New Blood, Inc. Blog

In the battle of publicly support content management systems.  There are three that have grabbed a significant amount of control over the rest of the pack.  Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla.  Of the three, WordPress takes on a different realm for being an easy-to-use blogging system, but lacks in greater database management control.  For the purposes of overall flexibility and ability to code sophisticated add-ons, joomla and Drupal have become the most powerful of these three content management systems.

Over our many years of coding experience, we have had the great privilege to code in both Joomla and Drupal coding systems.  Based on or experience, here are some reasons why we believe that Drupal has become our Content Management System of choice.

• Ability to Create a Search Engine Friendly Site – We have found that sites we develop in Drupal often fair better with respect to being found in search engines like google and yahoo due to the intelligent nature of Drupal’s search engine friendly design.  There is a lot of technical information involved in the reasoning for this, but the basic concept it simply that most people regard Drupal as a bit stronger in this area.
• Being Vulnerable to Hackers – New Blood has personally had a number of hacks to our developed Joomla sites.  I am not sure of the current security status for Joomla, but for a while there (about 2 years ago) we had to constantly monitor the updates to the main Joomla system in order to ensure we were not vulnerable to more attacks.  This was our number one reason for ultimately moving away from Drupal and now have found many other advantages to using the Drupal system.
• Advancement of Developed Modules – Out of the box, Drupal may not have everything we need to do exactly what we want on the website, but they have a great number of high level supporters that help make Drupal add-ons extremely powerful.  I have found that most web development goals can be obtained by some form of module or advancement available to Drupal through and easy add-on.  Joomla does have some good coding supporters as well, but I have found the add-ons developed by drupal to be more soundly developed.
• Ease of adjusting Themes and Layouts – This was our second most important reason for moving away from Joomla.  If you are not wanting to have your web site look like a typical Joomla layout, a lot of work is required to customize the look and feel of the site.  For Drupal, once we learned the structure of the the layout code behind the scenes, updating he design of the site has become much easier.   This too is another major reason for using Drupal over Joomla as we often do not want to follow the typical designs available.
• User Permissions – The third most important feature that Joomla often takes heat for is the fact that they do not support the ability to provide access level controls on a user or group level.  Meaning, if you wanted to have a group of people that could edit your content but not have full blown administrative privileges, this would require some sort of custom coding.  With Drupal, this type of access control is inherent in their development.  So allowing certain users the ability to perform only a given set of tasks is much easier.
• Web Standards Compliance – Once again, this is a techy concept that basically means that certain standards are typically for a website and Joomla currently requires a bit of extra work to meet those standards.   For man sites this is not a major concern, but if your are looking to have as close to an optimized site as possible, this becomes a bit more important.  This in short plays a small role in how fast your site ends up functioning.
• Support for Modules – There have been times in developing for both Joomla and Drupal where we need to make coding changes to any modules we are using for each system.  With our development in both systems, we have found the support for modules to be close to equal in both Drupal and Joomla.   As noted, both are publicly supported systems.  However, we have found that those using the Drupal system have been on average a more professional group to work with and for the most part a higher quality level of coder.  This is a subjective observation that we simply have noticed.