A Comparative Study Of Joomla vs Drupal 2018

The Internet is developing faster than ever. The total number of users in the web-space is quickly increasing every day. There are many industries, firms and companies that don't have an online presence, seriously think about taking their business activities to the online platform. With the invention of different content management systems, you don't need to learn several programming languages to create websites and blogs. Both technical and non-technical persons can easily create all types of websites and blogs with the help of a CMS.

Joomla & Drupal are among the most popular content management systems of the world. Since long, there have been heated arguments that which CMS-between Joomla & Drupal- is the best for creating websites? Each of these two content management systems has its own distinctive features, advantages and disadvantages. So, we will review some important features of both Joomla & Drupal and try to determine which one is best for developing websites and blogs.

Don't Miss: How To Convert Joomla Website To WordPress

1. Ease Of Use

If you look at modern websites, the majority of webmasters use graphics to determine which CMS is suitable for different specifications. As you see in the picture, when it comes to ease-of-use, Joomla stands in the middle. Drupal is very difficult to use (for non-technical individuals). But, it is ideal for complex web development projects.

2. The Availability Of Modules

If you own and operate a Drupal Website, you can get a fairly large collection of quality modules at drupal.org as per your needs. Install the useful modules on your website to add more functionalities/features to it and serve a large number of visitors that come to your website on a daily basis. You can also get industry-specific Drupal modules from Drupal developers.

Joomla offers three kinds of modules: components, modules and mambots. Each of these 3 has own, limited features. You can use them as per your specific needs.

3. User Rights

Joomla supports the multi-purpose use of websites, but it does not provide the necessary flexibility in daily work. It allows individuals to contribute to the website owner as a registered user, Author, Editor, and Publisher.

At a lower level, users can write materials. Someone else will review and publish it. If you allow the author to write and publish his/her content himself/herself, he/she can edit other materials also. Is there any way to restrict the user role in Joomla just to his/her own materials? The simple answer is No.

Drupal, with standard tools, offers a very flexible assignment of rights to users. If these rights are not sufficient for you, use additional modules to expand the flexibility. If you use your own module, then restrictions surface due to the lack of imagination and laziness.

4. Website Structure

There are several sections and categories in Joomla. You just need to place your materials in the right categories. There is a three-level hierarchy. So, use them as per your specific needs. The developers of Joomla offer Static materials so that Joomla users don't feel any problem while creating and operating Joomla websites.

With the help of taxonomy, you can make any hierarchy as per your needs while operating Drupal websites. You can create your own material and place in the hierarchy of the site as you deem suitable.

5. Economic Considerations

Although Drupal provides the greatest flexibility to a webmaster, its administration is extremely complex and has a very high entry threshold. Entrepreneurs would need to hire an expert webmaster to operate Drupal websites that come at a considerable price.

Joomla has a much larger community of developers than Drupal if you think it from the point of view of communities supporting CMS. So, this is the reason as to why developers prefer to work with Joomla. On the other hand, the experienced Drupal developers are difficult to find and they are more expensive than the developers of Joomla.

6. Design Patterns

Always keep in mind that Joomla is object-oriented. On the other hand, Drupal is based on old PHP 4 procedural programming. So, Drupal offers obsolete design patterns, such as Procedural, Hooking etc. Joomla implements modern design patterns that are used in the best frameworks, such as Zend and corporate programming languages, Object orientation, MVC (Model View Controller, Singleton. You should know that some design patterns can be implemented in both CMSs, such as DBAL. The use of these modern practices is associated with the continuous improvement of the Joomla and CMS frameworks. On the other hand, Drupal is always stagnating.

7. Database

On Drupal websites, views are accumulated in the database. So, you cannot put them under version control and developers cannot collaborate while developing specifications. Each new content type in Drupal creates a pair of database tables, which means the database structure changes over time if the webmaster creates and modifies content types. This creates problems for developers who create Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERD) while developing a web application. You should never rely on ERD because the number of tables and the base schema will be different when you see the database on the next time.

In Drupal, all logs are stored in the database. Keeping logs in the database means that it is very difficult for them to access, analyse and profile. The developer can't use Linux tools to process and analyse logs. The process becomes slower and takes up a huge amount of disk space (many gigabytes) for storing databases. This makes the database system large and inefficient. For a large site with high traffic, it is impossible for website owners to analyze the logs.

So, which one is the best for creating websites?

Experts believe that new Drupal 8 (which is yet to be released), will eliminate several problems related to Drupal. For the time being, it is not even worth considering using Drupal in large-scale projects. So, Joomla is better than Drupal on all parameters. Therefore, you must use Joomla extensively in web-development projects if you have to meet the growing needs of your clients easily and effortlessly.

About the Author:

Marie Thomas is a Web developer by profession and Writer by hobby. She works for WordSuccor Ltd.- best wordpress development company in USA. Also passionate about Drupal and Jumla web development. If you need to hire a Wordpress developer you can contact us on Google+, Facebook, and Twitter.