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Can't community building be a scale? Social networking is obviously huge ( myspace, facebook + million others), so if I were to use the criteria needed to build a well done and scaleable community site would I not want to know which cms fits the job better? What makes IBM's case any differant? Do you know of any other open source cms's that compares to drupals social networking because I don't.

There are tons of "scales" that you could use to compare them with. One general scale often doesn't fit the bill you have to break it down into smaller specific chunks, dynamic sites are not organized like some static business card site, some detailed criteria is important to compare such as caching, seo, scalability, etc, it can get very specific. Simply put some things joomla does better and vice versa, and it can be useful to talk about it.

I have developed on both joomla and drupal so Im not just talking into the wind here. I have reasons that I would choose one over the other depending on what exactly needs to be done. There can be friendly competition between the top 2 os cms's, its healthy in fact. And theres nothing wrong with having an activbe talk about what one does better than the other.

You're right... there is no official real winner, as you know... and everything would be interesting!

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Really? Having looked into this extensively you are correct - with Drupal and about $25K and about 1-2 months development time you should be able to have something that looks like facebook and social networking. Community Builder isn't great but it does the job to some extent. I'm not drupal bashing but there are a handful of cosmetically attractive and easy to use sites. The tools, modules, and other features in drupal sites are downright frustrating to anyone other than a developer or person who spends much time on the web. If you want RAD as in rapid development that is feature rich, attractive, and can get you up to speed then Joomla is the choice and it's not even close.

This isn't to say Joomla doesn't have it's share of fun. SEO and getting it to work with modules can be downright frustrating to the point of needing a helmet from all the head banging into the wall. In terms of taxonomy and pure content management, drupal is better engineered. Neither is really suited to do pure social networking. In looking at the "great" drupal sites I thought that the amount of user profiles and features were weak and their lack of use and flexibility showed.

I'm trying to shoehorn social networking into Joomla because, quite frankly, there are so many nice modules and development is easier that it's a much better tool to get eye candy with better navigation up and running. Drupal requires too much expense and heavy lifting unless you are truly dedicated and prepared to spend at least 10-20K to get there at a minimum. Just IMHO and hoping not to start a flame war.

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I am just starting with my first site to use either of Joomla or Drupal.

I have been reading a lot and putting it on my blog- [url=http://linkfindblog.[URL banned].com/]http://linkfindblog.[URL banned].com/[/url], but from what I have read and understood i feel Joomla is a good starting point but you need Drupal in long run. That is what I am going for. Thanks for this Drupal Vs Joomla debate

Thanks for all the discussion.

Need drupal in the long run? I think that's where we differ. If I get my Joomla site up to reasonable size where I've got investors convinced we have a decent sized community, I'll either migrate to a current commercial solution or will build mine to spec. If I ever want to "move" to drupal I can do the basics easily. But remember this -- if you've got money to blow because you're already investing in a concept that is fully funded for social community, then perhaps you'd want to consider drupal with some serious hacking. Others have been frustrated in that once they spent the money, their site was no longer easily updated as drupal changed core functionality. Be careful what you wish for. With $100K I might build mine to order...

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But why not start with Joomla! or Drupal as a base if you are going to build to order?  Yes, you will lose upgradability, but there is a lot you don't have to worry about.  I could see arguments for not using Joomla! 1.0 in this way because there was a lot of patchwork in the framework, but the 1.5 framework is pretty clean and extensible.  It would serve as a good foundation to build a custom system on.

Ian

I think the politicians of the world would be quite impressed; this has got to be one of the longest running threads I have ever seen that really ends up saying a whole lot of nothing (no offense of course, I'm actually quite impressed!)

Understandably, everyone designing a site wants to find the best system they can to do what they need to do.

Again, what I love about the Joomla community is the fact that they don't need to put on airs for anyone.  If you like it, use it.  if you don't, use something else!

No need to debate about what might be better.  The best thing you can do is evaluate what your client wants, understand what is most important, see who has the strongest performance in the particular section you need to focus, and make the decision accordingly.

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I actually respectfully disagree, senator.

I've enjoyed reading those opions that have been backed up and also it identifies what some of us who've played with both already know. Joomla is much easier to build web sites faster and more cheaply, drupal may have the better core for pure content management scaling upward. I'd say that if I had to use either with the need to do a LOT of page views, it seems that I might choose drupal but others have indicated that they have been able to get joomla to scale and caching has helped considerably.

