#1 "website management" business for over 4+ years on...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.
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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.
I tried WordPress. Never could get it to do what I wanted, and the administrative interface was awful. And once I started loading content I realized it would never run fast or smooth with all of my content and traffic.
I tried Joomla. The administrative interface was, uhm, quaint. Worst of all, it seemed the people designing themes all had color vision deficiencies. Worst. Color schemes. Ever. One should have something decent to start with or why bother?
I’ve been using Drupal for several years. And every time I hear of something new to try, and do so, I go right back to Drupal.
By the way, I’m a writer, artist and designer who knows HTML and CSS and taught myself Drupal. Happy I did.
don’t know how old this discussion is but…. I find it curious that people who know drupal, joomla and wordpress tend to go with drupal. People who know one particular CMS tend to bash the ones they do not know. That seems to be true for many of these “fair” comparisons. I am a web engineer who has implemented all three, on my personal art site I have used Joomla with a WordPress plugin – great combination. For sites that need complex taxonomies and flexibility I’d always use drupal.
Joomla USED to have more features than WordPress, but this is really no longer the case with WordPress 3.x. The latest release really allows you to do everything you could do with Joomla before, only faster and better. I have been migrating all my Joomla sites to WordPress.
If you are running a major site that you don’t want getting hacked, Drupal has the edge there as it is one of the most secure cms’s there are out there. But yea as far as blogging is concerned, wordpress is the way to go