Battle of the CMS - Wordpress, Joomla, or Drupal?

Technology is rapidly evolving, and this is certainly no exception for website platforms.

Back in the days, building a website required you to manually create and hard code all of HTML/CSS/Javascript/PHP. You would have to spend a crazy amount of time just to get a very basic website up and running, and making even the slightest changes to your content required you to go through those files and manually adjust the code.

Thankfully, those days are long gone. Today we have numerous content management systems (CMS’s) that allows publishing, editing and modifying content from a central interface. Any serious site creator will use these tools in order to develop a professional looking website. Although there are a lot of content management systems out there, the three most common ones are Drupal, Joomla and WordPress In this blog post, I will briefly summarize the key advantages and disadvantages of each CMS, and hopefully help you decide which CMS is the best choice for you.

Drupal:

• Very powerful, developer friendly tool
• Requires expertise and experience to operate
• Capable of producing the most advanced sites
• More complex installation
• UI less intuitive but more flexible and powerful
• Good e-commerce tool (Ubercart)

Joomla:

• Middle ground between developer oriented and user friendly
• Less complicated than Drupal, more complicated than WordPress
• Requires more coding to get the site to look and feel the way you want as opposed to Drupal/WordPress
• Still capable of producing advanced sites
• More complex installation
• Very nice easy to understand UI, but limitations exist
• Good e-commerce tool (JoomShopping)

WordPress:

• Least complex out of the three, user friendly
• Technical experience not necessary, very quick to set up
• Easy to paste text from word document, unlike Joomla/Drupal
• Powerful enough for experts to make a decent website, then with minimal instruction the client can take over the site management
• Easy installation
• UI takes some time to learn, but once you do it’s very easy/useful
• Good e-commerce tool (JoomShopping)

In conclusion, I would recommend WordPress for a beginner or anyone who has no knowledge of coding and intends to manage the website on their own. It’s ideal for fairly simple websites and is very quick and easy to set up. It requires no coding knowledge and is overall a very good starter CMS. Joomla is the middle-ground - requires more coding in the inital design-to-development phase, but very easy to manage after that is all said and done. Lastly, I would recommend Drupal only if you are running a large website, as it is more complex to use and more web development experience is required.

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