Why wouldn't I use either if I had money to build? I'm dealing with a project right now that gets over 4 million daily page views. I'm evaluating different systems to handle content management and also a media platform, as in videos, audio files, pictures, etc. and also social networking with extended user profiling. We have a custom built system that looks very nice but it was not built with certain flexibility in mind. The decision is how to expand certain portions of the code and perhaps use a joomla or drupal as the primary content engine and build on profiling flexibility from there.

If you want to look at the pool of developers, I'd also say that I wasn't so impressed with the number of drupal development expertise. I only saw a handful that were truly capable of building large scale solutions with the technology that are industrial strength and with an eye for design. Hey, I could be shooting a little from the hip here but it seems that the Joomla development community is much larger and there is also a great deal of expertise across the board. You can get designers to do the programming for profiling and still find a great design team familiar with it. The exciting thing about 1.5 is that, assuming I can move some of these 1.0.12 sites (I'm sure I can migrate), I'm hoping they will start approaching size once 1.5 is mature. At that point I'm hoping (don't know) that Joomla will have at least drupal's core content management excellence with more tricks and also the benefit of all the other extensions.

For example, the commenting alone is better in Joomla even from a cosmetic perspective. Looking at jomcomments or akocomments gets you where you need to be very quickly. It's nice to have. Drupal is a great piece of software. But to get it to look like the great drupal sites you see, expect to pay a pretty penny.

This was a useful discussion IMHO. It helps people who are struggling with what to use and, in summation, if you have lots of money behind your product right now, you may want to think of drupal but be prepared to deal with the consequences. I'll point you to some people who have already gone down that path...

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Honestly if you really do have a project with a great deal of capital invested, a free content management system to control enterprise level site(s) might not be the best solution.  No offense to the amazing groups that have put together these cms systems, but I'd more than likely lean toward a solution with a paid staff and paid support, having a system catered to my organization.  IMHO.

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ok very basic question  here...
very very basic and something pertaining to requirements specific to mine...

i have started looking at all the CMSs one week back, before that i could say that even definition of CMS might not have been very clear to me...

what i feel is that Joomla is good for sites such that where content is provided by the backend guy or group of such guys and other users are more or less consuming/using that data, its not where users can contribuet the content and can manage it, correct me if i m wrong, this is very important point for me

I have similar feeling with Drupal too, essentially its the same but somehow ther repeated talk of better user management still keeping me to explore more, very doubtful though that even it will come good??

so, my question here is whether Joomla or Drupal is good for user-driven sites where the content is user specific and user created ? 

They can be good for user driven sites, but it sounds to me like you're looking for something more like a wiki.

There's a few differences between a CMS and wiki, primarily:

1) Most Wiki's have a shorthand like bbcode to format pages more easily.
2) Page creation is handled a bit differently, and linking a bit similar.
3) Wiki takes a more 'bottom up' approach, and typically light on moderation.

Not to say they are better, just vary on their specific purpose and offering.

Here's a few if you'd like to do some comparisons;

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki
http://phpwiki.sourceforge.net/
http://www.telepark.com/

I haven't used any of them, but from what I understand, these are some decent systems, and hopefully give you an idea of the differences.  You never know, you may find joomla is more suited to what you are looking for.  Good luck.

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hi thanks...

i m not looking at something  wiki....

what i m looking at that the users as in defalut in Joomla are created as registered... and those have only view rights... for the conetent...  tehy can submita link but they cant submit a story... similarly i have not ventured very much into extensions ... but i definetly want one extension where user can upload pics.... now this should be doable from "usermenu" and tehy should be able to give permissions to others whoever can view that slide show... and in this way full content of site will be created and shared by users among themselves...

my qustion is " is this what we call CMS?"

and in my case this is what i call user created content....

1) now can extensions do this inda stuff???
OR i will have to tweak Joomla too much... in that case I would rather start from scartch....

some examples of user driven sites created through Joomla would be great

No offense akmanocha  but this is a discussion about 2 cms systems, what your asking for can easily be accomplished by both and several others, please create a new thread with your concerns or try and read up about them a little more.


