Drupal vs. the Others

Drupal vs. the Others
DrupalCampStockholmMay 6, 2011
Janne KalliolaKalleVarisvirta

Agenda
A couple of words about Exove
Systems
WordPress
eZ Publish
Joomla!
CodeIgniter
Drupal
Positioning

Exove enables companies to conduct better business on the Internetthrough best-of-breed personnel and solutions

We design and implement beautiful, functional, and business-driven solutions

Company in a nutshell
We specialise in designing and developing sites, web applications, mobile apps, and community platforms
Founded 2006, now employing 46 people
Operations in Finland and Estonia, clients all over the place
Clients ranging from small start-ups to big media companies, telco operators and multinational corporations
Usually Exove chooses the CMS system to build on
Mainly focusing on systems created on LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP), due to easy-to-match requirements for hosting

Platforms used by Exove
Currently and frequently used
Drupal (GPL)
eZ Publish (Commercial + GPL)
Wordpress (GPL)
CodeIgniter (own open source license, permissive)
PhoneGAP
Previously or from time to time used
CMS Made Simple (GPL)
Joomla! (GPL)
Symfony (MIT)

Systems in this presentation
The systems discussed are all used by Exove
They do not represent the complete spectrum of available content management systems
They have been selected to provide a good coverage for various customer needs
All systems are based on LAMP
There are excellent systems on other platforms, such as Liferay and DotNetNuke, that could be viable alternatives for the systems in this presentation
All systems are open source
There are also good closed source systems, but we are not speaking about them now

www.wordpress.org
www.wordpress.com
Wordpress

Wordpress
A CMS focusing on blogs, “an open source blog publishing application”
Also available as a service in wordpress.com
Has a huge user base, considered one of the market leaders of open source CMS systems by 2010 market survey by Water & Stone
www.waterandstone.com/book/2010-open-source-cms-market-share-report
Powers around 14% of websites accorgind to W3Techs survey (Apr 28, 2011)
w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management/all

Wordpress
Focuses on making things easy
Administration panel is easy to use
The whole system is easy to configure and edit with integrated editors for CSS and template files
A plugin architecture for extending the system
Recently included proper support for extending content types and multi-sites
The leader in both installations and brand exposure

+
Easy administration
A lot of core features
A lot of plugins for extra functionality
Huge number of readymade themes
Very intuitive API for plugin development, a plugin can be built in 30 minutes
Focuses really on blogging, considered one of the best blogging platforms
-
Still quite blog-driven
Plugin quality varies
From dirty template hacks to proper full-blown feature-packs with proper settings in admin
No proper separation of content and presentation in plugins
Performance is really weak without caching
Community features are not in main focus
Achievable through plugins
Wordpress

When do we choose Wordpress
When the site is small or medium in size
When the site focuses primarily on blogging
When the requirements do not specify a lot more features than Wordpress can provide
We have implemented some plugins, but extending WP to match one of the fully featured CMSes(like Drupal) would take years
When the site does not need a lot of community features

Why would we choose Wordpress (over Drupal)
Essentially, makes the site cheaper for clients needing a small or medium site
Setup time is faster, whole setting up does not really need any contribution outside HTML developers
Very easy and clear administration panel
Easy to train, easy to use
Small maintenance burden

www.ez.no
eZ Publish

eZ Publish
Developed by eZ Systems AS (a Norwegian commercial open source company)
Smallish community, but complemented nicely by a company
All-in-one enterprise content management system
Huge feature list
Focused on major corporate sites

eZ Publish
Very flexible and powerful content model
Integrated workflow and timed publish features
Fine-grained administration rights management
Very sophisticated multi-site and multi-language support
Two ways to administer the site, a toolbar approach along with the traditional administration panel
Also able to work as a intranet system

+
Easy and yet powerful administration interface
Caters for all required corporate features out of the box
Excellent search through deep SOLR integration (eZ Find)
Sophisticated caching
Highly developed administration processes
Commercial support available
-
Community features not that advanced
Focus on users enriching the content, not generating it
Extending eZ requires a lot of knowledge
Only a few dozen extensions
On the other hand, the base system takes care of most needs already
Open source version not released officially anymore
eZ Publish

When do we choose eZ Publish
When the site is from big to huge semi-static corporate site
When the site needs very sophisticated administration features
Typically, non-technical people maintaining the site
When the site focuses on top down content (like a newspaper, a magazine, or a corporate site)
When customer requires commercial entity behind the system

Why would we choose eZ Publish (over Drupal)
More needed functionalities in the core (if the requirements demand a lot)
When workflow on administration side is essential and needs strict control on user privileges
This can again be achieved with Drupal’s contrib modules, but needs a combination of modules that typically have some compatibility issues
Need for multilingual and/or multidomain support
The system is fabulous for multi-country deployments

www.joomla.org
Joomla!

