From a development standpoint, what are the advantages/disadvantages of the major Content Management Systems?

Question

I'm interested in using a CMS instead of building a website from scratch. However, as a software engineer, if I'm going to be using open-source tools, I'm going to use them to their full extent, including the possibility of developing plugins/extensions/modules and maybe even contributing core code.

I'm currently looking at WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla!. They all appear to have the features I need, either as core features or plugins. However, I'm curious how hard it is to learn the system and then develop for it.

Does anyone have experience with this? When using and developing WordPress, Drupal, and/or Joomla!, what were your experiences like?

Answer 1

I avoid Joomla like the plague. It is highly difficult to extend, especially if your use case isn't one of the ones their devs specifically designed the CMS for. Great if you want to do a small business brochure site, but if you're looking to heavily customise... ditch it. The pay-to-play nature of much of the dev community is a turnoff, too.

WordPress is very heavily specialised in the blogging direction. If that fits your needs, go for it - it's a slick, well supported, system. If you're looking for something that's a bit more complex in a CMS, though, go with...

Drupal. My favourite PHP CMS, hands down, with the exception of blogging. Functions like hook_nodeapi, hook_user, hook_form_alter, etc. make it essentially effortless to heavily tweak the function of nearly everything in the system. If I want to replace the password field in the user login form with an upload field and MD5() the uploaded file to verify the user, I can do that - without hacking core code, and in a few lines of form alteration and validation code. Pretty astounding the first couple times you do something slightly nutty like that.

Answer 2

I've only developed for Joomla! and have been a user of wordpress, but Joomla! development is too clumsy if you want to completely change the layout. Writing a plugin or 'component' is fairly easy if you know the way around the code, but getting it to do exactly what you want isn't so easy because it likes to force you to use it's MVC design pattern which I find too clumsy.

I've seen both the Joomla! and Drupal code base, and I'd say that Joomla!'s code is much cleaner and better documented. It also heavily uses the MVC design pattern which can be good or bad depending on your preference and what you want to use it for. It has the most extensive use of OO programming in any php project I've seen.

I haven't developed for wordpress, but as a user, automatic updates are a godsend! plugins and themes can be found and installed through an interface in wordpress itself, so as a developer you save a bit of time in trying to promote your plugin because it gets made available to everyone right away. Heavy modifications might break some of of this though, so I wouldn't recommend it if you want to modify it a lot.

Joomla!'s plugin community is heavily monotized, but there is a huge community of plugin developers. I don't know about Drupal, and most wordpress plugins are free. So that's something to consider as well if you plan on using third party plugins.

Answer 3

I haven't used Joomla much and have never really needed to tweak Wordpress outside the design but have used Drupal quite extensively. Drupal seems to be becoming the standard for PHP CMS' which I think is quite a shame given how much is wrong with it. I won't try to tell you why you should use it, or shouldn't, but here's a few things that I find really annoying with it.

1. Complete lack of OOP. Ok, in Drupal 7 they're finally doing some OOP with the Abstraction Layer but the community as a whole still shuns the entire concept of OOP as it applies to the CMS as a whole. And given their dependence on modules and third party code doing a decent OOP setup would help keep the code more organized. Currently to avoid naming conflicts you need to prefix all functions and constants with your module name which can lead to some very long function names which can lead to some very long lines of code which can make things a little less readable than doing something like $node->parent()->parent()->title;
2. Drupal content is completely unorganized. When doing an information heavy site it's imperative that you have well organized content and Drupal simply doesn't allow this. Drupal's content management is just one large list of nodes with a few filters you can apply. There are ways you can use Drupal's taxonomy system and other modules to setup relationships but I've never found any that actually make the interface easier to navigate and make it easy to manage the content on the templates. At work I've created a module that allows this but it's required dumping weeks worth of development time into it a simple feature that any good CMS should come with out of the box.
3. The admin interface is absolutely rancid. This one pretty much speaks for its self but install a copy of Drupal and click around. Then take a look at say, the Radiant interface (Radiant is Rails I know, but we're talking UI here). Another example of a good UI for the admin would be FrogCMS, a PHP port of Radiant.
4. No ORM, and absolutely no attempt to have one, means you better like writing lots of SQL to get the data you need. While I generally have no problems with writing my own SQL it's starting to get a bit old when most good frameworks and CMS' built on them have at least some kind of ORM for you to use. Even if it's a botched one.
5. Drupal loves to use non-standard file extensions (.module, .info, .install, .inc, etc) so you better make sure your htaccess and/or virtual host is setup to not allow direct access to these files or all your source code will be wide open for the world to see.

Personally I think FrogCMS looks like it's off to a good start to be an up-and-comer if the maintainers allow the community to contribute to it and allow it to grow. You'll need to do more coding as it doesn't have a big feature set out of the box and doesn't have a plugin repository like Drupal or Joomla but from a coding standpoint it's setup with a pretty well done, albeit basic, MVC implementation that will help your code be more organized and easier to maintain.

Answer 4

hi,

over the years, i began hating PHP, since i had to work a lot with it until i found good alternatives, so the first question i ask you is: does it have to be PHP?

but staying with PHP i'd add the following:

• most people like Drupal a lot because of it's extensibility ... that's fine, but it still has some design problems ... it's is very potent and flexible and has a huge user base -> lot of plugins, big community to ask for advice etc.
• when it comes to Joomla, one has to say, that in the past, this has been a really a complete mess ... but in version 1.5 the whole thing was redesigned and is now very clean ... i always laughed down at joomla, but recently i had a talk with some other developer i had worked with on several occasion, who quite conviced me, that it has become a developer friendly software ... plus, it is soooooooo damn easy to administrate ... i know no other CMS that is so easy to use (and is a "real" CMS, not a forum or blogging engine)
• you might wanna have a look at Vanilla CMS ... very sexy, still slick and powerful ...
• use a CMS based on a good PHP framework ... typo3 (Flow3 (IMHO really the most funky PHP framework)), something based on symfony (can't find anything, but this should be a good start), mambo (CakePHP) or maybe something based on code igniter ... you will always need to get familiar with the framework, but a) this is always good, b) if the framework is good, the app is likely to be good and extensible, c) you yourself will have a high productivity when building extensions since the framework will do a lot for you ...

finally, you might wanna have a look at opensourcecms ... always helpful ...

good luck with your choice then ... ;)