Recently I took up a project that needs to deal with Joomla and its not a positive experience. Let me say that I touched Drupal before dipping deep into Joomla so comparison are made along the way. Drupal almost always emerge as winner betweem the 2 and yes I am a Drupal fan.

Joomla is what I would say, pretty on the outside. Something a user will appreciate. But for people who can see and understand the inside, we wouldn't like it as much.

First, its a CMS and nothing more. If your website is simple and informative, Joomla would be great for you. But anything else out of the box would be immediately turn into a work around.

Drupal on the other hand is more of a framework. Its archecture is well design, in fact one of the most beautiful one I have ever seen. Its very flexible can is really a good foundation to build your web application on.

Secondly, I could not understand the need to come up with the term extension, component, module and plugin. They are way too similar in so many way its become very confusing.

Drupal on this end can be equally as daunting at first with modules, blocks, nodes and taxonomy. New terms it is but after you learnt them up it become very obvious to you.

Thirdly, I'm frustrated at how certain operation is so needlessly tedious. Often due to the fact that its architecture is already outdated, also to mention, rigid. Yes, in Joomla 1.5 it use a MVC model, in sync with ASP.NET 3.5 MVC I see? Its nice but I'm talking about SEF, database access, etc. Those are either too primitive, or needlessly tedious, did i mentioned twice?

Drupal is build with clean url, ajax, database abstraction and security. Tasks are certainly easier to do in Drupal than in Joomla.

Many people might disagree with my post but honestly after trying Joomla for some month, I am not impress. I welcome some discussions/arguments against this article as it did sounds kinda bias but all the points are valid.

One thing Joomla beat Drupal is the administrative interface. Its easier to navigation Joomla admin that Drupal for starter. That's kinda the only win for Joomla.