Comments on: Content systems: Joomla! vs. Drupal

By: Content systems: Joomla! vs. Drupal at Classroom Updates

Content systems: Joomla! vs. Drupal at Classroom Updates — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 21:13:46 +0000

[...] Original post by Kevin [...]

By: Tom

Tom — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 00:32:45 +0000

It looks like you've got more than enough already but this post came up on the front page of del.icio.us recently and it covers 30+ Joomla tools/resources. It seems like a pretty thorough big picture view. Tom

By: Gene Roche

Gene Roche — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 15:21:50 +0000

My Educational Technology Class is working on a project to support undergraduate research initiatives at Q&M. At the heart of the project is the capability for students to create research notebooks where they can share their experiences about the process of doing research. Since we’re looking at having a fairly large number of journals that could get pretty complex, we chose Drupal as the tool. (We liked the theming of Joomla better, but found the interface even more complex than Drupal.)

It’s been tough sledding so far. Our experience has been much like Alan’s: “But what happened for me was I really did not have the time to wrack my head around the drupal architecture and flow- it is really different in approach from the tools I was comfortable with,…” We’ve been working for a month and still don’t have a prototype that I’m ready to show to the client.

Thanks to Sebastian for the link to http://www.lullabot.com/ (and for all the others). We” be watching the progress that others are having and we’re hoping to be learn enough to make some contributions of our own before too long.

By: D'Arcy Norman

D'Arcy Norman — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 04:36:20 +0000

Great lists of plugins. er. modules. whatever. I use the Events module, Views, and CCK on every site I build. For event registrations, I use the Signups module – lets you track both members and anonymous registrations for events. Works great. If a user is logged in, they get a list of events they’re signed up for, and it takes care of email reminders and attendee lists.

http://drupal.org/project/signup

By: Kevin

Kevin — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 16:32:53 +0000

Alan – Thanks for your comment. I didn’t realize AcademicCommons was running on Drupal; it’s well done. I’ll be investigating the plug-ins you mention too. Question: are any of the registration system plugins you’re using available? I would love to use Drupal as an on-campus registration system for training classes and Center events, but I haven’t seen that functionality anywhere.

Gardner – It’s time to get this project going, once and for all. It won’t be long until the old URL isn’t working anymore and there’s no point in moving twice. So I’m going to put some focus into this project in the short term. And I may be soliciting volunteers from the Milton-L list – grad students looking to contribute – to help manage the site. Part of that depends on the workflows around new articles (pardon me, “stories”).

Eric – Lots to review here, eh? Let’s please stay in touch as we both work on our sites. I’d love to hear what you’re learning.

By: Eric

Eric — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 10:13:42 +0000

Kevin this is very useful information. Thanks. I’m thinking about building a site and was going to research which of these two content systems to use and now I have a great starting point.

By: Gardner

Gardner — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 10:38:57 +0000

I’m overjoyed to see this project, Kevin, and I know my fellow Miltonists will be too. Best of luck. I’ll be watching and taking notes–and once again marveling at the way the community steps up with great information. Full Drupal-grok is a stealth ambition for me: part of me feels I’ll be able to run with the big dogs (at least for short distances) if I can ever achieve it.

By: Alan

Alan — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 15:36:39 +0000

Kevin,

It’s not an easy decision. Proponents of systems can get overly religious about their virtues, when in the end, on a functionality level, they more or less can do the same things. We went with drupal at NMC for a variety of reasons- the kinds of sites we saw using it that seemed similar in scope (Academic Commons was a model), the extensibility, and the large development community.

But what happened for me was I really did not have the time to wrack my head around the drupal architecture and flow- it is really different in approach from the tools I was comfortable with, and in the end, we hired some people to do the architecture and module tweaking. But the amunt of that needed depends much on the kinds of things you need the site to do. I run about 4 of NMC’s other sites all as WordPress, though only 2 are really blog like in format.

Daniel has give a great list (I’m bookmarking quickly!

Some ones we also use are:

Flickr
JS Calendar
ActiveTabs
GMap (creates a dynamic google map of NMC organizations)
Community Tags
Modr8
TinyMCE
Captcha – creates a simple math captcha for forms
Tagadelic
Views- views really rock, I have gotten good at creating many different kinds of contents pages and blocks
CCK – very powerful

And we have a raft of custom ones for our new online conference registration system

The hardest p[art is making sense of categories and taxonomies… still working on that!

By: Kevin

Kevin — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 14:06:40 +0000

Sebastian,

Sorry your first comment triggered SK2 – too many links apparently, but I’ve rescued the comment.

Thanks for so many great resources. It’ll take me some time to dig through them all, but I get the feeling that Drupal is worth the learning curve.

Thanks!

Kevin.

By: GadgetGadget.info - Gadgets on the web » Content systems: Joomla! vs. Drupal

Thu, 04 Oct 2007 14:04:43 +0000

[...] unknown wrote an interesting post today!.Here’s a quick excerptI settled on Joomla! because both the front end and back end were intelligible not only to me but to the community that will use the site. I also liked the theme templates that are available. In the back of my mind, though, … [...]