Why I moved from Joomla to Drupal

“Joomla or Drupal” seems to be a question the web asks itself quite often, these being probably the most popular open-source content management systems. So I thought I might add my perspective.

I am not a professional web developer, but in my spare time, and for the sake of the greater good, I have built and am maintaining a congregation web site.

I first moved to CMS-based site more than two years ago. Back then, I decided on Joomla mainly because people said it was much easier to master. I still think it’s true, nut it comes at the price of being much less flexible (which is a trade-off you could expect).

Just an example. Joomla has an extremely annoying categorization system. There are sections, which contain categories, which contain content. Every item must be in a category and every category must be in a section. I can’t suppose the people who designed Joomla were morons, but I do think it’s pretty weird that they thought all the content people would ever want to put into Joomla would fit into this scheme. This is not a very important limitation by itself. I worked with Joomla, I coerced myself and my data into this system, it wasn’t pretty but it worked. I am just saying, people who design like that cannot be expected to build a flexible system in general.

Drupal’s design is much more open-ended, which means things you could not do with Joomla, or you could not reasonable do with Joomla, can be done with Drupal. Also, things that would require you to tinker with your Joomla template or write a new component or module, are done using the web interface only in Drupal. I am going to write more about this in the future.

The other selling point, for me, was the strong support for multilingual sites in Drupal. With Joomla I had two installations to support bilingualism, which means two logins, twice the maintenance, and media files duplication. Building a multilingual website isn’t effortless in Drupal either (maybe I’ll blog a little about that too), but it’s possible and it’s worth it.

I have worked with Joomla for a long time and only migrated to Drupal recently, so I do fear some agonies are still to come. In fact I already have some rants that I will probably share with you at some point. But for the time I am very happy with the move.