As you may remember from a previous post Joomla vs Drupal vs Wordpress, I started with very little knowledge of CSM software, I picked the three famous ones, installed them on my web server and I started messing around. After a while I was quite convinced that I wanted to use either Drupal or Wordpress, so farewell Joomla!
It looks a bit like a reality show, doesn’t it?
Now let me welcome you ladies and gentlemen to our big finale, with only two candidates in the running…On my left hand: Drupal and on my right hand: Wordpress!
In the meanwhile, I have been using both CMS, and I tried to perform similar tests, but both succeeded more or less in all tests. One thing that did occur to me is that Wordpress seems to be a bit more user friendly than Drupal. It might be just me, but everything I tried went a little bit faster in Wordpress.
A second thing that I found quite annoying is that the text editor in Drupal stinks. It really does. It’s just a plain text editor which you can compare with MS Notepad. It’s not that I need something very fancy, but some basics are always welcome. When you look at the editor in Wordpress, you’ll find functionalities like lists, hyperlinks, spellchecker, etc.
Now it seems that I’m not the only one who’s annoyed by this, because there are already a lot of Rich Text Editor modules which you can implement in Drupal, for example FCKeditor and WYMeditor. Nick Lewis has written a nice comparison of a couple of these editors:
Basically, this means I’m still nowhere. Both CMS work fine for me, be it with some adjustments where necessary. So I’ll need to take things to a higher level: Have a look what the professionals think about this. Luckily the internet is full of comparisons between different CMS, and especially between Drupal and Wordpress.
The opinion of the professionals is more or less the same everywhere:
“If you want to create a website around a blog, use Wordpress. If you want a ‘real’ website, use Drupal”.
As I see things now, the blog will be the central point of my website, it’ll be updated regularly, and the articles and photo pages will be more static. So I should go for Wordpress. On the other hand, I don’t know what the future will bring, if I want more sophisticated photo galleries, I will get more possibilities in Drupal, same thing for video galleries, and maybe later I want even more stuff like a forum or a web shop. Therefore my final decision will go to Drupal. In the beginning I’ll need to do more than I should have to do with Wordpress, but in the end I hope it’ll be worth the choice.
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls! Our winner is … (drum ruffle) … Drupal!
Also nice to know: In the Open Source CMS Awards, Drupal has been overall winner in 2007 and 2008 (the winners of 2009 are selected November 9th), and Wordpress has won the award for “Best Open Source Social Networking Content Management System” in 2007 (This category didn’t exist anymore in 2008).
In my Content structure: Philosophy post, we’ve talked about what content structure is, and why people make such a big deal of it. This week I’d like to tell you how we handle this with CMS.
I’ve already given you an introduction into Structured content and content types in my Joomla vs Drupal vs Wordpress post. These are the components that we’ll need to structure our data.
As an example, I will use the structure of my own website.
First of all, I have the blog, which will be the central component of the website. There will be regular posts and also announcements of what changed on the rest of the website. Next to the blog, there will be a part with articles and a part with photo galleries.
We need to separate the blog from the other parts of the website, as the way of structuring the data will be different. This is something we will do with content types.
For the blog we will use the content type Story in Drupal or Post in Wordpress. For every other part we will use the content type Page (this is the same in Wordpress and Drupal).
The pages will be structured using menus and submenus, the stories/posts will be structured using categories in Wordpress or taxonomy in Drupal
The Pages Structuring data using menus is not really what CMS is all about. But if they contain data that’s not frequently updated, it’s often the best choice. There will be two main categories: “Articles” and “Photography”. These will be accessed by pressing a button in the main menu (I will chose for a top menu here). For both categories, there will be following subcategories:
Articles
Travel
Web Design
The written word
Photography
Travel
People
Projects
Like I said in the Content structure: Philosophy post, it’s necessary to do some thinking about this. Is this the level on which I want to keep working? Creating new subcategories on an existing level is easy, dividing a subcategory into new subcategories on a deeper level is a lot harder.