I do agree with some of the recent comments, drupal in terms of developers are not as common as joomla, one of the reaons is demand for them often goes toward full time or extensive monthly contracts for customers that want truly unique sites, these can be quite high paying jobs so you will find less of them lurking around. The steeper learning curve also hurts the more amatuer developers from getting a grasp and sticking around to help other, something joomla is great at.

I also have to disagree with rogue4ngel, first off there's some quality points in this thread its not "a lot of nothing".

Secondly having a well funded site deosn't mean you have to start from scratch, using tools that are availible AND work well can be very effective and save companies hudreds of thousands of dollars in dev or real case, and I can provide exmples of this. Many large sites with a lot of funding use drupal as a base, and finding out why can is interesting and relates to joomla.

I also think its fine to debate what might be better and can be informative for people just discovering both joomla and drupal.

I should rephrase... there was a great deal said... but really didn't speak to the title of the post... and the debate about which is better ended up being an 'apples to oranges' comparison.  They both excel in different areas with different features, and for someone looking for a true opinion of which is better, the answer that everyone seems to come back to is... neither.

The informative nature itself is interesting, but it doesn't ever answer the question.. hence the political reference.

I'll try to be a bit more clear next time.  Don't want people to think I'm knocking the post.

And it would be great to see some enterprise level companies embrace open source, but you can't rely on an open source community to cater to your company.  In that case, you don't have much of a choice.  Sure you can hire people that could mod the hell out of it, but then you have to keep having them modify as it evolves, which could be unpredictable at best.

I'm not saying it can't work, I'm just saying if I was looking to invest in a system for an enterprise level company, it wouldn't be with an open source product because I don't have enough control over it, and I wouldn't put my fate in the hands of people who are going to do what's best for the community, and not necessarily my company.

Again, it's speculative as to what kind of complexity you're looking for in a web site and what you want to do with it.  I'm not about to get into a big debate about it.  There's too many unmentioned factors that we haven't even broached.

Of course, this again is talking about an enterprise level entity.  For myself.. Joomla is the bomb and I am enjoying it so far.  Should suit my customers just fine.

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uhhhh MODx... take any html page... throw in a few lines of php and voila... [no sections or categories]
it's all about MODx for me... I'm a newbie though it's so nice to have pretty much NO limitations...



I freaked out when I could take ANY page... and use it without the sections thing..

MODx
easy to miss.. and version .97 will be xPDo based...

I'm just getting to grips with MODx so it's that in between stage at this time.


best wishes to ALL!

Um, what's the difference between that and Joomla's static content manager?

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There's no limitations with PHP, JS etc etc...
Also, I meant that I can take any HTML page ...add a few MODx hooks to it and I have my template..


Sorry I can't offer the words here to explain it... I'm at the user/learning stage and not able to expalin the terminology yet... as an expert with MODx could.

I have to say that MODx is really the CMS to check out... [my opinion of course! ]

read thru the tutorial on the site I guess.

best wishes

Mod note: please stay on topic. This thread is specifically not about ModX.

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Take care

will do!
not be sleeping a lot... sorry for rambles...

When it comes to a solution using CMS, I'm sure Typo3 is presently the best.

Typo3 is capable of doing everything which is possible using any other CMS. There is an old saying "Quality takes time". Hence, Typo3 might take some time in learning before someone can make the first project roll out. But, once you get a hold of it, it's simply the best.

Typo3 comes at a cost. As they say on the Typo3 website:

Mod note: Off-topic posts will be removed and/or this thread locked if they continue.

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I Appreciate the patience shown.
best wishes to all.

The major advantage Drupal has over J! right now is the ACL system. It is an important distinction without a doubt but not one I expect to last very long once the 1.5 framework is stabilized and development work on J! 2.0 gets underway.
What you particularly want to do is not a common practice for your average website. And it could be done now via an extention just as well as it could via direct J! support. There just aren't that many people running websites that need the ability to let users post AND Manage content. The J! 1.0X system will allow users to post content... It can even allow Users to manage content. The only thing it can't do is limit which content sections those users can manage and contribute to, And that is a direct result of the broad ACL system in J! What you allow users to do should be based on trust of the user anyway. the fine tune approach is only important if you do not trust your content managers to do the right thing in which case it is better not to allow them to manage ANY content at all!

