(Dis)advantages between Typo3, Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress

Question

I'm about to switch from manual programming to using a CMS like the above ones. So my concern is, which one is the "best"...I know, the question which is best ist just very subjective, but maybe you can give me objective reasons for your oppinion.

Maybe I just have to tell something about the projects I'm about to realise in those CMS: 1 Personal homepage Several pages for smaller businesses and clubs...

Is there some reason why to use one instead of another? Which one can be modified (also in term of the look) easily? Which one offers better support?

I heard that typo3 is very powerful, but how big is effort for learning it? Which one is more professional?

Edit: Maybe there's one more criteria for the "chosen one"...At least one of those pages shall be edited by several users, so I need a possibility for giving everyone who needs to write a several "area" within he can make changes on the site...

Answer 1

Never used Typo3. The other 3 are all valid choices, it all depends on what you want to achieve. Personally, I use Drupal because, if you do things right, it's the easiest to use for the client (people may argue about that, but it works for me).

Joomla and Wordpress use a backend while Drupal gives content edit options directly in the frontend - everything's easy to locate and you don't need to learn the backend, just navigate through the site.

Drupal has thousands of modules - all are free of charge (unlike Joomla). Many are very good. Support is usually good, depends on the contributed module. But there are so many tutorials, you can't go wrong in most cases. The learning curve is rather steep, but worth the efort.

Answer 2

This is a hard question to answer. I will try not to be biased.

I never head of Typo3. Know nothing about it.

WordPress - fantastic for blogging and/or personal site. I was really impressed when used it, very AJAXy, looks sharp, intuitive interface. It seemed too limited for extending, integrating business solutions and customizing the way I wanted. Not development friendly! This is an option to consider if you want to make a small site without much functionality.

Drupal and Joomla are your choices if you want to achieve highly professional look and to build it into something more. Club websites, you can create big communities (similar to Facebook), send out newsletters, have paid subscriptions, online stores, forums, etc...

Drupal - very good, will not go wrong. I do not have any development experience with it. If someone has please add...

Joomla - I work with Joomla for several years, to me it is the best because I gets things done fast and right. Has plenty of free components/modules/plug-ins, once you use it you will have your favourites. Easy to extend and create complex websites as well as simple once with static pages. All of the the things I mentioned above (communities, stores, forums, ...) you can implement in Joomla in a day or so (knowing the right components).

In Joomla front-end and back-end are separate, in back-end you create you site and in front-end is what you get. After working with Joomla for long time it became more than a CMS to me, it became a platform for majority of my projects.

Both Drupal and Joomla are exceptional choices, it like Coke and Pepsi. It is up to you to decide. Here is an interesting study involving Drupal and Joomla.

Side by side comparison:

• http://www.alledia.com/blog/general-cms-issues/joomla-and-drupal-which-one-is-right-for-you/

As a Joomla person, I approve everything that is said about Joomla ;-) in the comparison above.

Her are some things to look at:

• http://www.cafewebmaster.com/drupal-6-vs-joomla-15-2009
• http://www.topnotchthemes.com/blog/090224/drupal-vs-joomla-frank-comparison-ibm-consultant
• http://www.goodwebpractices.com/other/wordpress-vs-joomla-vs-drupal.html

Answer 3

I've used TYPO3 extensively. It is extremely powerful, but the learning curve is incredibly steep. It has a lot of capabilities that the other CMSes in your list either lack currently or only recently added (like elegant handling of multi-lingual sites), but to build a modest personal site you'll probably never need those features.

For your needs, I'd probably recommend WordPress; it works fine as a basic CMS, and if you know PHP you already know everything you need to customize your site's theme. (You can theme TYPO3 sites as well, but doing so requires learning TypoScript and TemplaVoila, two TYPO3-specific systems.) Drupal is a better choice than WordPress for larger or less bloggy sites, but it can be a bit harder to pick up and get started with. Joomla is like Drupal, but with a smaller user community and thus less places to turn for support, extensions, etc.

I wouldn't classify any of them as more "professional" than the others; TYPO3 has more enterprise-grade features, but as I mentioned above you won't need them for what you want to do. Beyond that the professionalism (or lack thereof) is entirely in how you use your CMS rather than in which CMS you use.

Answer 4

I am biased toward Drupal as I use it heavily, but here are my thoughts.

Typo3

I've not used Typo3 before so I have no comment. :P

WordPress

WordPress is a good choice for blogs and small sites. It has a huge community, lots of themes and plugins, and a simple interface. It is really easy to get up and running and start using.

However, if you plan on building a community site with features beyond that of a blog, WordPress probably isn't a good choice. While it can be hacked into being a general CMS, it doesn't handle that type of functionality as well as other products do.

I've done a bit of WordPress development and I wasn't impressed. I can't speak for WordPress 3 but the 2.x version that I used was not pleasant to develop under. The code seemed disorganized and confusing.

Joomla

Joomla is also a good choice for small to medium sites. It can do more than just blog, has a lot of themes, and a fairly intuitive interface. The community around Joomla is different when compared to WordPress and Drupal. I've found that there isn't as much cohesion in the community and I think this is reflected by the fact a lot of the better Joomla plugins are not free. Plugins tend to stand by themselves and do not build on the functionality of other plugins.

You'll also run into growing pains with Joomla if your site eventually requires more complex content workflows, permissions, and content categorization. Joomla's user permission system is quite rigid and has predefined roles that cannot be changed. Content can only be categorized up to two levels deep.

My opinion is based on Joomla 1.5.x.

Drupal

Drupal has a very vibrant community. The usage of the software is expanding quickly and it is starting to be used more heavily in the corporate world. See this link for a list of larger name Drupal sites. It is by no means a complete list. :P

Drupal is developed by the community that uses it. Anyone can contribute code to the code base. Development is very active. Out of WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal, Drupal is definitely the most flexible and extensible. There are many modules. Modules in Drupal tend to be more generic and require additional configuration, but they are also highly flexible and very powerful. Many modules actually extend other modules, creating an ecosystem of modules that can provide very advanced features.

Internally, Drupal is not class heavy as it was written in the dark days of PHP 4, but the code in general is mostly clean and straight forward. There is a clear API for building modules and themes and the API allows them to even modify how the core of Drupal operates without actually changing core source code. Most of the default front end code can be stripped out if you like and replaced with whatever you want.

That said, Drupal has, in the past, been a developer centric tool and is not as easy to use out of the box as WordPress or Joomla. A primary goal of Drupal 7, which will be releasing within the next few months, is to make using a Drupal site significantly easier out of the box. Drupal 7 also packs a lot of features for the enterprise, like better database support and easier use of a multi-server database backend.

If you want software that will be able to scale well, Drupal is a very good choice. It has a learning curve for sure, but it is very versatile.