Today in CMS Class we moved away from our Joomla! discussion and took a peak at Drupal.  Drupal is a very powerful CMS system.  While I have used Drupal before for class work, it is always interesting to go back and take a second and third look at systems to see how their features actually work.

After spending more time with Joomla, I have found a few things with Joomla that I prefer over Drupal.  Joomla’s administrator access is a completely different backend, and even a separate login system.  Drupal’s system for administrating works, but how you float back and forth from the front end to the back end of the site is weird to me.  I’m sure I would get used to it over time, however at the time being, I prefer having them be separate.  Perhaps it is a false sense of security, but by keeping everything separate and hidden it seems more secure to me.

Drupal does have a few more pieces of a site that I like that are built in, such as the forum feature.  The reason that I like this better than Joomla, is that by being in the core functions, it’s more likely to get updated and be kept up-to-date.  With Joomla, most plugins are written by 3^rd parties, which this is true of Drupal, because more core features are included with Drupal. It’s likely to be more secure than adding in more plugins.

Overall, I think that for most people, Joomla will be a better option than Drupal for ease of use, and configuration.   I’m open to suggestions and am curious as to what others have thought about Drupal and or Joomla and other CMS systems that they have played with.

If you are curious as to how the CMS systems work, but don’t have a working install, It would be worth checking out http://php.opensourcecms.com/ you can play with most Open CMS systems for free and usually a fast option to play before you install.