With advancement in technology, three content management systems or CMS have gained more importance. The most popular CMS nowadays are WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. Sometimes it becomes difficult to decide which CMS is better than the other. So what is better content management system? Is Drupal, Joomla or WordPress better CMS? The answer to that question is not that simple. All three are open source and while they are all build on PHP and MySQL, they vary in their features, ease of use and capability. The only way to decide which one works best for you is by considering their pros and cons.
Joomla is a community type website, a portal which would work best if you are trying to create network or community with newsroom, membership, articles etc. from external authors. Navigation structure is easy to create in Joomla. It offers a lot of advance tools like setting expiry on certain articles, activation dates, breadcrumbs and so on. With so many tools at hand, it can be overwhelming unless you have good knowledge of the system. Some of the advantages of Joomla include the fact that it has a strong developer community with large plugin Library with many FREE open source plugins. It is user friendly and it offers lots of extensions variability, each of which differ in power, capability and function. It has a strong content management capability compared to WordPress as it was developed for enterprise level CMS.
Some Disadvantages of joomla include the fact that it needs a little training and learning before working. It is not as simple as WordPress. A lot of work needs to be done to make Joomla based website Search Engine Optimized. It also has limited Access Control List. This ACL refers to the permissions given to specific users for specific pages.
WordPress is fairly simple to use and worlds favorite blogging software. With its user friendly blog system it is easy to update, create pages and plugins. Since it has a blogging system, it is loved by google, making it fairly easy to optimize. It is very easy to understand and can accommodate multiple authors. It offers a huge plugin library. With strong Search Engine Optimization capabilities and ease of customization, it is one of the most popular CMS options. The system is flexible to use as it can be adopted for E-Commerce sites, portfolio, video sites, company blog and much more.
One of the disadvantages of WordPress is that once WordPress releases updates and new plugins, they are not compatible with the older versions. Since it was design for blogging platform, it has limited capability as content management system compared to Joomla and Drupal. Even though it is easy to customize, there are limitations in designing options. Security is another issue as it easily becomes target for hackers. It is not very secure on its own and needs third party plugins to help secure it further.
Drupal is extremely powerful and developer friendly compared to WordPress and Joomla and more suitable for Data intense Websites. It possesses strong SEO capabilities as it was developed to be search engine friendly. It is more favorable option for enterprises due to strong ACL Controls (Access Control List) and version controls. It is very stable, even when there are multiple users using the website simultaneously.
One of the disadvantages of Drupal is that it does not offer a great variety of FREE plugins. Lot of the plugins called modules have to be paid for. Themes are limited in Drupal, thus you need a good designer to make it look better. Drupal is not that simple to work with like WordPress. It is complicated and requires strong coding capabilities to work with it unlike WordPress.