Wordpress vs. Movable Type vs. Drupal vs. Joomla
In the past, I’ve written that Movable Type and Wordpress were on almost even footing. This is simply no longer the case. Wordpress is better, faster, and stronger. Wordpress can be setup in minutes, the admin tool allows you to use it as a complete CMS (Content Management System), and the pages are coded for speed not to be a bunch of graphically pleasing but slow loading gradients. Why Movable Type made such an unbelievably slow loading backend is beyond me. Who needs a backend or admin tool that looks great, but sacrifices efficient functionality? If you’re starting a new site, do yourself a favor and start it with Wordpress.
Now when it comes to Drupal or Joomla as a content management system, you’re looking at a big learning curve for learning how to administer your site. Not so with Wordpress. Both Joomla and Drupal will have a more features, but since you probably won’t be able to find them, you probably won’t know they exist and won’t ever use them. Since it sounds like I’m starting to bash what are actually good tools, I’ll have to stop this post and allow you to make a decision. Wordpress has just set the bar so high, others have a lot of catching up to do.
Those aren’t very strong points you’ve got there as to why one would choose Wordpress over Drupal or Joomla. WP and MT, and Drupal and Joomla, were originally intended for entirely different purposes. Drupal and Joomla are _whole_ content management systems, it includes blogging, it includes other content types, it includes many more features than WP and MT offer. But because of that, Drupal and Joomla have higher learning curves. Wordpress has just been diversifying and expanding into CMS-related functionality as well.
Which one works best for someone all depends on his website’s purpose. If you’re strictly just hosting your own blog, obviously you would not need to use a real CMS. But if you want to do a lot of customizations and control, or if your site is a newspaper site with tons of content types and permission types for different users, then you need to have a proper CMS. Otherwise you’ll just try to build WP or MT by hand into one that it wasn’t meant to be.
As a professional web developer, I have worked with Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, and a number of other content management system. Uh…you need to do your homework before you write two paragraphs on a subject.
As Karen talked about, Drupal, Joomla, and Wordpress are very different animals. Drupal is for full-fledged web content system for web developers. Joomla is also designed for full content management, but a bit less developer based. Wordpress is just a blog (no matter what insanity people do with it to run full websites). WP is a very good blog system, but still is just a blog system.
Personally, I recommend drupal for developers and wordpress for personal blogs.
I still wouldn’t agree, and my homework is done thank you. Plugins which add nearly any functionality you’d ever want are not “insanity”, they are add ons to a nice base of a site. You should read the article on Goal Focused Design
I think what you’re overlooking is that a huge percentage of websites are personal, and brochure type. It takes less, no, far less time to install, design, customize, and learn wordpress. Once you throw in efficiency and speed, Wordpress outweighs the others immensely.
Its a wonderful starting point for a huge percentage of websites, and as you want to grow and add functionality, there’s a huge number of very nicely designed plugins to help you.
So what you are saying is that if you are an idiot you should stick with Wordpress because although Drupal and Joomla are much more advanced and offer many more features – you wouldn’t know how to use it?
Well here is what I think. If you are looking for a bad ass blogging site with lots of cool widgets, Wordpress is great. If you are looking to create a more complex content site, go with Drupal or Joomla. Joomla is easier if you are less technically inclined.
I’m a bit of a latecomer to this article, but since I’m a Joomla!, Wordpress and Blogger user (but not developer) I wanted to shove in my pennyworth.
I have three Joomla! 1.5.9 sites, and for the more complex content it’s terrific. In particular for sites serving an interactive community. Joomla! seems to me to be an ideal solution, and is hugely expandable.
I’ve not found it totally ideal as a blogging solution however (I’ve been using a commercial extension, MyBlog, for that). I’ve recently played with Google’s Blogger and Wordpress, and of those two, much prefer Wordpress, which just seems to “work better”, in the way it handles composition of new blog articles (particularly cut and paste, and insertion of images and other media). For a first time blogger, I would recommend Wordpress.
Clearly these apps offer different things to different people.
I’ve never tried Drupal (other than as a local install on my laptop) or Moveable Type.
I would have to say that for me and many of my friends, that wordpress is starting to make ground on Drupal joomla etc, one of the main reasons I left them was that If you ever needed something special done you would need to fina a developer and pay x amount to get the job done. With wordpress, most of the custom needs are available for free, I have yet to come up against a problem that could not be resolved. I would also like to add that wordpress runs some very large sites, the first one that comes to mind is the new york times.
Although I will say that this is only my opinion, I think this is quite relative to who is making the statement. ATB George
Choose from one of the following categories:
Q: What should I choose if I’m a beginner web developer and want to set up a site quickly without much of a learning curve?
A: Wordpress
Q: What should I choose if I’m an intermediate web developer and want some flexibility and extensibility to customize my site?
A: Joomla!
Q: What should I choose if I’m an experienced web developer and want unlimited flexibility and extensibility to customize my site?
A: Drupal
Here’s another category:
Q: What should I choose if I am a designer, not programmer, and have no desire to become a PHP programmer in order to create my site?
A: Expression Engine, Textpattern, or Movable Type
Wow, that came out of nowhere. Who on earth would recommend something which claims to be fully featured like “Expression Engine”, when it clearly has 1/10th of the features that you’d actually need when running a “successful” website.
Expression Engine is worse than coding in PHP.
With Movable Type, you spend more time administering rather than writing content.
Haven’t tried Textpattern
Drupal is good – but may have many features you probably won’t require unless you’re creating a mid to large sized web site
While I sort of agree that you should have spent more time backing up your premise, I do agree with your conclusion. Wordpress has gained so much ground on Joomla and Drupal over the past 2 years it’s astonishing, AND as someone who earns a living helping small business owners make more money and their lives easier, WP is the only option.
Of course, for other types of sites, like large social networks, huge e-commerce sites, etc., one of the others will be better (assuming you have the programming knowledge), but I have no doubt in my mind that within the next 2 years, Wordpress will become a legitimate contender with Joomla and Drupal in even these areas.
For me, it’s all about giving the small business client a SOLUTION, and that solution 99/100 times is Wordpress. I work with mostly local companies that aren’t trying to take over the world and for their needs, nothing beats Wordpress.
Wordpress certainly has the ease of use thing down pat. Not so much security, speed, or features, unfortunately.
Drupal is nearly ten times as fast as Wordpress, which is a big deal if you have a serious site in mind. Not so much for small time folks, I suppose. The ability to run hundreds of sites off of the same codebase is also pretty awesome.