I don't have much of an opinion on Joomla or Drupal as I haven't used either one very much. I have however used WordPress, ExpressionEngine, and tried (hard) to use Plone. IMO, WP, even with a forum, is not enough if you really want to build a community. It limits what your users can do. EE is a pleasure to work with. It's easy, and its features are robust and great. It's especially a pleasure for designers and developers, but users are usually pretty happy too The one thing about EE that bugs me for a community site is that users are still pretty limited in what they can do. They cant, for example, start their own blogs on the site. Plone LOOKS like a great option. I've used it at socialedge.com, and I like how it works, though it does take a little getting used to. The problem is that it runs on top of Zope, and from a developer/designer standpoint, it is kind of a nightmare. I've spent weeks trying to just customize the look of Plone for one of my sites and had no success. (Disclaimer: I didn't know anything about Python or Zope to start, so if you have some experience with these, it might be easier). If you don't mind using it out-of-the-box though, Plone's features are great.
As much as i love Drupal, I dont think it would be the best choice for a site with 5,000,000 members. When properly configured and optimized, and with caching enabled, Drupal does great with high traffic from anonymous members. I was on the front page of Digg and was getting several thousands of hits per hour on my Drupal site while it was on a shared-host, and didnt even notice a slow-down. More recently I was mentioned on Gizmodo.com, and got even more traffic - again with no problems. BUT - If my site gets 150 - 200 MEMBERS logged in, things get horribly different. Because caching in Drupal is only applied to anonymous visitors, not members that are logged-in, 200 logged-in members brings my site to a crawl. So to support 5,000,000 members, of which say 1,000 might be logged-in at any given moment would take some serious horsepower..
Thanks Randy I am really looking for such feedback. I do love Drupal. I made a trial installation and played around little bit. But my sites generally run by building loyal members. I am looking for something that supports high number of logged in members, traffic and gives an option for various mailing lists (based on member interest) I am looking closely at :- Expression Engine (Still I am not sure if it's really the best despite of good feedback across the net) IPB community software (To be released soon. Currently in beta testing. I am considering it because my current forum runs on IPB and it runs well even with high traffic of around 800 members online)
Both looks nice, but most of your visitors are guests. There are only 7 members online. I am looking for an example where 1000 members logged in.
Just my two cents: If I want all that, I generally revert back to a CMS called xoops It's not as SEO friendly etc, but I love the layout and find it much simpler than drupal/joomla
Joomla is voted number 1 for a reason and 1.5 is bad ace. I've also used Subdreamer which is very good for a beginner and at the same time very powerful with seamless forum integration. Youre also not going to get hacked with Subdreamer. Subdreamer sounds like a very good solution for you because you sound like a majority of the community and traffic base will be in the forum. Subdreamer will give you the option of easily integrating your forum and adding content or blog or downloads or image gallery. One thing i've come to appreciate about Subdreamer after migrating to joomla is that it has superior forum integration, download manager, and image gallery compared to any other cms and its backend admin panel is just plain more user friendly than the others. You won't see as fast development in the sd community but you will see higher quality development and the support in the forums is at least 4 times better than support at any open source cms community. I migrated to Joomla mainly cuz i wanted to build a site with more ad positions. However, If your building a large site around a forum like vbulletin, SD is a solid choice. Also, I think it would take over a 100 dedicated people to control a forum with 100,000 members, let alone 5,000,000
In fact, I had considered Subdreamer and then left it half way. May be I did not get convinced about professional layouts. And also it did not seem to be too much expandable in terms of features (I may be wrong though). After your feedback here, I have decided to add it in my short-lists and have another look. But I am already controlling a forum with 1,50,000 members and I am doing it alone (though I agree my members are very professional)
Just an update if you are interested. Expression Engine :- I posted my questions in their forum. Awaiting their response. http://expressionengine.com/forums/viewthread/65258/
I tried Joomla for some time. It may be little easy to install & use. But I was not convinced that it suits my needs.
Just a question have you checked out this one http://www.joovili.com/ if not has anyone in here have anything to say about it
Dear Miguelmateos, I feel you should read the below thread before making any decision on this software. http://talk.joovili.com/showthread.php?t=981 In fact, this is one of the reasons why I don't choose 'small & unreliable' softwares where there is no continuous growth.
Oops ! Left out SubDreamer from my finalists, after some research and reading negative feedback about it.
I am actively administering Wordpress, Drupal an Joomla. I love Drupal for its fetures and architecture. Joomla is very nice out of the box you don't need to play with the themes. Wordpress is the most easy to work with. My first pick is Drupal.
As a user of both Joomla and Drupal, and other CMS's, according to your criteria I recommend Drupal. Flexibility - Drupal is the winner Simple - if it's simple it's not powerful Elegant - by default there are few elegant themes for Drupal so I have to give this to Joomla Customizable - Drupal wins here Powerful - Drupal is the clear winner although it loses at simplicity (as I said, you can't have both)
Hi, we can get many features in both joomla and drupal.For an example Drupal is much more flexible when it comes to the development and setting up the theme and layout of the website. Joomla! is known to be surrounded by the paradigms set by itself, and offers less scope to be flexible. So Both having different kind of features which depends on processing.. thanks.