Janne Kalliola from Exove compares Drupal to other PHP based open source content management systems, such as WordPress, Joomla, eZ Publish, and Concrete5.
Unblocking The Main Thread Solving ANRs and Frozen Frames
Drupal vs. the Others
1. DRUPAL VS.
THE OTHERS
DrupalCamp Tallinn
June 14, 2012
Janne Kalliola
Image by Abysim
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2. Agenda
A couple of words about Exove
Systems
WordPress
eZ Publish
Joomla!
Concrete5
Drupal
Positioning
3. Exove is one of the leading Nordic and
Baltic companies specialising in open
source web services design and
development.
4. We enable companies to conduct
better business on the Internet
through best-of-breed personnel
and solutions
5. Company in a Nutshell
We specialise in designing and developing sites, web
applications, mobile apps, and community platforms
Founded 2006, now employing 50+ people
Operations in Finland and Estonia, clients around the
Europe and the States
Clients ranging from small start-ups to big media
companies, telecom operators and multinational
corporations
Usually Exove chooses the CMS system to build on
Mainly focusing on systems created on LAMP (Linux
Apache MySQL PHP), due to easy-to-match
requirements for hosting
6. THE SYSTEMS
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7. Platforms Used by Exove
Currently and frequently used
Drupal (GPL)
eZ Publish (Commercial + GPL)
Wordpress (GPL)
Concrete5 (MIT)
CodeIgniter (own open source license, permissive)
PhoneGAP
Previously or from time to time used
CMS Made Simple (GPL)
Joomla! (GPL)
Symfony (MIT)
8. Systems in The
Presentation
The systems discussed are all used by Exove
They do not represent the complete spectrum of available
content management systems
They have been selected to provide a good coverage for
various customer needs
All systems are based on LAMP
There are excellent systems on other platforms, such as Liferay
and DotNetNuke, that could be viable alternatives for the
systems in this presentation
All systems are open source
There are also good closed source systems, but we are not
speaking about them now
10. Wordpress
A CMS focusing on blogs, “an open source blog
publishing application”
Also available as a service in wordpress.com
Has a huge user base, considered one of the market
leaders of open source CMS systems by 2011 market
survey by Water & Stone
www.waterandstone.com/downloads/
2011OSCMSMarketShareReport.pdf
Powers around 16% of websites accorgind to W3Techs
survey (May 30, 2012)
w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management/all
11.
12. Wordpress
Focuses on making things easy
Administration panel is easy to use
The whole system is easy to configure and edit with
integrated editors for CSS and template files
A plugin architecture for extending the system
Proper support for extending content types and
multi-sites
Not optimal, though
The leader in both installations and brand exposure
13. Wordpress
+ -
Easy administration Still quite blog-driven
A lot of core features Plugin quality varies
A lot of plugins for extra functionality From dirty template hacks to
proper full-blown feature-packs
Huge number of readymade with proper settings in admin
themes No proper separation of content
Very intuitive API for plugin and presentation in plugins
development, a plugin can be built in Performance is really weak
30 minutes without caching
Focuses really on blogging, Community features are not in
considered one of the best blogging main focus
platforms Achievable through plugins
14. When Do We Choose
Wordpress?
When the site is small or medium in size
When the site focuses primarily on blogging
When the requirements do not specify a lot
more features than Wordpress can provide
We have implemented some plugins, but extending
WP to match one of the fully featured CMSes (like
Drupal) would take years
When the site does not need a lot of community
related features
15. Why Would We Choose
Wordpress (over Drupal)?
Essentially, makes the site cheaper for clients
needing a small or medium site
Setup time is faster, whole setting up does not
really need any contribution outside HTML
developers
Very easy and clear administration panel
Easy to train, easy to use
Small maintenance burden
Plugins are easy to install and configure
17. eZ Publish
Developed by eZ Systems AS (a Norwegian
commercial open source company)
Smallish community, but complemented nicely
by a company
All-in-one enterprise content management
system
Huge feature list
Focused on major corporate sites
18.
19. eZ Publish
Very flexible and powerful content model
Integrated workflow and timed publish features
Fine-grained administration rights management
Very sophisticated multi-site and multi-language
support
Two ways to administer the site, a toolbar approach
along with the traditional administration panel
Also able to work as a intranet system
20. eZ Publish
+ -
Easy and yet powerful Community features not that
administration interface advanced
Focus on users enriching the
Caters for all required corporate content, not generating it
features out of the box Extending eZ requires a lot of
Excellent search through deep knowledge
SOLR integration (eZ Find) Only a few dozen extensions
Sophisticated caching On the other hand, the base
system takes care of most needs
Highly developed administration already
processes Open source version not released
Commercial support available officially
21. When Do We Choose eZ
Publish?
When the site is from big to huge semi-static
corporate site
When the site needs very sophisticated
administration features
Typically, non-technical people maintaining the site
When the site focuses on top down content (like
a newspaper, a magazine, or a corporate site)
When customer requires commercial entity
behind the system
22. Why Would We Choose eZ
Publish (over Drupal)?
