In my last article (Comparison of Drupal and Joomla) on Drupal and Joomla I mentioned I would try both as each has its advantages even though the results of the survey and analysis showed Drupal had the lead. This is a shorter article with my early experience with both. My trial isn’t finished as yet but I know some people have asked me how I have been going.

Joomla

My initial impressions of using Joomla to build a simple site were good. It seemed to have lots of features, an attractive administrative interface with numerous options and extensions. I was impressed, at first.

The trouble I had was trying to figure out how it all really fitted together. I certainly tried to use it with, admittedly with very little knowledge. However, I found its overall conceptual design didn’t quite fit with me, and I am not sure why. Perhaps it was just one of those subjective things. Some people like one thing, others like something else altogether.

Whatever the reason, I found I had to keep looking for things in the menu system and it seemed harder than I thought it would be to do some reasonably straight forward things. Now I know Joomla can do a great deal, but my trial was to just jump in with a little knowledge on both Joomla and Drupal, and using my software engineering background, to muddle through. Of course, I could buy 3 books on Joomla, study them, and do some amazing things but that isn’t what my trial was about for me.

If you want to read the online Joomla Getting Started Guide, click here.

The bottom line is that I found Joomla confusing, harder to do things than expected and hard to find good quality information on its internal conceptual design. I am sure Joomla has a lot of power, but I just couldn’t uncover it in the short time I allocated to each CMS for my trial. Certainly, there is a wide range of general information out there, its popularity is growing, there are a wide range of templates available and there are many good quality books on Joomla. But in my case, after my set period I stopped using Joomla and moved onto Drupal to see how far I could get in my Drupal and Joomla Comparison in a similar set time and with a similar lack of knowledge. I expected to have a harder time with Drupal based on what I had read in many articles.

Drupal

So how did I go?

Drupal is apparently really complicated according to various articles I have read. Apparently it is also hard to get good quality themes for it. And apparently, it takes forever to learn how to use. Apparently!

But I found none of that to be completely true. In fact to my surprise, I was able to do things quicker in Drupal than in Joomla. Why? I don’t know for sure because I know lots of people will say exactly the opposite and for them, they will be correct – it is all down to personal taste, experience, style, thought processes, requirements and so on. But personally, I found it easier to find good information in the Drupal.org website than on Joomla.org. For Drupal the forums were very good, and I was able to get more done in the same time with Drupal than Joomla.

I did have a fairly annoying problem in my initial Drupal set up, probably my fault or due to the way Fantastico set up the Drupal MySQL databases and the default parameters set for my host. One set of tables used the utf8_general_ci collation sequence and the other utf8_unicode_ci. The problem didn’t stop my site running but it did display the following warning messages which obviously are not acceptable to a finished site.

The error message was:
"user warning: Illegal mix of collations (utf8_general_ci,IMPLICIT) and (utf8_unicode_ci,IMPLICIT) for operation '=' query: SELECT aa.aid, a.type FROM trigger_assignments aa LEFT JOIN actions a ON aa.aid = a.aid WHERE aa.hook = 'cron' AND aa.op = 'run' ORDER BY weight in .............../test-drupal/modules/trigger/trigger.module on line 146."

This repeated for different pairs of tables on different line numbers.

At first sight this sort of problem would clearly throw many people, and perhaps it is that sort of thing that has put people off Drupal, but unfairly in my opinion. I was able to fairly quickly find just the right advice on how to deal with this in the drupal forums. Here is the answer: http://drupal.org/node/367376 and you will notice my comment in there as well. The key point for me was, yes, this shouldn’t have happened but I was able to quickly find the exact solution to a fairly tricky problem and learned from doing it. Did I cause it or Fantastico or both – I am not sure, but I know what to check for early next time.

Along the way I found a short interesting post on the difference between utf8_general_ci and utf8_unicode_ci in the MySQL Forums and another article called: “The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)”

In my case, I corrected my table collations making them consistent with each other and the problem went away.

Once my site was functioning fully I started to appreciate the flexibility and power provided by Drupal’s clean underlying architecture. It has been built from the ground up (where a LAMP stack is the ground) based on good Object Oriented Design principles. To get a sense of that for yourself check out the Drupal Overview article.

To make it easy for you to compare for yourself here are the links to the Joomla and Drupal “Getting Started Guides”. Have a look, try them for yourself, and let me know what you prefer, it will be interesting to see the different opinions.

