First off, I apologize if a similar thread has been created. I tried to do a thorough search before posting this. As a side note, at this time, I'm not evaluating Drupal as an immediate possibility. I've been an avid Joomla user for several years (since its Mambo days), and have overall been happy for it. Because I typically use forums, multimedia, comments and so forth, Joomla has been great with the sheer number of complex extensions and the fact that it has at its core an extensible framework. However, with J!1.5, I am really starting to look at other options. Though I do agree with MVC (and in general OO practices), I find J!1.5 to feel a bit, well, bloated. Plus, the lack of good, clear Joomla-based MVC documentation and easy migration for complex Joomla 1.0 sites (with several custom extensions) really has me a bit turned off at the moment. I admit I'm a bit miffed at Joomla having given its 1.0 users "the finger" by requiring migration rather than upgrade, but I'll put that aside for the purposes of discussion. That said, I am really looking at all my options before I decide to do any migration to J!1.5. What I really need is a CMS that also has a solid, extensible framework (so I can roll my own extensions if needed), and has a reasonable templating approach. So far, after visiting opensourcecms and reading reviews and CMS descriptions, I've been seriously evaluating Concrete5, Silverstripe and MODx as possible alternatives. What are your experiences with these CMS, if any? Have I left any off the list that I should be looking at? And finally, after all is said and done, are there any of you who think I should "stick it out" and just give the new Joomla framework more of a chance? If so, what do you use for documentation (which is really what has me the most frustrated)? Thanks!
My first suggestion is Drupal, but you already stated you opinion on that matter. I have not used any of the CMSs you listed, but I'am going to give you a quick review based on my experience. Concrete5 - looks like a wordpress clone. The forum is flaky and looks like a wordpress forum rip off. I am not very impressed at all. Silverstripe - once again, looks like a wordpress rip off. And, I can not find the support forum on that site. So that one is an absolute NO. MODx - support forum is using SMF. If modx has full integration with the SMF forum, this might be a good option. The supports forums seem active with 222,202 Posts in 33,790 Topics by 16,253 Members. I also like the look and layout of the site. The Search Engine Friendly urls sure beat joomla. Out of those three, I am most impressed with MODx - and that is with years of CMS experience behind me. If you want a commercial grade solution, VBulletin is supposed to be offering a CMS with its next major update, which is going to be VBulletin 4. Then you could have CMS and fully integrated forum. ----------------------- As for joomla, my personal opinion, stay far, far away from it. And if you are using it, get away ASAP. I lost all respect for the joomla project years ago.
First off, thank you Kev for taking the time to post such an intelligent response. I want to be clear - I am not excluding Drupal forever. In fact, I plan to learn the basic architecture once I actually have a moment to truly give Drupal the attention it deserves. It is NOT a platform I expect to master immediately, so I want to give it a fair chance by studying it in the future when I have real time. I am going to give MODx another, closer look based on your notes. Of course, if you have any other ideas, please do share. As a side note, out of curiosity, what caused you to fall away from Joomla? If you'd rather PM me with a detailed description, please feel free to do so - I am truly interested in your thoughts, as they may indeed give me the final push I need to flee. Again, if anyone has additional comments, or has other CMS platforms I should look at, please feel free to post.
The reason why I liked modx is because for the search engine friendly urls, and the support forums. Chances are if you run into any problems, so has someone else and the problem has already been answered. So its very, very important to have active support forums. This also adds a layer to the site. Lets say that one day you want to add a forum. It would be nice for the site software to offer full integration so a forum can plug straight in. No need for a private message, I am very open about my "dislike" for joomla. Back in 2006 - 2007 I ran a joomla site with a bridged smf forum. The support forums for joomla were TERRIBLE. I posted several questions that were never answered. The only reply was from people having the same question. Someone might post a link to a thread where you could find the answer and all that was there was another link, to another thread with another link, to another thread with another link,,,,,,, until you made a big circle. I posted a question, waited about 4 weeks - no replies - then posted the same question in another section - and provided a link to the original thread. A moderator gave me a slap for double posting. But what are people supposed to do when they can not get help? I needed an answer, and all I got was a slap. A lot of the modifications are outdated, have known security issues and still offered in the downloads section. Even the commercial grade add-ons were lame. I spent several hundred dollars on several add-ons and received little support for them. This is not the fault of the joomla developers, but it reflects poorly on the community. Joomla is a bloated resource hog. Even on a VPS, if any more then 15 people got on the site, it would stop responding and no more connections were allowed. The hosting provider said the site was using too many mysql connections. Simple things were overlooked, such as a category icon. Why force my to use a category icon if I do not want to. Why is there no comments section on the post? You have to install all kinds of modifications just to get the site close to using. Updates causes bridges to break. I had the smf forum bridged to the site. Updating joomla broke to bridge. So my forum was down until I found another bridge. Lack of full integration - it seems like there was a bridge required for everything. Well, bridges break. It was one thing after another with the joomla project. I finally gave up, closed my site, waited about a year and reopened with wordpress.