More required functionalities in the core (if the
requirements demand a lot from the site)
When workflow on administration side is essential
and needs strict control on user privileges
This can again be achieved with Drupal’s contrib
modules, but needs a combination of modules that
typically have some compatibility issues
Need for not-straightforward multilingual and/or
multidomain support
The system is fabulous for multi-country deployments
24. Joomla!
Open source CMS with long history (2000->)
Excellent positioning in search engines, community pays
focus on marketing
Has a huge user base, considered one of the market
leaders of open source CMS systems by 2011 market
survey by Water & Stone
www.waterandstone.com/downloads/
2011OSCMSMarketShareReport.pdf
Powers around 2.8% of websites accorgind to W3Techs
survey (May 30, 2012)
w3techs.com/technologies/overview/
content_management/all
25.
26. Joomla!
Simple and powerful content model
A lot of extensions for various purposes
Based on model-view-controller paradigm
Better than usual admin user interface
Powerful templating system
Very designer friendly, focus on making sites
look fantastic with little effort
One of the major reasons behind the success
27. Joomla!
+ -
Big community Content model is simple and
A lot of extensions, readymade requires extensions
themes, and such Extensions are hard to build
Extensions are easy to install Some internal concepts are
Relatively friendly admin confusing
interface Lagging behind compared to
WordPress and Drupal
28. When Do We Choose
Joomla!?
When the customer has selected the system as
part of their technology portfolio
When WordPress is not enough and Drupal
admin UI is too intimidating
When site features can be achieved with
readymade extensions
Typically, one or two big extensions do the trick
29. Why Would We Choose
Joomla! (over Drupal)?
We do not see any reason to select Joomla!
instead of Drupal or eZ Publish
Unless there are non-CMS reasons, such as earlier
experiences or investments in Joomla!
However, Joomla! has very good traction in
some countries and among freelance designers
The install base is 2-4 bigger compared to Drupal
(depends on measurement)
31. Concrete5
A modern and object-oriented content management
system
Excellent approach to the content models
Based on Zend framework and ADOdb DB abstraction
Has been raising awareness
Highest growth rates in Water & Stoner survey in 2011
Active community with both free and commercial
extensions
Permissive license (MIT)
32.
33. Concrete5
Simple and yet powerful admin user interface
Sophisticated theming based on content areas
and blocks that may have their custom
templates
Easy and extendible codebase
Several add-ons
Peer reviewed
Helpful community
34. Concrete5
+ -
Focus on what site visitors actually Number of add-ons smaller
see compared to big names
In contrast to content types etc. Not yet suitable for very large
Friendly admin interface sites
Add-ons easy to install and of goof For example, powerful search
quality is missing
Easy to make own blocks for
Core functionality is not enough
content
for normal sites, at least one
Front-end upgrading
add-on needs to be installed
Good community
35. When Do We Choose
Concrete5?
When customer wants to have a good CMS for
a smaller site
Especially when the object-oriented content model
gives real benefits
When customer demands to have an intuitive
admin user interface
When there is no major amount of custom
functionality
36. Why Would We Choose
Concrete5 (over Drupal)?
Admin interface is way better
Focus on content management and not on system
management
More permissive license for the customer
Less configuration and hacking
38. Drupal
A fully featured CMS with a great community and UGC (user-
generated content) support
Literally thousands of modules and a very active development
community – as you should know
Has a huge user base, considered one of the market leaders of
open source CMS systems by 2011 market survey by Water &
Stone
www.waterandstone.com/downloads/
2011OSCMSMarketShareReport.pdf
Powers around 2.1% of websites accorgind to W3Techs survey
(May 30, 2012)
w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management/
all
39.
40. Drupal
Multi-language and multi-site support in the core
Has a great API, a lot of hooks and toolkit
overrides for extending
Has a decent documentation, even very good if
you compare it to other open-source products
A lot of good quality modules
41. Drupal
+ -
Excellent community feature Not enough features in the core
support for typical CMS case
Bad admin interface that focuses
Extendible easily and to pretty too much on system
much anything administration
Widely used Caching is somewhat limited
Huge user-base No integrated admin workflow
with user access controls
Active community, quality Community focuses too much
contrib modules available on code, design and marketing
Install profiles and distros seems to be a hindsight
Drupal.org is not “selling” the
Excellent references system at all
42. When Do We choose
Drupal? 1/2
When the client specifically wants it (this is way
more common for Drupal than any other CMS)
You can create pretty much any site with Drupal – the
other CMSes just might do some specific sites faster
to build or easier to use
When the site focuses on community and user
generated content
There is no match to Drupal’s community features,
as we see it
43. When Do We Choose
Drupal? 2/2
When the client wants/needs a CMS for which they
can get support from a lot of technology companies
When we need the CMS to bend to anything we
want
There’s no match to Drupal’s API and flexibility for
extending on
You can build pretty much anything on Drupal, without
breaking the core
On the other hand, the content models of eZ Publish and
Concrete5 make them easier to extend without coding or
configuring the system
45. Positioning:
User Perspective
User generated
Drupal
WordPress
Joomla!
Contet sources
Small size Site size Big size
eZ Publish
Concrete5
Top-down information
47. Recap
Different systems serve different needs
There is no fit-for-all system available
Drupal is quite a good candidate for an all-
around system
If you tolerate its weaknesses
48. Want to hear more from us?
www.exove.com
@exove
Meet us at Drupalcon 2012 in
Munich
49. THANK YOU FOR
YOUR TIME
Questions? Comments?
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