• Joomla.org
• Joomla Getting Started Guide
• Drupal.org
• Drupal Getting Started Guide

However, the bottom line for me was I was able to do more in less time with Drupal.

So after this short trial and based on the results from my article: Comparison of Drupal and Joomla, and knowing that if I was going to spend time and effort on really getting to know a CMS that I wanted to be sure it would enable me to do whatever I wanted of it in the future, then I decided Drupal is for me. I know Joomla is great, so don’t flame me if you love Joomla, but for me Drupal is my choice for most of my sites. For blogs I will probably continue to use WordPress as I am doing for this blog, perhaps in the future I will use Drupal for that as well.

So having made that decision I then spent time doing something radical for most engineers, I thought I might buy a book/manual or three and actually read them to learn how to use Drupal . (Ok, I confess, I actually buy lots of books and read all the time.)

Here is what I selected to cover all my needs for now, and so far these books are definitely proving to be well worth while. If I had to recommend just one, it would be the first, Using Drupal.

1. Using Drupal
2. Pro Drupal Development
3. Front End Drupal

Joomla Templates and Drupal Themes

Before, I finish let’s talk a little about Templates and Themes. A common point that many make, and it also came out in my Comparison of Drupal and Joomla, is that Joomla themes look better than those for Drupal.  So is that really true?  Well, only to a certain extent, but not as much as you might have thought.

There are many many sites out there that offer either free or paid Drupal, Joomla and WordPress themes but one of the best I came across is ProWebCreative. I selected several of their free themes to try out and each worked well. The Free Joomla themes in general do look better than the Drupal ones, but not that much better. Why? I don’t know as yet but believe that the book Front End Drupal is written to partly address that very problem. But clearly, if you are prepared to pay just a little you can get Drupal Themes that look every bit as cool as Joomla Templates. Let’s just look at some examples. Check out the ProWebCreative Professional Joomla Templates and the Professional Drupal Themes. Did you expect them both to look like that?

To me both sets look great and far from what I had expected based on the many articles on the internet claiming that Drupla themes are ugly – they clearly are not. However, if you compare the Free Drupal themes and Free Joomla Templates on that site, and many others, there is a difference though perhaps not as much as you might have thought or expected. There are many many sites out there with themes to use and of course the very popular Artisteer program that enables you to create your own themes. You can download a free trial of that and try it out for yourself. Again, using my “Just close your eyes, and jump” quick approach to testing I found that Artisteer was indeed very powerful and within 5-10 minutes I was able to produce very attractive Themes/Templates for Drupal, Joomla and WordPress without having to reach for DreamWeaver or Photoshop. So unless you have Dreamweaver and Photoshop and know how to put together Drupal, Joomla or WordPress Themes then you may find Artisteer is the best compromise for you – its name says it all: “Art I Steer”.  But for complete control you certainly can’t go past the wonderful Adobe suite of programs if you really know how to use them and have the time. There are also many articles on the web that discuss using Dreamweaver and the rest of the Adobe CS4 suite to develop Drupal Themes. And I wonder how long it will take before Adobe starts including extensions to generate themes for the top 3 CMSs: WordPress, Joomla and my now favorite: Drupal.

Where next?

Well, for me, I have a site to build in Drupal in my limited spare time so it could take a week or three.

Until next time

Owen

I have been reviewing the web lately for information about Joomla and Drupal in particular as well as WordPress. I am about to develop a new site in my spare time, not that there is much of that, and want to move to a CMS rather than a more traditional website tool.  I am new to all three CMS’s and of course like most people would love to find the one tool to do it all, but of course that usually doesn’t happen.

First, here are some of the best articles I found comparing WordPress, Joomla and Drupal:

1. WordPress vs Joomla vs Drupal
2. Open Source Content Management Systems: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and Plone
3. How to Choose Between Joomla, Drupal and WordPress
4. Comparison Report: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and Plone
5. Drupal vs. Joomla: A frank comparison
6. SXSW Web Content Management System Showdown
7. Joomla vs Drupal: It’s still a problematic comparison
8. Comparison of the Capabilities and Features of Drupal, Joomla and WordPress
9. Drupal, Joomla or WordPress?
10. Open Source CMS
11. Drupal vs Joomla, WordPress & Proprietary CMS Products
12. Using open source software for a collaborative Web site, IBM Report (2006)
13. WordPress vs. Drupal
14. Drupal vs. Joomla Survey Analysis Part 1: Developers and Documentation