As these pages won’t be updated that much, the chance that new subcategories are needed is a lot lower, so I think it’ll be sufficient to stick with this structure. For the blog we will need to be more careful though.
The Blog As said before, we will use the Story/Page content type for the blog, which is the central component of the website. We will structure the stories/posts using the CMS standards: Categories in Wordpress and Taxonomy in Drupal.
The reason why is because the blog can be seen as one component with lots of new information being published on a regular base. Suppose you have written this great photography post about landscape compositions a couple of months ago, but your readers need to scroll through every post about cameras and aperture settings, chances are that they’ll leave your website before they found your article.
Another thing that needs to be reconsidered is that posts/stories can be linked to different categories. This is a good and a bad thing. The good thing is when writing a post, you don’t have to be thinking all the time about sticking to your subject. The bad thing is that people are likely to link their posts to as much categories as possible.
Let me give you some examples:
1. You’re writing a post about a nice landscape you’ve seen, and you describe why the composition was that perfect and what settings you’ve used on your camera to make that superb picture.
This story can be categorized in photography/technical and photography/composition.
2. You’re writing a travel story about your last trip, and at a certain moment you describe a landscape that seemed to have a perfect composition for a picture and why it seemed like that.
You classify this story under travel/story but not under photography/composition.
In the second example, why don’t we classify the story under photography/composition?
When a visitor requests an overview of all photography posts about composition, your travel story will appear in that list. This is not the information he/she is looking for. The visitor wants tips or information on composition, and is not interested to read how you’ve spent your time in Oegadoega. If you really think that the info about composition that you’re giving in your travel story is that important for photographers, you need to consider to write a separate post for it.
Now let us get back to the techniques. My blog will have four main categories: Travel, Writing, Web development and Photography. These will be the top nodes of the tree structure.
In Drupal: Go to Administer > Content management > Taxonomy and press the tab Add vocabulary.
We add four new vocabularies for each of our main categories. Check the content type story and check the setting multiple select .
In Wordpress: Go to Posts > categories and create four new categories.
The next step is to define the different levels in which you will divide your main categories (or vocabularies if you like).
Here’s how I’ll structure my content:
Travel
Stories
Photography
Technical
Cameras & accessories
Composition
Pictures
Travel
People
Projects
Writing
Blogging
Articles
Web design
Code
CMS
Now I know what you’re thinking… first I’m telling you that you need to think this over and over and that you need to have several subcategories of subcategories, but my structure only has three levels, most of the time only two.
And you’re right! This is only a first draft of my structure. At this stage I’ve spent most of my time learning the different CMS that I didn’t really think about the final structure yet. But I promise, when I’ve figured things out, I’ll certainly post them!
Before I show you how to create this structure in Drupal and Wordpress, you need to know that there’s a huge difference between the two. In my humble opinion, I think this is a huge shortcoming of Drupal but I guess the designers had their reasons (probably because taxonomy can be used for every content type in Drupal).
Suppose, you’ve created the category “Writing” in Wordpress with the subcategories “Blogging” and “Articles”. And now you want to write a post about the writing style of a book you’ve read. This doesn’t belong to Blogging or Articles, and as you’re probably not going to write fifty posts about this subject, you can just categorize it under the main category “Writing”.
This is something that’s not possible in Drupal. You can’t categorize a post under a vocabulary, only under a certain term in a vocabulary.
There are two possibilities to solve this issue:
1. For each (sub)category where you expect that there might be post which don’t fit in any subcategory, you can create a new subcategory called “other” or “random” or something like that.
e.g.
Writing
Blogging
Articles
Other
2. You start your vocabulary at a higher level.
e.g.
Blog
Writing
Blogging
Articles
Photography
…
Both solutions have their pros and cons. The first solution looks very amateurish to me, it looks like you don’t really know what you’re doing (which might be the case, just don’t tell anyone).
The second solution may resolve in the fact that visitors won’t find your articles as they tend to look on the lowest level possible (so only in Blogging and Articles, but not in Writing).
It’s up to you!
Now how do we create these subcategories?
