Went to a Joomla User Group yesterday to check it out. I've been aware of Joomla for a while as a leading open source PHP CMS but haven't had a chance to see how it compares with Typo3 or other CMSs I'm familiar with. I thought the user group would be a good chance to get a quick overview.
My first impression was that the interface was friendlier and more modern looking than Typo3's but as I saw more of the system I feel like its approach to managing content is less intuitive. I really like Typo3's strong sense of a page hierarchy. Joomla's user management was less flexible as well.
Most of the people at the user group weren't php developers and I can see the appeal of Joomla for someone who wants to avoid code. In comparison, Typo3 is much more of a developer toolkit. I think this gives it more power and flexibility at the high end though obviously at the cost of complexity and learning curve up front.
Since none of the people were deep php developers I didn't get to see the extension development side. I never build a typo3 site without custom extension work so that will be an important part of any CMS that I add to our toolkit. I was surprised to see that many extensions were commercial, I assumed that most would be GPL like typo3 extensions are.
I'll look at Joomla some more but I think if I want a system with less of a page approach than Typo3 that Drupal might be a better fit for the kind of sites I build.
My first impression was that the interface was friendlier and more modern looking than Typo3's but as I saw more of the system I feel like its approach to managing content is less intuitive. I really like Typo3's strong sense of a page hierarchy. Joomla's user management was less flexible as well.
Most of the people at the user group weren't php developers and I can see the appeal of Joomla for someone who wants to avoid code. In comparison, Typo3 is much more of a developer toolkit. I think this gives it more power and flexibility at the high end though obviously at the cost of complexity and learning curve up front.
Since none of the people were deep php developers I didn't get to see the extension development side. I never build a typo3 site without custom extension work so that will be an important part of any CMS that I add to our toolkit. I was surprised to see that many extensions were commercial, I assumed that most would be GPL like typo3 extensions are.
I'll look at Joomla some more but I think if I want a system with less of a page approach than Typo3 that Drupal might be a better fit for the kind of sites I build.
posted by John Nicholas at 7:44 AM
1 Comments:
I've recently used Drupal for a few sites. For community-oriented sites, it's hard to beat Drupal. It's very much a development framework. Look at CCK and Views, and you can do some fairly advanced data construction without ever having to get into coding. (on the database side, the data stays well normalized.) Sure, Drupal will have its shortcomings, but many can be remedied by addon modules. It's definitely worth a solid look.
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