The last link is for an article that includes a survey administered by Webology eBusiness Solutions. They conducted a survey of Joomla and Drupal users predominantly asking each a set of questions covering things such as documentation, Search Engine Optimization, Quality of core code, template availability and more. In their article: “Survey Analysis Part 1: Developers and Documentation” they draw the following key conclusions:

• “In terms of selecting a CMS, these results suggest that Joomla is ideal for projects with smaller budgets, while Drupal may better suit larger projects. In our survey Drupal users reported larger average budgets than Joomla users.”
• “Drupal meanwhile seems better suited for larger projects. Survey responses indicate that Drupal developers are more experienced, on average, than their Joomla counterparts. This seems to indicate that Drupal developers may be somewhat more capable of taking on larger projects. However, data from responses about the availability of qualified developers for each CMS cuts the other way. Respondents indicated that it is easier to find qualified Joomla developers. One interpretation is that once you find a Drupal developer she/he is likely to be more experienced than your average Joomla developer. This MAY indicate that Drupal would be a better choice for a larger project.”
• “Drupal outscored Joomla in all of the documentation related questions. Joomla also scored well on these questions; however, it requires improvement to match Drupal’s scores. An area where Joomla needs significant improvement is in the documentation of its modules”.

They will be publishing another article analyzing the whole survey they conducted but I can’t wait, so I will have to do some of my own analysis because I am still not sure whether to use Joomla or Drupal for my next site.  Another of their articles briefly discusses the “Cost Cutting Features of Content Management Systems” which is certainly one of the main reasons many people are turning to Open Source CMS’s.

The full survey results conducted by Webology eBusiness Solutions (and my compliments to them for getting some real data from real users) can be found here: “Drupal vs Joomla Survey Results”. Have a look at that and then read on here for some more analysis.

My Analysis of the Comparison of Drupal and Joomla Survey

To analyse the Webology eBusiness Solutions survey results further I am going to make two simplifications.

First, I am going to use only the opinions of the Drupal Users for Drupal, and only the Joomla Users for Joomla and ignore the rest. From the survey I can’t be sure if people who indicated they are Drupal users actually know much about Joomla or were just repeating hearsay or vice versa. I am not interested in people’s perceptions of the two systems but in real experience from actual users and developers. Though the communities would be very interested in the perceptions of the other.

Second, rather than try and weight the “Strongly Agree” answers more than the “Somewhat Agree” answers and so on, I will use a simple binary system.  I will add the values for “Strongly Agree” to those for “Somewhat Agree” and call those “Good” or “Yes – Satisfactory”, and add the values for “Somewhat Disagree” and “Strongly Disagree” and call those “Bad” or “No – Not Satisfactory”.  This will give a more balanced and conservative result than if I had weighted the answers but will be sufficient to draw some conclusions as you see below.

In addition, I have inverted some questions for consistency in the table. For example, instead of “The Core CMS has many bugs”, I have written that as “The Core CMS has few bugs” and swapped the “agree values” with “disagree” to get the same logical outcome. The numbers are the same but it makes for a consistent scoring down the columns, so Yes is Good, No is Not so Good. Those questions I have inverted are marked with an *.  You can check back to the original survey.

If you make those simplifications, add up the numbers, then the survey can be simplified to the following table. This makes it easier to make a fair comparison of Drupal and Joomla.

Conclusion of this Comparison of Drupal and Joomla.

From the simplified table above what conclusions can you draw?

Let’s look at the numbers first:

• There are 18 out of 42 Selection Criteria where Joomla and Drupal scored about the same.
• There are 7 criteria where Joomla was judged by Joomla users to be more satisfactory than Drupal users judged Drupal.
• But there are 17 criterion where Drupal users judged the Drupal CMS to be more satisfactory than the Joomla users judged the Joomla CMS.

On numbers alone Drupal wins for this survey. Of course it depends on what Selection Criterion are critical for your project. Any comparison of Drupal and Joomla needs to take into account your specific site or customer requirements.

Here are the areas where Joomla seems to be markedly stronger than Drupal

• Easy to create attractive websites
• Range of Themes
• Easy Interface for Non-technical people
• Easy to train clients to use
• Easy to find qualified Joomla developers

Here are the areas where Drupal seems to be markedly stronger than Joomla

• Documentation of Core and Modules
• Fewer bugs in the Core and Modules
• Social Networking Support
• SEO Support
• SSL Support
• Internationalization Support
• User Management and Permission Features
• External integration
• Quality of Add-ons for administrative functionality
• Easy to develop large complex websites
• Developers don’t need to invest time with extensions that don’t perform well

The choice is good one to have because either way Joomla or Drupal are great systems and for many people either will do what they need.

