Web Development in Indiana

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Comment by Eric Bischoff on September 30, 2009 at 12:49pm

Thanks for the tips. I can't wait to read them.
In the time since talking this morning something has come up that will likely keep me from attending the Drupal meeting, but I will try to attend the next one, and do some reading up on it in the meantime.
This sounds very much like the C#/Vb.Net debate. Competing technologies used for the same thing that have separate strengths both of which are marching towards a point of common point of usability.

Comment by Neil Hastings on September 30, 2009 at 10:03am

That was a good article. I think it's also important to note that the Drupal community knows it's weaknesses and is working very hard on improving them. Drupal's admin area sucks for beginners. So the admin module was created and the Drupal Usability movement was strated.

There is a lot of cross talk between Drupal and Joomla and both sides are learning from the others. Future releases of Joomla are going to have a much better API and future release of Drupal will have a much better UI. I think the both systems are great for each other!

Companies like Development Seed are donating their skills to making drupal better. They released a concept called "features" and created Open Atirum

One very true aspect is the design. Drupal was developed more for developers. There is a huge lack of excellent Drupal designers. The complexity of Drupal's themeing system is it's greatest weakness.

Comment by Tim Piazza on September 30, 2009 at 9:44am

Here's another comparison that is worth reading as it's current and credible.

Comment by Tim Piazza on September 30, 2009 at 9:40am

For an interesting comparison, you can check out the survey results on the Webology eBusiness Solutions blog. It seems to confirm what my experience has said--technically, Drupal has the benefit of being a more mature platform where Joomla is still going through a maturation process. But Joomla seems to more easily support very creative designs, the sizzle of the steak, which is something that our designers really like to do. In our situation, Joomla works better, but that shouldn't take anything away from Drupal.

Comment by Eric Bischoff on September 30, 2009 at 9:17am

I love snakes and soda. Goes down sssssmooth. :-)
Seriously though Neil, I will try to make it, today and tomorrow are particularly busy but it is a well timed opportunity to see and hear about it first hand.

Comment by Tim Piazza on September 30, 2009 at 9:14am

Free snakes! Wow! It's almost worth the drive from E'ville. I wish I could make it.

Comment by Neil Hastings on September 30, 2009 at 8:58am

BTW, the meeting tonight is free with free snakes and soda. http://groups.drupal.org/node/28032

Comment by Neil Hastings on September 30, 2009 at 8:57am

I'll chime in as a devoted Drupal developer. I also spent years looking for a platform I could call my own, I developed sites in a wide variety of system and languages (Plone, ROR, VB.NET, ASP, Zend PHP Framework w/ smarty templates, PHPNuke, e107, ...) and for me it came down to flexibility and easy of customization.

I have very little creativity when it comes designing the layout, colors, etc. Drupal allows me to concentrate on developing the processing of the page without having to worry about the looks. I'm sure a Drupal designer will say the exact opposite (they can concentrate on design while not worrying about the processing).

Drupal can be a CMS, a framework, your best friend or your worse enemy :) The next version of Drupal (D7) is going to be a giant leap forward in both areas. They have spent tons of time on developing a better user experience (http://www.d7ux.org/), along with a better database and field layer API that will allow developers (like myself) to extend Dru pal even easier.

The main difference in Drupal is the community. In my 10 years in IT, I've never seen a group of people who spend so much of their spare time helping out others. There is a real sense of price and ownership in the product. The community really knows that the better we make everyone's experience, the more people get involved and the better Drupal gets.

That being said, Drupal is not for everyone. Be sure you do your research!

We are have a Drupal User Group meeting tonight so please come! It's at Jillians and it's going to be a blast. http://groups.drupal.org/node/26357.

Note: I'm a member of the Drupal User Group, work for a Drupal development company and have several Drupal contributed modules so my opinion might be a little bias :)

Comment by Tim Piazza on September 30, 2009 at 8:31am

I had looked at Plone for a multi-lingual project about 2 years ago. Handling localization seems to be its greatest differentiating strength, but I haven't tried implementing Plone.

One thing you might want to do, Eric, is spend some time reading the support forums for whatever system you are interested in, look at the types of problems people have, and what sort of responses they get, if any. Look at how many people are active in answering questions or if it's the same one or two people.

Site traffic to their respective sites can be used as an indicator of CMS popularity. According to Quantcast, Plone.org gets about 10k visitors per month, Joomla.org gets 63k, Drupal.org gets 73k.

Drupal has a user group in Indy, which may weigh in its favor. You may want to attend a meeting and see if you'll be able to learn from some locals. Contact Aaron Dudenhofer and talk to different members before deciding if that will have a strong influence on your decision.

Also look at the back end. it is easy to teach a non-technical person how to add and update content on the site? How well can you control access levels? Are there commercial plug-ins available that provide support? We use a commercial module for controlling access to the back-end, and for events registration. Commercial plug-ins tend to be very high quality.

Ultimately, I think you have to go with your gut. We're pretty deep into Joomla at this point, and for a straight eCommerce site I'd probably go with Magento, for the same type of reasons--it's an evolutionary project that took lessons from the growth of oscommerce and started fresh. Newer open source projects are not without their pain points, but I think any code project has pain points unless you pay someone else like Collin for programming and support.

Comment by Eric Bischoff on September 30, 2009 at 5:54am

Thank you both for your insights this is exactly what I needed. Colin, having coded my own applications in VB I understand wanting to know what each line of code is up to, especially should something need debugging. However, that was when I was salaried and had others to lean on when I got stuck. To Tim's point, now this is just me, myself and I having to learn it all to implement this for a couple non-profit organizations with a combined total budget in the low four digits. (read as doing this for free while I learn the ropes). Hence the need for a pre-built CMS. That being said I will benefit more from the thousands of heads are better than one approach, and thus far, Joomla is sounding like the one to try.
Has anyone heard anything about Plone? That was the other I had my eye on. There is a company developing in it very nearby (Fortville, I live in Greenfield) but I have not heard anything about it from people that have used it alongside other CMSs.

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