In Drupal: Go to Administer > Content management > Taxonomy and press the add terms function next to your vocabulary. Enter the name of the term. For the first level this is sufficient, for any other levels, go to Advanced options and select the parent (higher level) category.
In Wordpress: Go to Posts > categories, enter the name of the category and select the parent (higher level) category.
And there you go. Your content is now structured.
I’ve mentioned this a lot before (I know), but again, think before you start structuring your content. Otherwise you may find yourself one day in a huge mess, needing a lot of time restructuring it all.
Last days I’ve quite heavily investigated in this issue, and I still haven’t figured out some kind of ideal strategy.
If you have one, please share it with us!
It’s been already four years ago, I guess, when I created nicolasdecorte.be v1. Based on school knowledge, the web pages were totally created in HTML written in Notepad, only using Macromedia Dreamweaverwhen I really couldn’t figure out how to design a certain item. I was a hardcore programmer, and I was proud of it!
It didn’t take very long before I found out that this wasn’t something to be very proud of. All I did was spending loads and loads of time on reinventing the hot water. Even worse, I reinvented the cold water when the hot water already existed. So that meant it was time for v2. The same website, the same content, but written in PHP 5. Using professional tools as Dreamweaver and Zend Studio, and implementing scripts I found on the internet, the website became more professional and more dynamic.
Some time ago, I figured that it was time for v3. I had some ideas of changes in mind, but instead of starting to program immediately, I planned some hours of research before the first code would be written. And this is how I found out about CMS software.
After some reading about this subject, I found out that there are lots of software suppliers who each have their own CMS masterpiece, but there are three that seem to be used very often: Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress.
If you’re reading this post because you finally want to figure out which one is the ultimate CMS software package that you must use, I’ll have to disappoint you. Maybe you know more about this stuff than I do. I only had a first experience with both Joomla and Drupal yet, but I read a lot about this item, and what I will bring you here are my personal ideas.
If you haven’t stopped reading now… great!
So what I did next was also install Wordpress, and then try to create a basic website in all three CMS.
The test phase could be divided in following categories:
Installation All three CMS are kind of similar in installation. You download a zip file from the website and extract it to the source directory of your website. Then you need to create a database (If you don’t already have one),and you have to tell your CMS which database it needs to use. Joomla has a user interface where you can set your database settings, this interface starts automatically when first starting Joomla. For both Drupal and Wordpress you need to adjust a config file where you put your database settings. When this is configured, all three CMS have an installation script which does the database setup.
Guides:
Joomla: http://help.joomla.org/ghop/feb2008/task048/joomla_15_quickstart.pdf Drupal: http://drupal.org/getting-started/install Wordpress: http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress
First time use Now wasn’t that easy? But beware…It might get a bit confusing now.
The first thing you need to do is to log on to the administrator page, and have a look at the possibilities. This can be done by using following urls:
Joomla: http:///administrator/index.php
Drupal: http:///?q=admin
Wordpress: http:///wp-admin/
(replace “” by the server/location where you installed your CMS)
There you are, this is where your website will be born. Quite overwhelming, isn’t it?
What’s important to know is that the purpose of every CMS is the same: to let you create a website. They give you the possibility to create structured content, create a specific design and use several add-ons (e.g. calendars, RSS,…).
But still there’s a big difference between them. First of all in the way of working, and secondly in what they can or can’t handle.
Structured content That the content of your website is the most important part is something I probably don’t have to tell you. But how do we structure this content? Let’s take my website as an example, I will have four main topics: photography, writing, travelling and web development. So I need a way to categorize everything I publish under one of these topics. But after I’ll be posting for some time, maybe I have too much content for one specific category, so I’ll need to create subcategories. E.g. Color photography and black & white photography. Each CMS has its own way of structuring content:
Joomla: Joomla works with sections and categories. Each section can contain several categories, and the content can be linked to a certain category.
Drupal: Drupal uses something they call “taxonomy”. The point is that you make a tree structures (called “vocabularies”), in which you categorize your content.