My first suggestion is to go through the 42 criteria and pick out the top say 5-10 that are important to you for your next site and then pick the CMS that excels in those categories. That means for one site you will choose Joomla while for another site you will choose Drupal and of course for some you will choose WordPress. The only drawback is the learning curve involved and perhaps the cost of supporting both Drupal and Joomla versus the benefits of using both. You also have to consider the long term problems you might have if your chosen CMS seems to do the job in the early stages but doesn’t scale up as your site grows and you want to add more and more features to it. All that depends on the size of your organisation and the type of sites you develop and support. But if you are building a 10 page simple site your choices are easier, or at least sometimes appear to be.

An important, but often neglected, point to consider certainly for larger sites where it certainly seems clear that Drupal wins is the cost of full life cycle support. Whenever a system is delivered, used and maintained for many years you have to factor in the full cost of delivering and supporting the system. The rule of thumb is that the cost of supporting, maintaining and enhancing a complex system after delivery is four times the upfront cost of the system!  For larger long term systems the upfront delivery cost is only 20% of the total lifetime cost of the product. So saving a few dollars on the upfront costs (20%) but losing a lot on the full life cycle support (80%) is not in fact the most cost effective approach.

It is important when choosing your CMS, or in fact any product for your business, to work out how long the website you are building is going to be around and how many features may be added to it over its full life. That consideration may in fact be the most important particularly for larger projects where lots of money is at stake. Have you ever had the experience of porting an old system to a new one? Whether it be websites, databases, financial systems, software rewrites to newer languages or whatever example you have no doubt there are lessons you learned from that about up front choices and the cost of life time support. What did you learn from those experiences? What would you make sure does and doesn’t happen next time? How could you minmize the cost of that again? Considering those things might help you make good choices about all your tools and in this case your CMS.

If you still can’t decide then my final suggestion for this article to help you decide is this: Spend the same amount of time, say two or three days (or if you can weeks) with each and work out which you are more comfortable with by building a similar simple site with each. There are things you will find that way that you can’t find by reading reviews. Find out what you personally like or dislike and will work for your business. Then use that one. In the overall scheme of things it won’t cost much compared with the full cost of your systems and then you will know what works for you.

Hope this helps you, I will write more on this as I use these CMS’s for my own sites. I am following my own advice and have started to build a site in Drupal and Joomla, and will document my experiences when done.

Having said all that it is clear that both Drupal and Joomla are great and (and I know I shouldn’t say this) here to stay and will continue to grow. But having seen a a few fads in the software industry come and go over the years I am certainly not going to predict anything except that CMSs will continue to get better and better. The fact that they are free, supported and so feature rich is a powerful statement of the benefits of the Open Source community – all of them in whatever camp they be.

Until next time

Owen

How many blogs are out there is a good question? Why am I adding another one? Perhaps an even better question is why are there so many blogs out there?

There is that old saying that there is a good book in everyone, perhaps we should change to “there is a good blog in everyone”. Well perhaps, perhaps not.  Maybe, there is a blog in everyone, whether it is good or not is another matter. The Guardian UK wrote about this late last year on their blog post entitled: “Literature is for everyone, writing isn’t.” Extending that to blogs isn’t too hard to do.

But let’s just look at the quantity and put aside the quality for the moment. How many blogs are there? Let’s consult the top of the blogging World: Technorati.

Technorati’s “State of the Blogosphere: 2008” report

“Technorati currently states it is tracking over 112.8 million blogs, a number which obviously does not include all the 72.82 million Chinese blogs.”

Check out the full article at this link:
BlogHerald: How many blogs are there?

Business Week has also looked into the Blog phenomena:
Business Week: Blogs will change your business

Technorati and others publish a catalog of blogs
Technorati: Blogs directory

Smartcompany Best Business Blogs
Smartcompany Best Business Blogs

And an interesting list of 100 Small Business related blogs
WebdesignSchools Guide: Top 100 Small business blogs

BlogWell has compiled a great list of useful resources for small business on the net
BlogWell: 100 useful web resources for small business and non profits

Just to simplify things here is another of Common Craft’s Great Videos: “Blogs in Plain English”

Until next time

Owen

At last I am moving my Blogger posts across to WordPress and amalgamating them into one blog instead of two. I had planned to do this several weeks ago but have been busy with some consulting and with our ecommerce web sites.

