYG support of Drupal drives me crazy. I also find the way it implements clean URL's to be very cumbersome. Furthermore, if I have to upgrade modules, I have to download them, gunzip, and untar them and then upload them via FTP. In Wordpress, I can upgrade plugins at the click of a button and upgrade many at a time.

I can't say I have zero problems with Wordpress but it's head and shoulders above Drupal for me in terms of functionality, user support, plugins, and ease of maintenance. As for Joomla, I've tried a couple of times and just don't have the patience to configure all the options it has nor am I patient enough to learn something new right now with all the things I have going on.

 

[rpeters]

I guess it boils down to how much control you want and what you want to do with your site. Since I am a developer, I want full control and Drupal gives me that in a cms. I totally get Wordpress is easier to use. In Drupal, they have limited the modules by CCK, Views, Panels, etc.. I totally with their editors they need serious work. Have you checked out Drupal 7?

 

[Semper Fidelis]

Well, you mentioned that you were talking about CMS's for Churches and most Churches don't have guys that are developers. While I am comfortable around programming I don't do it enough to keep up with it and don't have the time. I used to be very warm to Drupal (back in 4.x) after I decided that Scoop was just too restrictive for what I was trying to do. At the time (about 4 years ago) my goal was to create a community based site like DailyKos (without all the liberal stuff). This was when that kind of thing was starting to catch on. solideogloria.com has run in Drupal for years but it was never really a big site (which I'm fine with). People can still sign up but I mostly use it to post the occasional sermon. Conceptually, I liked Drupal but when I tried to build another site in it for paleo-conservatives it proved to be very difficult for people to do a lot of things they wanted to do. One of those things was categorizing things in such a way that it could build a dynamic menu. I still use the Category module but I'm never sure if that developer is ever going to give up on it. If he does then I'm pretty much out of luck given its complexity. Drupal has taxonomy built in but that proves difficult for novices to understand (in other words, your typical Church staff). I've found that building a CMS-based website for a Church really needs a smooth way to Categorize because sermons and teaching and events can be easily broken into those categories. Taxonomy just doesn't do it.

I even built a Drupal website for Fred Greco years ago and, at the time, I thought it was pretty straightforward. His Church didn't share that optimism. At the time, Wordpress was just starting to emerge out of the blogging only paradigm and we were able to patch together various plugins to make it useful. Now, the situation is completely different and Wordpress has everything that Drupal had back then and even more so.

It's my opinion that Wordpress has left Drupal far behind for consideration as a Church CMS platform. If you're a full time developer I imagine there might be some advantages to Drupal but Wordpress has the ability to do articles, blogs, multiple authors, categorization, forums, and everything that I can think of that made Drupal or Joomla the CMS of choice for me.

 

[rpeters]

Very good pone! I used to use primarily Drupal. Then I started to explore Joomla, I like it, but it still has its limitation. I think wordpress is good, but if you start to get a large community on your site Wordpress, just will not do. I agree that the idea of taxonomy is hard for them to understand maybe it should be renamed. Drupal 7 has really made leaps and bounds you should check it out!

 

[SolaScriptura]

It's like you guys are speaking Martian or something.

 

[rpeters]

Sorry

 

[Covenant Joel]

I concur with the majority of these here about WordPress. I use it for numerous things, as it is quite powerful for its ease of use. I haven't used Drupal, but I have used Joomla, and I don't like the layout of it nearly as well. It's quite easy to have a community-based site on WordPress in my opinion as one can restrict roles and allow users to only post to certain areas, etc.

 

[rpeters]

It is always good to define terms because in the web world we could be talking about to different things. Joel, what do you mean about community sites? I do agree with you that Wordpress may be easier to set up for a community site than Drupal or Joomla, but the more concurrent users you have will have or the more users you have visiting your site the more you would need to move to Drupal.

 

[Semper Fidelis]

It is always good to define terms because in the web world we could be talking about to different things. Joel, what do you mean about community sites? I do agree with you that Wordpress may be easier to set up for a community site than Drupal or Joomla, but the more concurrent users you have will have or the more users you have visiting your site the more you would need to move to Drupal.

You would have to have a pretty gigantic site to scale past what Wordpress can support. Check out this site: WordPress Ecommerce a WordPress Shopping Cart Plugin. It has thousands of users.

I've heard Drupal can scale better but most Churches will never run into that problem.

 

[Covenant Joel]

It is always good to define terms because in the web world we could be talking about to different things. Joel, what do you mean about community sites? I do agree with you that Wordpress may be easier to set up for a community site than Drupal or Joomla, but the more concurrent users you have will have or the more users you have visiting your site the more you would need to move to Drupal.

In the context of what was said above, it just sounded like you meant a site where multiple users could add content and that the editable content could be restricted for various users or groups of users. That can be accomplished on WordPress.

If you're trying to set up a social network for a church or something like that, I wouldn't do it myself anyway. I'd just use one of the solutions that already exists for that.

 

[Edward]

Informational website just relays information about your website. This I feel this kind of website is dying and in 5-10 years will be nonexistent...What are your thoughts?

I disagree.

 

[rpeters]

Edward,
Why do you disagree?

 

[VictorBravo]

It's like you guys are speaking Martian or something.

Ha, Ben. I was following just fine until I came across this:

Very good pone!

I can't make that out at all. And Google is no help. I'm not ruling out a flatcake, but it might hint at taking over a project. Those are the best uses I can discern. There are very many bad uses.

So, Robert, clue us in! What are you talking about???

 

[rpeters]

Ha, Ben. I was following just fine until I came across this:

Very good pone!

I can't make that out at all. And Google is no help. I'm not ruling out a flatcake, but it might hint at taking over a project. Those are the best uses I can discern. There are very many bad uses.

So, Robert, clue us in! What are you talking about???

Sorry for the typo. pone = one

 

[jason d]

We used to use Joomla but I like Wordpress much more... for user interaction we just direct people to twitter and Facebook if they so choose to have that. Sovereign Joy Community Church | Keller, TX. is the site

 

[Edward]

Edward,
Why do you disagree?

Don't want to hijack your thread from your intended discussion of what platforms are best for your intended use. But there is still a need for static websites to convey information.

 

[rpeters]

Don't want to hijack your thread from your intended discussion of what platforms are best for your intended use. But there is still a need for static websites to convey information.

Your not hijacking the thread. I should have been more elaborate on what I mean by that statement. If all you do is convey information about your church than people will not get a picture of what your church is like. They need to know from your website what it would be like to come to your church. At the end of the day one has to ask, "has the website given the world a good picture what this church is like in vision and mission?" This means you have blogs, galleries, media, etc..and this is also showing what it is like to be apart of your church.