So, I’ll create four vocabularies: Writing, photography, travelling and web development, and then I divide these vocabularies into terms, which can also be divided in other terms, and so on.
Here’s an example of a “Photography” vocabulary:
Photography
Portraits
Color
Black and White
Landscapes
This can go on and on as far as you want to categorize.
A good tutorial on taxonomy can be found here
Wordpress: In Wordpress, you have categories. The usage is quite similar to Drupal, you create a main category (e.g. photography), and then you create sub categories with that main category as parent.
As you can see, there are different ways of categorizing your content, so it’s very important to take some time to think this over before you start creating content. In the beginning, this might sound boring and useless, but when you become a Problogger, managing thousands of articles, blog posts, stories, pictures, videos and so on, you’ll thank me for this.
Content types When you reread my previous sentence, you already see that there are different types of content that can be on your website: blog posts, stories, articles,… You have already categorized them under your different categories or sections or whatever you prefer to call it, but that’s not enough. You want them to look differently from each other and you want each content type to have other functionalities. E.g. my “about me” page should be static, my blog posts should be able to receive comments, …
Again, the different CMS have different ways to handle this. They all have certain content types installed by default and the option to add new “non-standard” content types. A short overview:
Joomla: By default, Joomla works with “articles”, and that seems to be the only content type you can use. However, there seem to be lots of modules and plug-ins which you can use within your article to create an image gallery, make it look like a blog post, and so on.
Drupal: Drupal has Pages and Stories by default. They both look similar, but pages should be used for static content (e.g. the “about me” section) and Stories should be used for sections that are updated regularly (e.g. a blog). Furthermore, you can install several modules like blog (so each user can have his own blog), image gallery, and so on.
Wordpress: In Wordpress, several content types are ready to use be default: Posts, Pages, Media, Links and Comments. Pages can be compared with the pages in Drupal, and Posts are similar to Drupal’s Stories. Media is used for images, videos,… Comments manages the comments that are given to a certain post, and Links speaks for itself, I guess, it’s for managing links (duh!)
Themes Now that you’ve created some content (with the right content type of course), and you categorized it, it’s time for some designing (woohoo!)
If you’re not used to web development (html, php,…) that’s not a big problem, because thousands of others have done the designing for you. It’s called “Themes”.
Each CMS comes with its standard theme, which is normally the same theme as they use on the CMS website. But you probably want things to be more personal, right? That’s why there are lots of free themes available. They can be found on the website of your CMS, but also on specialized websites like proWebCreative , osskins and many others.
Still not personal enough? No problem! You can also build a theme yourself. Or start from a certain theme and make adjustments to it. But this requires at least some basic skills in html, css, php and javascript.
This topic will certainly be discussed in future posts.
Modules/plug-ins/add-ons/extensions Each CMS has a standard installation package which includes the basic components to get you started. But there’s more…much more! There are lots of pieces of software available that add certain functionalities to your CMS, these are called: extensions (Joomla), modules (Joomla, Drupal), plug-ins (Joomla, Wordpress) or add-ons (Drupal).
A good example is a forum module. It’s not available by default, but you can easily download and implement it. Another example is an image gallery.
Just like themes, these modules are available on the website of the CMS, and on a lot of specialized websites (just google it). And like themes you can also program them yourself, if you have the knowledge.
Conclusion So far my first comparison of the three major CMS. This is only the top of the iceberg, but I guess it gives a wide overview of what CMS are and what’s the main difference.
So now the big question: Which one will I use?
Based on my experience up to now, I think that I won’t use Joomla. It looks a bit like a mess to me.
So there are two left: Drupal and Wordpress.
Word’s on the street that you need to use Wordpress if you want to create a blog. If you want to create a “real” website, you need to go for Drupal. This means that I should go for Drupal... But I’m not going to decide yet. I’ll test Drupal and Wordpress further, and then I’ll see which one will fit best to me.
Another conclusion that could be made is that there is no such thing as the “best” CMS. If you read about this on forums, you’ll find Joomla-people, Drupal-people and Wordpress-people. I guess I’m just not a Joomla-person myself.
