Drupal vs. Joomla vs. Wordpress
Posted 25th April 2009 at 03:20 PM by rlnorthcutt
Tags cms, competition, drupal, joomla, wordpress
Everyone knows that I am a Drupal fan - I build most of my sites and my client sites with Drupal. But, often people think that Drupal is more difficult than WP or Joomla. Thats really not true.
Check out this CMS Competition that was held for the 2009 SXSW festival:
http://www.cmsshowdown.com/competition
The overall results:
Drupal Joomla! WordPress
Total Hours 79.25 57.25 90.5
Hours spent on
front end 21.75 15 36.5
HTML Validation No(8er) Yes No (8er)
CSS Validation No(7er) No (1er)No (21er)
Page weight 180K 140K 154K
Lines of custom
PHP/JS code 220 30 1,808
Keep in mind that each of the groups had the same design (with choice of color scheme) and feature list, along with a cap of 100 hours.
So - designing a custom site/theme with WordPress takes quite a bit more effort. WP is great for blogs and adding a few simple elements, but it does take more effort to "break out of the box".
Joomla seems to be the winner in this case with the quickest build and a very close adherance to the design (typographiy is off). However, you will note that the front page layout happened to work well for the default Joomla layout. This is an example of how "the box" can help make things faster.
Drupal comes in the middle (though the demo site seems to be unfinished?) in terms of time and resources.
So - am I going to switch camps to Joomla now? No way...
Why?
Because the same reasons that I switched from Joomla (Mambo back in the day) to Drupal are still the same:
- Drupal is more flexible and offers more choices
- Its actually easier to do the advanced stuff
- There is alot more free, quality code available
Of course - each application will warrant a different system... if all you need is a squeeze page, then straight HTML is your friend.
Check out the site and spend a few minutes reading the developer team's notes on each build. Very interesting stuff...
Check out this CMS Competition that was held for the 2009 SXSW festival:
http://www.cmsshowdown.com/competition
The overall results:
Drupal Joomla! WordPress
Total Hours 79.25 57.25 90.5
Hours spent on
front end 21.75 15 36.5
HTML Validation No(8er) Yes No (8er)
CSS Validation No(7er) No (1er)No (21er)
Page weight 180K 140K 154K
Lines of custom
PHP/JS code 220 30 1,808
Keep in mind that each of the groups had the same design (with choice of color scheme) and feature list, along with a cap of 100 hours.
So - designing a custom site/theme with WordPress takes quite a bit more effort. WP is great for blogs and adding a few simple elements, but it does take more effort to "break out of the box".
Joomla seems to be the winner in this case with the quickest build and a very close adherance to the design (typographiy is off). However, you will note that the front page layout happened to work well for the default Joomla layout. This is an example of how "the box" can help make things faster.
Drupal comes in the middle (though the demo site seems to be unfinished?) in terms of time and resources.
So - am I going to switch camps to Joomla now? No way...
Why?
Because the same reasons that I switched from Joomla (Mambo back in the day) to Drupal are still the same:
- Drupal is more flexible and offers more choices
- Its actually easier to do the advanced stuff
- There is alot more free, quality code available
Of course - each application will warrant a different system... if all you need is a squeeze page, then straight HTML is your friend.
Check out the site and spend a few minutes reading the developer team's notes on each build. Very interesting stuff...
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