WordPress vs Joomla vs Drupal CMS

Pros and Cons of Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal
and Comentum CMS

Below is a brief description, comparison and pros and cons of different types of CMS applications.

Open Source CMS Applications

Open Source CMS Applications are free, but at what cost is "free." Although, they are free, people are not paying attention to the fact that free does not mean that there will be free installation, configuration, customizations and support.

In most cases the hours and cost which may take to install, configure, customize and maintain an Open Source CMS can be unthinkable, specially, since you are getting the application for free in the first place. For example, WordPress charges $80,000. per year for their Platinum VIP Support and $150,000 per year for Black VIP Support (http://vip.wordpress.com/support/).

"VIP Support," this is a good example that shows how support and maintenance can easily add up substantially.

There are a few different Open Source CMS Applications available and each have their own advantages and disatvantages.

This article concentrates on the currently three most popular CMS applications: Drupal, Joomla and WordPress

WordPress

WordPress was mainly designed for blog websites. However, there are many websites that are using WordPress' CMS features for creating and managing a regular website. WordPress is perfect if you need to create a blog or create a quick templete type website and do not need to add many custom features and functionalities that would require editing the WordPress core code.

Below are the pros and cons of WordPress:

Pros:

• Easy to install
• Easy to add popular and common features
• Very easy to find many themes and template designs
• Easy to administer

Cons:

• Not easy to customize the functionalities or add custom features
• Not easy to customize the design and branding
• If you are just using WordPress for building a simple site, the blog features are in your way and it is not easy to remove them

Joomla

Joomla is less friendly than WordPress for installation, configurations and administration. Joomla is mainly designed to be used as a Content Management System (CMS) of a complex website with many pages. (WordPress is mainly designed for a blog website).

Joomla has more CMS features and flexibilities than WordPress.
Joomla can manage a website with complex content easier while WordPress is tailored for a blog or a website with simple content.

If I needed to get a simple website up and running very quickly without any initial tedious installation time or cost, I would choose WordPress.

If I needed to get a complex website with a huge content level, up and running, I would use Joomla.

Below are the pros and cons of Joomla:

Pros:

• Easy to install (not as easy as WordPress)
• Easy to add popular and common features (not as easy as WordPress)
• Easy to administer (not as easy as WordPress)

Cons:

• Not easy to customize the functionalities or add custom features
• There are not any available and easily downloadable themes from Joomla, so you will need to search for them outside Joomla's site
• There are so many commercial themes with different costs available, which makes looking for a theme very confusing
• Once you select a theme, if you need to replace it in the future, the new theme needs to be compatible and support the existing site content in order to work.

Drupal

At one point there was so much hype about Drupal, that if you ever mentioned the word "Drupal," you were considered the most technically advanced person on earth and the smartest computer geek in the world!

The joke aside, Drupal is a lot less friendly than WordPress and Joomla to set up, configure and maintain. The site administration is also very complex and not very user friendly, specially for a non-technical person.

However, Drupal is much more capable and flexible for adding custom features, changing or customizing a feature, and customizing the design and brand.

One of the main disatnatages of Drupal is that although there is much flexibility allowed for customizations, you will need to be an advanced programmer in order to customize and add features. Also, since you will need to write custom code and work with with hundreds and thousands of built-in lines of codes, it will be very time consuming and costly to maintain and manage a Drupal site. That is why many Drupal developers love the application — because they can legitimately charge a substantial amount of money to customize a site. Additionally, since their customizations will add a large amount of complexity to the application, you are stuck to that developer until he / she abondons the project.

Below are the pros and cons of Drupal:

Pros:

• Much more capable and flexible for adding custom features
• Much more flexible for customizing the design and branding

Cons:

• Not easy to install, configure and customize — need advanced programming skills
• Administration and Content Management is not easy or intuitive, and not user friendly
• There are not many available themes for Drupal
• When Drupal is greatly customized with custom features and functionalities, the code tends to become complicated to manage; I recently came across a customized Drupal site where the developer compacted about 2000 lines of code into one page. Something like this will limit the site owner's options for hiring another developer, and he / she usually becomes stuck with the sloppy developer.

Comentum CMS

Comentum CMS was designed and developed by a group of like-minded business owners and professionals with a great deal of emphasis on ease of use, simplicity and branding flexibility.

Comentum CMS is simple to set up, easy to configure and provides unique branding for your business. There is no need to hire an advanced programmer to work with Comentum CMS. With Drupal, you do need to hire an advanced programmer to set it up and configure it to your business. Programmers, typically have little or no design background or marketing / branding knowledge to build your Drupal template and unfortunately the results often are very generic looking, without any branding or site personality consideration.

Below are the pros and cons of Comentum CMS:

Pros:

• User freindly and easy to manage
• SEO built-in with ease of use
• Design flexiblity — you can customize the look and feel to market your business' unique personality and brand, rather than have a "template" look
• Free support and training
• Ease of customization and maintenance
• Comentum delivers your site and Comentum CMS to you and also provides training — no need to spend hours trying to learn a complex application such as Drupal or have a programmer do your branding and design

Cons:

• There is one low initial cost for set up, design and branding customization and fitting your unique design into the Comentum CMS. (However, often, the one initial cost is much less than the cost of hiring a programmer to work with Joomla or Drupal.)
• Since Comentum CMS is not as popular as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, if you need to move to another developer(s), there will be a learning curve for the new developer(s) to learn the Comentum CMS. (However, Comentum CMS uses MVC framework which most developers are already familiar with it.)

Research for this article was completed August 1, 2010; pricing and other information may change.

related articles:

• Drupal vs Joomla vs WordPress