Drupal Vs.The Others

Drupal vs. the Others DrupalCamp Helsinki 27.05.2009 Kalle Virta, Exove

Few words about Exove
Exove is a technology company specialised in designing and implementing integrated web solutions.
Founded 2006, now employing 17 people
Clients ranging from small startups to big media corporations and telecommunications operators
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
Drupal (GPL)
eZ Publish (GPL)
Wordpress (GPL)
CMS Made Simple (GPL)
Why these?
A selection that covers all needs of our clients. These are also complemented with a well-performing PHP framework for custom systems.

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 2008 market survey by Water & Stone (www.waterandstone.com/downloads/2008OpenSourceCMSMarketSurvey.pdf)

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
Also available as Wordpress MU (Multi-User) for multi-user installations

Wordpress
+
Easy administration
A lot of core features
A lot of plugins for extra functionalities
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
-
Pretty limited to a blog plus a couple of pages
Plugin quality ranges from dirty template hacks to proper full-blown feature-packs with proper settings in admin
Performance is really weak without caching
Community features are not in main focus, but achievable through plugins

When do we choose Wordpress
When the site is particularly small
When the site focuses on blogging
When the requirements don’t need a lot more features that Wordpress can provide (we’ve done some plugins, but extending WP to match one of the fully features CMS’s (like Drupal) would take man-years)
When the site doesn’t need a lot of community features

Why would we choose Wordpress (over Drupal)
Essentially, makes the site cheaper for clients needing a small site
Setup-time is faster, whole setting up doesn’t really need any contribution from the back-end team
Very easy and clear administration panel

www.cmsmadesimple.org
CMS Made Simple

CMS Made Simple (CMSMS)
A CMS system for relatively small websites, “simple, easy to use utility to allow building small-ish (dozens to hundreds of pages), semi-static websites”, as they say themselves
Features focusing on a company or corporate website, very few community features
Slightly different focus than WordPress
Small user base, pretty slow development
Limited documentation
Everything can be updated with a web browser

CMS Made Simple
+
Easy administration
Easy and fast setup
Uses Smarty templates (no special template language)
-
Limited features
Extensions focusing on simple features
We rarely extend CMSMS due to the somewhat limited API and API documentation

When do we choose CMS Made Simple
When the site is relatively small
When the site focuses on semi-static content (as in nothing that updates every minute)
When the requirements are met (fully) by CMS Made Simple core functionalities or with a few contributed modules
When the site doesn’t need sophisticated multi-language support

Why would we choose CMS Made Simple (over Drupal)
Essentially, makes the site cheaper for clients needing a relatively small site
Setup-time is faster, whole setting up doesn’t really need any contribution from the back-end team
Pretty simple administration panel

www.ez.no
eZ Publish

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

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

eZ Publish
+
Easy administration interface
Two ways to administer
Sophisticated caching
Highly developed administration processes
Commercial support available
-
Community features not that advanced
Extending eZ is not that simple (they’re in the process of changing the API structure)
Lately there has been a lot of delays in releases

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
When the site focuses on up to down content (like a newspaper, magazine or a corporate site)

Why would we choose eZ Publish (over Drupal)
More needed functionalities in the core (if the requirements demand a lot)
If 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 do have some compatibility issues.

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
Has a huge user base, considered one of the market leaders of open source CMS systems by 2008 market survey by Water & Stone (www.waterandstone.com/downloads/2008OpenSourceCMSMarketSurvey.pdf)

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

Drupal
+
Excellent community feature support
Extendible easily and to pretty much anything
Widely used
Huge user-base
Active community, quality contrib modules available
-
Tricky admin interface
Caching is somewhat limited
No integrated admin workflow with user access controls

When do we choose Drupal 1/2
When the client specifically wants it (this is way more common for Drupal than any other CMS)
You can create pretty much any site with Drupal – the other CMS’s just might do some specific sites faster to build or easier to use
When the site focuses on community and user generated content
There’s 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

Comparison of the systems Site size Community focus Community driven Up-down information Big size Small size Drupal eZ Publish CMS Made Simple WordPress

Questions? Comments?
Thank you for your time

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Drupal Vs.The Others

by Exove on May 27, 2009

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Drupal Vs.The Others — Presentation Transcript