Comparison of Drupal against other systems Exove is using -- WordPress, Joomla!, eZ Publish, and CodeIgniter

1. Drupal vs. the Others DrupalCampStockholmMay 6, 2011 Janne KalliolaKalleVarisvirta

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

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

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

5. 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

6. 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)

7. 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

8. www.wordpress.org www.wordpress.com Wordpress

9. 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

11. 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

12. + 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

13. 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

14. 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

15. www.ez.no eZ Publish

16. 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

18. 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

19. + 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

20. 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

21. 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

22. www.joomla.org Joomla!

23. 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 2010 market survey by Water & Stone www.waterandstone.com/book/2010-open-source-cms-market-share-report

25. 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

26. + 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!

27. 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

28. 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)

29. www.codeigniter.com CodeIgniter

30. 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

32. 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

33. + 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

34. 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

35. 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

36. www.drupal.org Drupal

37. 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 2010 market survey by Water & Stone www.waterandstone.com/book/2010-open-source-cms-market-share-report

39. 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

40. + 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

41. 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

42. 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

43. Positioning

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

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

46. 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

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

48. Questions? Comments? Thank you for your time