Content Management Systems: Drupal, Joomla! or WordPress?

This website has just been re-done.

Really?

Well, you can't tell because I haven't given it a new design -- I only changed the back end. I finally got my site switched over to the Drupal content management system (CMS). Oh what a relief!

So what's the big deal about? Well, my old site was done with a CMS called Joomla!. A few years ago, I started building sites with Joomla! because it was easier to learn the templating/design system. I did a few sites with Joomla! but came to the realization over time that I just did not like the CMS. Well, the truth is - I really, really hated it. Too many tables in the core and modules, way too complicated to add new content, etc. There were so many strange ways to do things. In the end, I rarely bothered updating my site with new articles and such. Of course, that's a very, very bad thing.

However, over the years, I have used a couple of other CMS's -- Drupal and WordPress. Now, I really like WordPress for blogging sites, mostly because it's just so great to set up a site and then hand it over to the client so they can work on their blog. WordPress is used by so many people all over, and it's been fine tuned so much that it's easy to use for non-techy people. If the client is comfortable using the system, then we're all happy.

I've also worked with developer teams on Drupal sites for many years, and it's a really awesome system. It keeps getting better with each new version, too. So a while ago, I set about learning how to set up sites myself from scratch, in Drupal.

So there you go... I'm a fan of Drupal and here are a few reasons why:

• It's free (Warning: That doesn't mean all the programming to set up a site is free... that would be too easy, don't you think??).
• It's open source, and it works well with other open source applications, including Apache, MySQL database, and PHP. And I just like the principle of open source: many contributors, free to use and, fits with the idea of freedom on the internet. Yeah, I know it's Utopian, but Utopia is great when it works.
• It's been around many years and has so many people contributing to it, that it's very well seasoned and very well supported.
• There are a gazillion modules you can add on, to do almost anything you want (although I'm still looking for a calendar module that syncs with Outlook... which is the antithesis of open source, but I'd like to make life easier for my clients).
• It's extremely flexible, yet you don't have to be a programmer to get started with it.
• You can use PHP filters to add page content (even more flexibility).

Credits: A big thank you to the guys behind the Joomal-to-Drupal Converter. It saved me a lot of time on my new site, and worked wonderfully. I had to rebuild permissions afterward, but that was a minor glitch.