CMS

[Raymond Cote]

Lori Hitchcock wrote:
> Working with a company developing a website in a LAMP environment and
> starting to look at CMS.  Hearing good and bad about both Joomla and
> Drupal.  The needs to be very simple for non-techs to add content.
>
> Does anyone have any advice or experience with either of these? Does any one
> have a positive experience with another CMS?
>   
Hi Lori:
We've used both Drupal and Plone recently.
Some thoughts:
- both reasonably complete CMS systems.
- Plone has a tough learning curve -- but can be pretty easy for the 
non-techs once it is set up.
- Drupal has less of a learning curve -- and also relatively easy to use 
once set up.
- Drupal seems to hit the wall with complex environments a bit earlier 
than Plone does (e.g., Plone more complex but also more capable.)
- Plone doesn't get security update alerts every week.
- Plone community has a greater focus on web standards than Drupal 
community (core products not bad, Drupal add-ons are all over the map).
- Drupal has a much larger collection of half-done, partially 
implemented, "done some time soon now" plug-ins.
- Plone tends to have fewer plug-ins (and 1-3 of any particular 
selection, like blogging), but they tend to be maintained (there are, of 
course, always exceptions to this).
- Drupal will deploy just about anywhere you can get PHP and MySQL.
- Plone requires more specialized hosting (though places like 
Webfaction.com provide excellent service).
- Plone built on Zope which is probably the most complex environment in 
the Python community.
- Fairly active Plone community here in the northeast. 
- Drupal built on PHP and you can find PHP programmers just about 
everywhere.

One big difference between the two is ecommerce.
Drupal has a nice Ubercart system which is fairly flexible (long as you 
don't need multi-language checkouts).
Plone community working on their first eCommerce plug in which is doing 
well, but nowhere near as functional as something like Drupal.
If you need a heave e-commerce component, then a pure Plone solution is 
probably out of the picture for the moment.

Above are all my personal opinions to date.
I don't consider myself an expert by any stretch in either of these.
Your mileage may, as always, vary.
--Ray