Drupal vs eZ Publish vs WordPress vs CMS Made Simple

Great stuff, guys! I was trying to help a friend decide today about what CMS to pick. I love Drupal, but WP has so many solid features for the beginning user.

Personally, I deal with WP because the support is around.

Keep great info like this coming!

— Casey

I think any such list as this needs to include Joomla. It arguably fills a role that is not as clearly represented here — it's simple, but extensible and capable of dealing with more sophisticated scenarios. Its usability for content administrators is probably superior to Drupal or eZ Publish.

I think it fits in nicely between CMS Made Simple and the Drupal / eZ Publish level of products.

Gary, you probably haven't tried eZ if you think Joomla's content administration would be superior. eZ is one of the rare open source CMS out there that has given a serious thought for providing easy to use and still powerful way to edit content: you log in, you go to page you want to edit as any site visitor would go, and then you start editing.

I think a list like this also needs to include PageLime! We're way more polished and professional then CMS made simple and were still in Beta. I think this site needs to do an article comparing the potential in up and coming content management systems.

There are a lot of really talented developers creating cool CMS's that arent getting represented. I only loosely include PageLime in this because I developed it. CMS is starting to hit a point where niche CMS's that are targeted are much better options then the Wordpress,Drupal, Joomla.

There is a huge market for people just doing CMS for Churches, that handle the specific needs of that exact client. PageLime is the perfect CMS for small web developers who do a lot of work with small businesses. There was a new CMS i saw the other day Perch that could be helpful for some people.

I just want to change the way when people say CMS they immediately start recommending these large scale solutions, just because they are comfortable coding in them. We as developers should be looking for the right CMS for the client. It's about benefits not features. Check us out at http://www.pagelime.com, if you are a church try http://churchcms.com/ (no affiliation).

The growth of options and better niche solutions has changed the whole market. Let's start to act like it.

Janne: “you log in, you go to page you want to edit as any site visitor would go, and then you start editing.”

Sorry, but Joomla has had that feature for years.

The strange omission of Joomla must have something to do with the equally strange custom of insisting there are “no winners” in contests billed as “showdowns” where Joomla shows up Drupal by every quantifiable measure, despite the whole contest and criteria having been set up by Drupalists.

Dan, the omission of Joomla is simply because our company (Exove) currently does not use it — it has seldomly appeared on our or our customers' radar.

Thus, it would not be fair to include any CMS into the competition without having worked thoroughly with it. Steve's comment to my first comment shows that we are no experts with Joomla.

Should we add Joomla to our portfolio, we would have it on the showdown as well.

Any and all good reasons to include Joomla in the portfolio can be sent to me by email: janne@exove.com. We will listen, and then make decisions. Thanks in advance.

I used eZ Publish for the last 2 years and stumbled upon MODx CMS when looking for an alternative solution for small sites. MODx features many of the tools seen in eZ Publish whilst allowing us to build small scale sites quickly.

MODx offers an ideal solution for sites which do not require event triggers and advanced content archiving. But what MODx offers is a flexible system, with custom content template variable for rapid website development.

Great post and comments. I strongly agree with your point that the choice of CMS often comes down to the dev team's preference. Marketers and non-technical website owners should spend time researching sites like CMSWire so they can read objective opinions about the various flavors or open source and proprietary CMSes.

Like other people here, I always consider the requirements of the project before choosing the CMS. For the past few years, I've used Drupal, Joomla, and Wordpress. They've all come a long way in the past 2 years and will only improve over time.

Drupal's access rules make it the clear choice for me in many situations. Plus, Drupal supports comments right out of the box. Joomla doesn't. It'll be interesting to see how Joomla 1.6 and Drupal 7 fare against each other.

When you are doing such a study and if you want readers to take your findings or opinions seriously you cannot conceivably leave out so many CMSs which deserve consideration point by point.

One that springs to my mind is Plone. You have sadly left it out which what many serious programmers and users alike would regard a serious and powerful heavyweight in your comparative study of CMSs.

Plone is conjunction with Plumi can provide you a very useful platform for content management with video streaming too. It is an upmarket and complex software not usually available in the lightweight. I would like to know as what your visitors/readers/users think of this awesome software.

from Shiv Satchit

Hi

Drupal is a pain to learn and I do really know this. But the point of Drupal is not to be “THE CMS!” out of the box. Its a CMS framework that gives you a sophisticated API and workflows. You can find a solution for any requirements there are.

You cons for drupal are:

* Tricky Admin interface.
Well Drupal has a loose structure and no backend. This is imho a wise choice. Because this means you can adapt the workflow of your customer, improve them and give them a real nice admin interface that fits their needs. Use Views and Panels and get the job done.

* Caching is somewhat limited
There are strategies to use APC, Memcached or filecache through modules like cacherouter, memcache or boost. Or maybe write your own. Pressflow Drupal gives you varnish support. Stuff like imagecache uses the apache rewrite rules as advance. Views and Panels are pluggable for caching soltuions. So how is this limited? ;)

* No integrated admin workflow with user access controls
Should this be in core? Isn't it better you can make a workflow that fits the user? There are a lot of modules around this. Or maybe make a feature of your worklfow Rules set and export it. There are endless options to solve this. imho the biggest problem is making a decision and learn how to achieve what you want as always in Drupal.

Drupal is a tool that gets the jobe done. Its difficult to use but basically has no limitations. Taxnomy, Nodes, CCK, Views, Context and Panels are great concepts. Downside is you have to understand them to work with them.

Workflow should be part of any CMS core. It provides a sequence of actions for content objects to hook system functions via triggers or other functions & relations. Any content object in eZ Publish can be incorporated into a workflow, if needed. And if your user needs it, by all means set one up!

eZ Publish has abstracted the concept of content objects so that the User content object that is no different than a Page or a Blog or a Role. They're all content objects that can be extended, made into containers, modeled, related, templated and restricted. And most of this can be done via the admin. They drink their own kool-aid by building eZ Publish with their own objects.
Want blog moderation? Build a workflow for Comment objects. Want e-commerce? Build a workflow for Shopping Cart objects. Want a one-off members area? Build a workflow for adding new members of a certain User Group.

Another strength that I didn't see mentioned is that eZ Publish has advanced Roles and Permissions management that allow very fine-grained access to every content object & function in the system. This, coupled with the concept of site-accesses, make it very powerful. For instance, the default is that everyone who access the site is an Anonymous user. You can create entirely different versions of what each user can see & do with a piece of content, if they get to see it at all. It's exponentially far more elegant than WordPress's four user roles.