Thanks for the details! I too haven't had much prior luck getting questions answered on the Joomla forums (though I must admit, the Joomlahacks forum actually was much better to me regarding answers for the SMF bridge - even now members are still unofficially supporting it for J!1.5). Likewise, I am NOT happy with the fact that functionality that should have been built into J!core still is not there, and you STILL have to fork out $$$ to get, say, comments, etc. Many of these professional components, ironically enough, still have serious bugs. If I am going to get buggy, I'd rather get it FREE and work on it. To be honest, some of the BEST plugins were actually free contributions to the community. Given the HUGE Joomla core overhaul, wanna guess at how many of these people ARE NOT going to upgrade these to the new framework? The large projects will roll on, but it was the smaller, "boutique" if you will, neat oddball extensions that I really liked. I see you mentioned opening back up with WordPress. Funny, as I have JUST been turned on to WordPress Multiuser with the BuddyPress social network layer. The combination looks like it has features very similar to Joomla and Community Builder, and this may be the solution for a very near-future project. Have you used WPMU at all? What's it like to actually develop in the WP enviroment? I have my own test server, so I'm not afraid to give things a tryout. Oh, and I have actually just posted at the MODx forums. The user community looks really solid, and overall quite polite and responsive to each other. Great find!
I have made a few notes on Drupal and Joomla in Drupal vs. Joomla. Personally, I am making every effort to avoid "niche" CMS projects like Concrete5, SilverStripe, MODx, or the large number of others listed in places like Wikipedia's List of Content Management Systems. Why? They just don't have large enough development and support communities to develop an economy of scale. Joomla, for all of it's many faults, has an enormously helpful development community. I am currently running three Drupal sites and around 150 Wordpress sites, and I have two Joomla sites in development. My next major site will probably be Joomla also -- because of the quality of Joomla extensions. Bridges are always difficult to maintain and I recommend against them. Look at the nightmare that is currently vBDrupal. This is one reason I chose Agora Forum over vBulletin for my most recent forum project. Joomla's 1.0 to 1.5 upgrade has been unpleasant. There may be more unpleasantness in the future as even more nasty Mambo ugliness is pushed out of the architecture. The way Joomla handles URL's is just bizarre and that's a pretty core component. Are your J1.0 extensions not migrating well to J1.5Legacy?
The answer is there in your question. By this you indirectly said that you need drupal. Honestly.. trust me and give it a change, you will never look back.
Hi, Will.Spencer. To answer your question regarding Legacy Mode, the answer is... nope! LOL. Seriously, there is only ONE extension that is really giving me the blues... and yep, it's "custom." Isn't that always the way? To finish up a current project, I have one extension that REALLY needs to be converted to 1.5 framework, but I just don't have the time as I am still really learning the ins and outs of MVC (though conceptually I think I am really starting to understand). To make things worse... it's a bridge component for eFiction. If I better understood JFusion, I'd try to convert the d*mned thing into a JFusion plugin and be done with it, but again J! really suffers from p*ss-poor readily available documentation. Mini-Rant: Yes, yes, bridges are evil... but for some reason, NO ONE has designed a real writer CMS where authors can create and maintain stories, novels, etc. - if you know of one, PLEASE tell me. I'd actually take a crash course in Drupal if it does this. . end Mini-Rant Speaking of Drupal... To daringtakers, the more I hear about Drupal, the more I may be converted. I am really, seriously, truly, starting to hear you guys about this one. I am never against learning something new - the only limiter I really have is time and real world requirements (which, again, involves time).
Have you looked at Front-End Article Manager System for Joomla? Joomla's short-sighted Section and Category architecture makes it hard for a field where you really want books and chapters and you want each chapter to naturally lead to the next chapter. It seems to me that you could create something very similar to efiction in k2.
