A few years ago, having a website was a luxury. A professional website maker will charge you from hundreds to thousands of dollars to get your website up and running. Plus another monthly fee for the webmaster to maintain your site. Today websites are just clicks away. Anyone with little knowledge of computers and the internet can make them. And everyone is a webmaster. :) All thanks to Content Management System or CMS.
For anyone new to the world of CMS, it lets you to make websites in just clicks. There are many CMS out there, paid or free, but there are only a few that stand on the top. There are three giants in free CMS world, WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. Those three have their own advantages and disadvantages.
WordPress is the simplest of them, only slightly more difficult than updating your Facebook profile, my mother and my 6 years old son use them with ease. Download it from WordPress.org. Good tutorials on installing and customizing are all over the net. You could probably get trough it without reading any though since it's so simple. Thousands of pretty templates steal the heart of everyone. However it focused only on blogging. An attempt to get WordPress into something else is time consuming and you'll hit the wall soon enough.
Joomla is somewhat in the middle. It needs some learning curves, but it isn't rocket science. Download it from joomla.org. Junior and High Schooler might be able to tackle Joomla with the help of some tutorial. Templates are fully customizable with modules make it less blog and more professional looking. It's quite flexible but I do hit the wall here and there.
Joomla and WordPress is my best friends in building webs all these years. I can meet almost all my clients request based on those two. Tried others like oscommerce and even Drupal, but back to those two right away.
However, lately I heard rumors about how great Drupal is. A quick Googling told me this:
1. Many big community sites, magazine, government and big companies are now using Drupal. Barrack Obama, Michael Jackson, NASA, MIT and Harvard to name a few.
2. It's competing against Joomla to be the best free CMS around. (Sorry WordPress, but you still the best engine for blogging) Drupal wins in architectural and flexibility but falls in templates and ease of use.
Dated today the last version of Joomla is 1.5 and Drupal is 6.12. Most likely both of them will try to improve what their engine lacks on the next version. But many said that Drupal's homework is much easier to accomplish since it already win in its foundation, the architecture.
Most people on the net agree that Drupal is difficult. That it's intended only for web developer, that it is actually a Content Management Platform, and so on. But I found one guy that said that it isn't entirely true. A friend of his has a website project. A month configuring Joomla didn't get her anywhere. So that guy lent her a hand and tried a Drupal's approach. The problem was solved in 3 hours, no coding whatsoever.
Of course, that guy can do it because he was already using Drupal since version 4.03. But if Drupal is that powerful and will get better on later version, I definitely want it!
Started the experiment, downloading it from drupal.org and installing it based on the installation notes the package provided. Drupal's installation doesn't differ much from WordPress's or joomla's. A few clicks and you're good to go. But configuring and customizing Drupal is another story.
With WordPress and Joomla, googling for tutorials is more than enough. It's all there! I've tried the same method for Drupal and ends up with headache. The official website, forums, Drupal's community, tutorials didn't do me any good.
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