Joomla!
Open source CMS with long history (2000->)
Excellent positioning in search engines, community pays focus on marketing

Joomla!
Simple and powerful content model
A lot of extensions for various purposes
Based on model-view-controller paradigm
Better than usual admin user interface
Powerful templating system
Very designer friendly, focus on making sites look fantastic with little effort

+
Big community
A lot of extensions, readymade themes, and such
Extensions are easy to install
Relatively friendly admin interface
-
Content model is simple and requires extensions
Extensions are hard to build
Some internal concepts are confusing
Lagging behind compared to WordPress and Drupal
Joomla!

When do we choose Joomla!
When the customer has selected the system as part of their technology portfolio
When WordPress is not enough and Drupal admin UI is too intimidating
When site features can be achieved with readymade extensions

Why would we choose Joomla! (over Drupal)
We do not see any reason to select Joomla! instead of Drupal or eZ Publish
Unless there are non-CMS reasons, such as technology portfolio selection
However, Joomla! has very good traction especially outside Finland
The install base is 2-4 bigger compared to Drupal (depends on measurement)

www.codeigniter.com
CodeIgniter

CodeIgniter
A model-view-controller based PHP framework from EllisLabs
Simple, lightweight, and powerful framework for implementing web services and applications
Does not contain CMS features
There are content management systems built on top of CodeIgniter, but we have not used them
Semiactive community

CodeIgniter
Has really short path to the user’s code
Comprehensive support for basic operations
Does not force developers to use certain way of doing things (hooks, scaffoldings, XML mappings, etc.)
Recently bumped into version 2.0 and broke backwards compatibility
We have not yet tried the new version

+
Very fast compared to all other systems in this presentation
Very simple to learn
No need to fight against the system
Excellent separation of content and presentation
Very good and comprehensive documentation
Better open source license for commercial purposes
-
No CMS
We have integrated WordPress with a special bridge
The view system allows logic in views
We have fixed this with Smarty integration
KohanaPHP (former fork, now rewritten) is faster and provides more features
The community is smallish
CodeIgniter

When do we choose CodeIgniter
When there is no or little need for CMS features
We have integrated CodeIgniter with WordPress in certain cases
When the data model is truly complex and cannot be tackled with predefined database schemas
When adding new features to Drupal or eZ Publish would take longer than writing everything from scratch

Why would we choose CodeIgniter (over Drupal)
Way faster
Faster development time when coding is a must
Better separation of content and presentation
Allows to use own database schemas as seen fit
Also easy to use with SOLR, MongoDB and such

www.drupal.org
Drupal

Drupal
A fully featured CMS with great community and UGC (user-generated content) support
Literally thousands of modules and a very active development community – as you should know

Drupal
Multi-language and multi-site support in the core
Has a great API, a lot of hooks and toolkit overrides for extending
Has a decent documentation, even very good if you compare it to other open-source products

+
Excellent community feature support
Extendible easily and to pretty much anything
Widely used
Huge user-base
Active community, quality contrib modules available
Install profiles
-
Not enough features in the core for typical CMS case
Tricky admin interface
Caching is somewhat limited
No integrated admin workflow with user access controls
Community focuses too much on code, marketing seems to be a hindsight
Drupal.org is not “selling” the system at all
Drupal

When do we choose Drupal 1/2
When the client specifically wants it (this is way more common for Drupal than any other CMS - in Finland, your mileage may vary)
You can create pretty much any site with Drupal – the other CMSesjust might do some specific sites faster to build or easier to use
When the site focuses on community and user generated content
There is no match to Drupal’s community features, as we see it

When do we choose Drupal 2/2
When the client wants/needs a CMS for which they can get support from a lot of technology companies in Finland (it’s probably the most supported here)
When we need the CMS to bend to anything we want
There’s no match to Drupal’s API and flexibility for extending on
You can build pretty much anything on Drupal, without breaking the core

Positioning

Comparison of the systemsUser perspective
User generated
Drupal
WordPress
Joomla!
Contet sources
Site size
Big size
Small size
eZ Publish
Top-down information

Powerful
CodeIgniter
eZ Publish
Drupal
API
Joomla!
Development
Easy
Hard
WordPress
Restricted
Comparison of the systemsDeveloper perspective

Recap
Different systems serve different needs
There is no fit-for-all system available
Drupal is quite a good candidate for an all-around system

Want to hear more from us?
www.exove.com@exove
Meet us at Drupal Business Days and Drupal CXO
May 25-27 in Helsinki

Questions? Comments?
Thank you for your time

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Drupal vs. the Others

by Exove on May 06, 2011

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Drupal vs. the Others — Presentation Transcript