Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal: What Makes These CMS Different

Web content management systems allow users with little knowledge of programming and markup languages to create websites with ease. CMS allows people from non-technical background to create and maintain websites. It typically requires an administrator and a web developer to add features and maintain websites. However, with the advent of content management system, the scenario has changed. A CMS stores all the web pages content in a database and this allows any non-technical person to create new web pages. All you have to do is to enter desired content in the CMS and everything else including the themes and the widgets, will be taken care of by the content management system.


In PHP, there are mainly three most popular content management systems, each having its own strengths and weaknesses. These content management systems are Joomla, WordPress and Drupal. Let us take a look to analyze each CMS and compare the three of them based on their strengths and weaknesses.

Wordpress development: Wordpress is primarily a blogging platform. It was first released in May 27th, 2003. Wordpress is incredibly flexible and is used by many as a content management site. Through its thousands of plug-ins, themes and widgets, it has evolved from just being a blogging system to a full content management system. Several non-blog websites are also taking the advantage of Wordpress development. Wordpress development is usually undertaken by websites that have a combination of episodic and static content such as E-commerce websites, websites which contain static web pages and other small scale websites or web magazines. The in-built interaction features of Wordpress, make it a favourite amongst community-oriented websites. Easy to use, wordpress’s biggest advantage is that it is easy and simple to install as well as upgrade with its wide range of pulg-ins and themes.

Joomla development: Joomla is another content management system, which uses mysql at its backend. Joomla is used in corporate extranets or intranets, corporate Websites or portals, online magazines, government applications, publications & newspapers, small business websites, organizational Websites, non-profit websites, Community-based portals, School Websites and family or personal homepages. Non- technical people can easily go about creating websites  using Joomla development as it is easy to install and can thus quickly built sites for clients. But it lacks some of the strong user interaction features of Wordpress and its blogging capability is weaker as compared to that of Wordpress. Joomla is easily expandable but unfortunately the extensions need to be purchased. Joomla’s permission level is limited and hence it requires more knowledge for the users to use and implement it.
   
Drupal development: Drupal is a free and open source content management system. It is built with PHP and MYSQL. Though its features are highly technical but it lacks the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) features of Wordpress. Drupal development is a favorite among developers but designers do not prefer it as visual designing on Drupal is not an easy task. It may not be easy to use but has a smooth navigation that allows the creator to give a flexible URL structure to the website. It is also easily extensible just like joomla and customizable too. With a single drupal installation, more than one website is executable. Drupal’s feature of running multiple sites is more effective than the multi user feature of wordpress. Many of drupal’s extensions come for free.

It is difficult to conclude which is the best content management system among the three as each one has its pros and cons. You can use any one of these keeping in mind the purpose of the website you are planning to create.