I have enjoyed using Google Blogger and found it very easy to use. In comparison with my limited experience to date, WordPress is more difficult though much more powerful. There are so many plugins for WordPress that unless you are careful you can end up installing lots of stuff you will never ever use.  But isn’t it great to have the range available? Though one thing concerns me is how well tested those plugins are, especially with each other? What do I mean by that?

If you check out the great WordPress site then you will find 5,583 plugins!  I haven’t yet looked into the software architecture behind WordPress but know that many great software engineers have, but my concern is that even if each of those 5,583 plugins works in isolation – do they still work when installed with any number of the other plugins?  The number of permutations and combinations would be staggering and so no doubt there are some incompatibilities as there are with any complex piece of software.  Considering the number of WordPress sites and articles out there I think it is safe to assume that the system is quite robust. I have tried to select plugins I think I will use, we will see over time just those I do use and those I do not.

There are also a great range of free templates/themes for WordPress which again adds to its almost irresistible appeal as a blogging and simple website platform. For this blog, I am still deciding which theme to use but to start I used one of the Dream Templates but am now trying the freely available ones. Expect the theme here to change a few times over the next few weeks until I settle on one that suits.  Let’s get back to the “Journey from Blogger to WordPress and almost back again!”.

I tried importing my old blogs directly into WordPress but no matter what I tried, the import simply did not happen.  It would stop at the first post, and I never found out why.  I read lots of websites and blogs but couldn’t find an answer that actually worked for me. I even tried exporting my Blogger posts to XML, but then couldn’t find a neat way to import them back into WordPress!  I made a suggestion to WordPress on their site and noticed a few others had the same problem so I was comforted that I wasn’t alone in these problems. So now I am resorting to selectively copying and rewriting my old blog posts into this blog. Fortunately, as I only have a few dozen posts in the old blogs. At that point, I almost stopped with WordPress in fact, but kept reading glowing reports and so went on.

Because as simple as it is to use, Blogger just doesn’t offer the same range of solutions, and also doesn’t appear to rank as well in the Search Engines as WordPress and I have my own simple example of that. I conducted an accidental test of WordPress SEO recently.  Accidental because I wasn’t intending on conducting a test, I just got delayed in moving my blogs across.  So what happened?

My previous blogs: my Internet Blog and my Career Blog were started early in 2009. Both were started as a trial, in fact the career blog was started to spread the word about some jobs with some people I knew from a previous employer, but one thing lead to another and so the blog grew over time.  Both those blogs have a number of articles, some good, some not so good (I can say that, I wrote them). But what about their Alexa rank? Well as I write this, the Career Blog has an Alexa rank of 1,804,010 and my Internet Blog a rank of 1,827,209. Those rankings for two new and relatively small blogs are fine. But what about this blog?  Well, today as I write this, the first real post for it, this blog today has a rank of 878,237 yet has only a few posts in it.  How can that happen? How do you get a site to the top one million with almost no content? Yes, there is traffic that comes here via other links but not that many but maybe they all use the Alexa toolbar?

Is it WordPress?  Is it the fact that I also installed Joomla on the side to test out, or is it the fact that I hosted it at a quality host, HostGator?  Is it all three?  To be honest, I do not know, but will keep investigating and when I find out will write about it.

WordPress it is then for this blog, from all accounts the best blogging platform available and even not bad as a simple to medium Content Management System, though not as sophisticated as Joomla or Drupal. So far I have spent only a little time with Joomla and I liked it.  I was able to get things done very quickly without having to search through the 5,583 plugins.  But, as I am new to both I will keep an open mind because millions of WordPress users can’t be wrong. One article I came across somewhere out there, suggested that the best combination was Joomla for your main site, with a WordPress blog on the side. Over time I will test that combination out, and Drupal appeals as well. Time will tell which I use more. All three are great for different jobs.

Here are some good articles I came across while investigating WordPress, Joomla and Drupal:

1. WordPress vs Joomla vs Drupal
2. Open Source Content Management Systems: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and Plone
3. How to Choose Between Joomla, Drupal and WordPress
4. Comparison Report: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and Plone
5. Drupal vs. Joomla: A frank comparison
6. SXSW Web Content Management System Showdown
7. Joomla vs Drupal: It’s still a problematic comparison
8. Comparison of the Capabilities and Features of Drupal, Joomla and WordPress
9. Drupal, Joomla or WordPress?

Until next time

Owen