The document compares various content management systems (CMS) including Drupal, WordPress, Ez Publish, Joomla!, and Concrete5, highlighting their features, strengths, and ideal use cases. Exove Systems, a Nordic and Baltic company specializing in open source web services, discusses how these platforms serve different needs based on site size and functionality requirements. Ultimately, Drupal is presented as a versatile option for complex projects, while other systems may be better suited for simpler implementations or specific use cases.

1. DRUPAL VS.
THE OTHERS
DrupalCamp Tallinn
June 14, 2012
Janne Kalliola
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2. Agenda
A couple of words about Exove
Systems
 WordPress
 eZ Publish
 Joomla!
 Concrete5
 Drupal
Positioning

3. Exove is one of the leading Nordic and
Baltic companies specialising in open
source web services design and
development.

4. We enable companies to conduct
better business on the Internet
through best-of-breed personnel
and solutions

5. Company in a Nutshell
 We specialise in designing and developing sites, web
applications, mobile apps, and community platforms
 Founded 2006, now employing 50+ people
 Operations in Finland and Estonia, clients around the
Europe and the States
 Clients ranging from small start-ups to big media
companies, telecom 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

6. THE SYSTEMS
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7. Platforms Used by Exove
 Currently and frequently used
 Drupal (GPL)
 eZ Publish (Commercial + GPL)
 Wordpress (GPL)
 Concrete5 (MIT)
 CodeIgniter (own open source license, permissive)
 PhoneGAP
 Previously or from time to time used
 CMS Made Simple (GPL)
 Joomla! (GPL)
 Symfony (MIT)

8. Systems in The
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

9. WORDPRESS
www.wordpress.org
www.wordpress.com

10. 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 2011 market
survey by Water & Stone
 www.waterandstone.com/downloads/
2011OSCMSMarketShareReport.pdf
 Powers around 16% of websites accorgind to W3Techs
survey (May 30, 2012)
w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management/all

12. 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
 Proper support for extending content types and
multi-sites
 Not optimal, though
 The leader in both installations and brand exposure

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

14. 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
related features

15. 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
 Plugins are easy to install and configure

16. EZ PUBLISH
www.ez.no

17. 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

19. 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

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

21. 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

22. Why Would We Choose eZ
Publish (over Drupal)?
 More required functionalities in the core (if the
requirements demand a lot from the site)
 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 not-straightforward multilingual and/or
multidomain support
 The system is fabulous for multi-country deployments

23. JOOMLA!
www.joomla.org

24. Joomla!
 Open source CMS with long history (2000->)
 Excellent positioning in search engines, community pays
focus on marketing
 Has a huge user base, considered one of the market
leaders of open source CMS systems by 2011 market
survey by Water & Stone
 www.waterandstone.com/downloads/
2011OSCMSMarketShareReport.pdf
 Powers around 2.8% of websites accorgind to W3Techs
survey (May 30, 2012)
 w3techs.com/technologies/overview/
content_management/all

26. 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
 One of the major reasons behind the success

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

28. 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
 Typically, one or two big extensions do the trick

29. 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 earlier
experiences or investments in Joomla!
 However, Joomla! has very good traction in
some countries and among freelance designers
 The install base is 2-4 bigger compared to Drupal
(depends on measurement)

30. CONCRETE5
www.concrete5.org

31. Concrete5
 A modern and object-oriented content management
system
 Excellent approach to the content models
 Based on Zend framework and ADOdb DB abstraction
 Has been raising awareness
 Highest growth rates in Water & Stoner survey in 2011
 Active community with both free and commercial
extensions
 Permissive license (MIT)

33. Concrete5
 Simple and yet powerful admin user interface
 Sophisticated theming based on content areas
and blocks that may have their custom
templates
 Easy and extendible codebase
 Several add-ons
 Peer reviewed
 Helpful community

34. Concrete5
+ -
Focus on what site visitors actually Number of add-ons smaller
see compared to big names
 In contrast to content types etc. Not yet suitable for very large
Friendly admin interface sites
Add-ons easy to install and of goof  For example, powerful search
quality is missing
Easy to make own blocks for
Core functionality is not enough
content
for normal sites, at least one
Front-end upgrading
add-on needs to be installed
Good community

35. When Do We Choose
Concrete5?
 When customer wants to have a good CMS for
a smaller site
 Especially when the object-oriented content model
gives real benefits
 When customer demands to have an intuitive
admin user interface
 When there is no major amount of custom
functionality

36. Why Would We Choose
Concrete5 (over Drupal)?
 Admin interface is way better
 Focus on content management and not on system
management
 More permissive license for the customer
 Less configuration and hacking

37. DRUPAL
www.drupal.org

38. Drupal
 A fully featured CMS with a 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 2011 market survey by Water &
Stone
 www.waterandstone.com/downloads/
2011OSCMSMarketShareReport.pdf
 Powers around 2.1% of websites accorgind to W3Techs survey
(May 30, 2012)
 w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management/
all

40. 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
 A lot of good quality modules

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

42. 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 CMSes just 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

43. 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
 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
 On the other hand, the content models of eZ Publish and
Concrete5 make them easier to extend without coding or
configuring the system

44. POSITIONING
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45. Positioning:
User Perspective
User generated
Drupal
WordPress
Joomla!
Contet sources
Small size Site size Big size
eZ Publish
Concrete5
Top-down information

46. Positioning:
Developer perspective
Powerful
eZ Publish Drupal
Concrete5
Joomla!
Hard Development Easy
API
WordPress
Restricted

47. 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
 If you tolerate its weaknesses

48. Want to hear more from us?
www.exove.com
@exove
Meet us at Drupalcon 2012 in
Munich

49. THANK YOU FOR
YOUR TIME
Questions? Comments?
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