If you are looking to build a new website for your business, then you must be looking for a content management system (CMS) that would best suit your business. WordPress, Joomla and Drupal are some of the most widely used CMS that help in building a robust website. These three online systems are open source and are built on PHP and MySQL. They vary immensely in terms of features, flexibility, capability and ease of use.
Here, you will find a complete comparison between these three content management systems that can help you figure out which one will show compatibility with your business. Each one of them is developed by a community of several developers. They are continuously improved regularly in order to support new internet technologies. Though they perform pretty much the same action, they differ completely on the end user. The main differences between these three content management systems are based on scalability and usability.
Drupal – Strengths and Weaknesses
Compared to Joomla and WordPress, this CMS offers an open source website building tool used to manage and put on contents and functionalities as well to an extensive array of website content. First released in early 2001, it has grown tremendously to be a granddaddy of CMS systems. It is also based on PHP and MySQL just like WordPress and Joomla. It is an extremely powerful and user-friendly system, and has become a choice for feature rich, data intensive websites.
Strengths of Drupal:
1. Unparalleled Web Security
Drupal, unlike WordPress and Joomla, has a diverse measure of security and tokens that protect form submissions, display of content and module implementation. It has several easy to fix configurable access allowed properties that are for different users, contents, functionalities and modules. Any module with security issues cannot be published.
2. Incredibly flexible:
If you want a simple blog with a static front page, then Drupal offers the best choice. It can handle this very simply. It has about 17,000 free modules available for you, hence, it can support hundreds of thousands of pages and millions of visitors. It is very powerful and flexible, no wonder it is a favorite for many developers.
3. Strong Web-SEO Friendly:
Any Webmaster will love this. Drupal has the best SEO capability that is readily available. It has several modules available for any SEO activity and tracking of the web statistics. It can automatically produce customizable Meta-tags or create title based URL nodes for your website, a characteristic that is lacking with WordPress and Joomla. Additionally, it supports RDF and integrates very easily with Google Analytics and offers more advanced SEO facility settings.
4. Inclination to Social Network:
Drupal offers several management and social networking modules such as forums, comments, social media plug-ins and user networks.
Drupal Weaknesses
A few demerits of Drupal include:
1. Extremely steep learning curve- it is more complicated than WordPress or Joomla. One needs to have strong coding capabilities and have to read several technical papers for ease of use.
2. It has lesser free plug-ins and themes, commonly referred to as modules. It is assumed that you can implement any nuances in-house.
WordPress – Strength and Weaknesses
This is by far one of the most widely used CMS on the Internet. It has been powering in excess of 17% of the Internet. This system is the proud creation of Automattic, and is available for free. There are more than 68 million users of WordPress, including New York Times, Forbes and CNN, among many other clients. If you want to avoid any technicalities and focus only on publishing, then WordPress should be on the cards for you. Let’s take a closer look at some of the strengths and weaknesses of using WordPress.
Advantages of WordPress
1. It has the highest number of themes and plug-ins. It is the poster child of open source developer community, which has hundreds of thousands of plugins already developed.
2. Multiple users- This CMS has built from the ground to accommodate more than one author, a unique and very important feature for serious publishers out there.
3. Easy to setup and start- WordPress has a very friendly user interface that is very simple to use and is highly intuitive, even for the first timers. You can do a lot; drop a theme, start blogging immediately or even add a few plugins.
4. Strong SEO capabilities- WordPress offers SEO advantages by plugins as well as manually. This will greatly help with your content and get better search results even on powerful search engines such as Google. Therefore, you can start blogging instantly without worrying about on-page SEO.
WordPress – Disadvantages
1. The major weaknesses of WordPress include;
2. It is not suitable if you have complex or unusual business requirements.
3. You cannot build more advanced E-Commerce websites if you choose to use WordPress.
4. There are people who feel that this CMS is not as secure as other systems such as Drupal or any custom system.
Joomla- Strength and Weaknesses
This is an open-source CMS software developed by Mambo. It is one of the most popular content management system solutions globally, with over 30 million downloads. It is another comprehensive CMS that meets the requirements of any individual or organization.
The advantages of using Joomla include:
1. Easy to Use and Time Saving
Joomla is very user friendly due to its advanced technology. When using this system for adding more content, it is time saving compared to the rest of the systems. You can edit and manage your content easily as well. Unlike WordPress, you can also add a lot of content to Joomla.
2. SEO friendly
Joomla not only makes your website look professional, but also attracts more visitors, hence high chances of high traffic.
3. Extension variability
The extensions of Joomla are categorized into 5- components, templates, plugins, languages and modules; these differ in functionality, capability and power.
4. Templates and themes
There are several templates and themes available for development. Once you install Joomla, a few minor modifications is all you need to ensure that it suits your preferences and needs.
Disadvantages of Joomla
The are a few weaknesses of Joomla.
1. It requires specific plugins for certain scripts.
2. Customization is limited.
3. Involves a big learning curve, meaning difficulty in learning.
4. It cannot be easily handled by small or simple websites.
5. It is difficult to allocate different pages to varying CSS when using this CMS development.
6. A developer is required for configuration- hence you incur some costs.