WHA....?! I never heard of k2. I am most CERTAINLY going to look into it. Thanks for the tip! I will definitely play with it to get a feel. If k2 works the way I want it to, buh-bye bridges (assuming that I stick it out with Joomla, as our marriage is on admittedly shaky ground). As a side note... I read your article, and I must admit it is one of the very best Joomla and Drupal comparisons I've ever read. Your Joomla notes were pretty much dead-on accurate as far as my experience has proven, so I just may delve more into Drupal once Version 7 comes out (at least that's what folks on Digg seem to be asserting). I also am peeking over into the WordPress Multiuser camp. Out of intellectual curiosity, and based on kev's several posts regarding WP in general, I've installed WPMU in my "lab", along with BuddyPress. My inner masochist peeked its ugly head, and I just HAD to install bbPress to complete this trifecta of fun. Admittedly, it wasn't as heinous as I'd read (the bbPress part of the installation has caused hardened coders to wee themselves and cry like school girls), but seriously... in a couple of hours I had it pretty much all in and working (!). Not too shabby for a COMPLETE WP noob. I must admit, I'm kinda diggin' the 'press right now. Not committing to it yet (gotta peek under the hood and see what I'm in for as far as the API is concerned), but certainly it is becoming one of my top suitors.
I know exactly what you mean! Right now, I'm spending most of my time with Joomla, so I hate it most. When I spend more time with Drupal, I hate it more. The same is true for Wordpress. Thanks man! My posts in that thread were the result of a truly agonizing decision making process over dumping Drupal for Joomla as our primary development platform. BuddyPress just seems kind of sucky, but Wordpress has connectivity to almost everything. One annoyance though, is that the Complete Wordpress-vBulletin Bridge does not support WP-Mu. Wordpress, as far as I know, has no method of allowing users to add posts or pages via the front-end. That might be troublesome for your current project. Wordpress doesn't work well for my current projects, because it has very kludgy support for per category ad placements. Joomla is far better at that, even if the OpenX plugin for Joomla is vaporware. Another annoyance: WP-Mu doesn't support "www". You can use any domain you want with WP-Mu except for www..
Hmmm... I must say that, though I see WPMU as being extremely promising (and probably something I use for an experimental site), the powers that be MUST do something about the whole 'www' issue. Not only that, but WPMU so doesn't like working in localhost that, to development in say WAMP or XAMPP, you have to create localhost.localdomain to get the thing running. That right there almost turned me off until I learned that trick. Also, another maddening thing - there doesn't appear to be any option in WPMU to disable the activation link requirement for registration. At least Joomla has this built in as an option. I think you're right, Will. The partner you're hooked up with right now is going to seem FAR more irritating than the potential one you're eying across the room. Yet and still, I am definitely going to dive more into WordPress and its API. Still waiting for a response from the k2 team regarding its ability to support multi-chapter/multi-part works.
Okay, no response from the k2 team YET regarding my relatively simple question, so my decision regarding that plugin is still pending. For now, weighing all the pros and cons, and reading through posts, I'm taking the plunge into WordPress. Yes, there are some things I find stunningly missing (I mean, really, out of the box I cannot select whether I require an activation link for users?!!!), but overall, this project is at least as active as Joomla, with a relatively simple structure but nonetheless has a lot of potential power. The number of plugins is staggering, and growing. Let's not even mention the themes - WP has some of the most beautiful, readily available free themes I've ever seen. Just as importantly, the community is very helpful. Technology means nothing without the people behind it, and I can say the WP community is very supportive and responsive from what I've seen - I can't say that for the official Joomla community overall (though the occasional fire-fights have been INTENSELY entertaining). Individual Joomla sites can be quite good (I've had a blast on quite a few), so I'm not painting a bad picture of the whole community, I just find the official forums a bit... ugh. Drupal? At least I'm willing to look at it when version 7 comes out, so count that as a minor victory if you want to. As for my older sites - I may not convert those to 1.5. Yeah, I know, but for the meantime, I just don't want to go through the hassle especially with 1.6 on the horizon (and goodness knows what THAT will break). Plus, they are just too highly customized to be worth the effort just to say that I am now using "bright shiny thing".
I have a test set up of Wordpress MU running. I do have the home page set with the (www.domain.com) working, is that what you mean? From their new users who get their own Blog end up in a sub-domain (sub-domain.anything.com). Their user name becomes their Blog sub-domain name. I have been able to turn off registration of new Blogs or new users. I do belong to an advanced theme and plugin club for Wordpress MU. It's a solution for some people to use this set up but it is not simple. It will not take many users before you need your own dedicated server or at least a VPS. It may take a while before you cover costs, if ever.