While I understand many people want the ability to throw up the website, set the permissions of who can post and who can manage content and then feel they are done I would consult them that it is not wise to run any CMS that users maintain without any supervision other than permission setting by the webmaster.

You will be leaving yourself open to many spam articles and content that should not be up on the site. And the need for limiting users to specific sections to post may seem desireable but I feel it is not really needed. No user content should be displayed without first getting final approval from the webmaster. And the assignments of section and cat can be done by that webmaster during the review.
To do that simply give the contributor Author status and your done.

If you trust a user enough to manage, change and publish articles then you should also trust them to not publish content into the wrong section/cat as well! A finer tuned security level is not going to remove the headaches this content manager will cause!

At some point I expect J! will be able to do all those things. the new Framework was written to allow more flexability in the future to choose and implement many core features such as ACL...

And while I know some people want to get on the new "My Space" social networking bandwagon, Many more J! users simply want a good CMS that can be used as a base for client site development. 

It's just my opinion but the social networking craze is actually much better served in the Cell phone network, Not the Internet.
With the Cell Phones you get the GPS location features and ability to text message and contact users wherever you have cell service. that is where the SocialNet is headed if you ask me...
And the truth is this type of feature is best done as a seperate entity (extention) for J! than it would be in J! itself!
an Extention that maintains it's own userlist and database is safer and more secure that trying to wedge it into the core J! system itself. the seperation would protect the actual site from user screwups, and make the page building for users much simpler! this is possible right now in J! 1.0X...all that is needed is someone to write the code as an extention. a signup page for new users, a create/edit personal page script, and a display page. this would be much better than trying to contort the J! article system to accept user created pages! And protect your site from hacking! Since the application would be seperate from the J! system there is no way the J! permissions could be compromised by bad user code. so it is possible to do it's just that there has been such little call for it before that no one has really fleshed out an extention for this. It's not that J! can't do it it is just that J! would require a different method for implementation that Drupal would.


so yes Drupal being a bit younger and starting off from the get go to include a fine tuned ACL system has a bit of an advantage in this particular area. But I believe J! has many other advantages in the other categories! Add to it the ease of use and overall J! will edge out drupal for most purposes you can think of...Only in this finite user contribution area does Drupal hold an edge. And how long will that last once the 1.5 framework is stable?
considering what I just suggested about doing this via an Extention it's not that J! CAN'T do this it's just better done outside the J! architecture and DB!

A finer tuned ACL system is needed without a doubt but not for the reasons I have seen expressed in this thread.
for something like a member only section or subscription service this feature is imperative.
But as far as user content posting and management there are much better ways to handle that!

so the problem is about ACL ? Good, with a simple efficient plug-in joomla will be alone !? I think that with our new 1.5 when ready we'll have a marvellous product and the next thread will be: Joomla vs Typo3 / Midgard and not Drupal...

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It's not only ACL it is also categorisation.. for example drupal supports tags, and you are not restricted t categories / sections (which are the same thing?) And a simple plugin? ACL is usually never simple, also it is required in pretty much everything within the system... and if it is done right installed components and modules would also take advantage of this. That is why it is important that it is allready integrated in the core.

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Well content organization IMO is better organized through navigation not by tags or cartegory...
Tags are good for Duplicate Articles in multiple sections but the actual organization should be done on from the menus.
In that case I agree Sections are not really needed only Categories as you can make a section simply va a blog display of multiple categories.

Tags can also be implemented in J! as is if you use the proper meta tags for each content item and then make a menu item consisting of a search of those metas. Its not quite as elegant as a full tags system but it does do pretty much the same thing

As for the ACL it is really only important that the system recognizes the ACL routines it does not have to handle the checks or balances of what the ACL does it simply has to refer to the ACL routine and set the Flag "True" or False for access...Since J1.5 is more modular this is pretty much easy to do. what is hard is how to do all the checks and save the DB and that can be done 100 ways to china as a plugged in ACL system!

It only gets complicated if you try to put everything into one routine as the old system tried to do everything.
But with the more modular design of 1.5 it really won't take a lot of hammering into the core to get a more fine tuned ACL to do everything Drupal currently does...In fact it will be easy to do more as you could technically swap out the Kerberos ACL with an LDAP.
this also means less work on redesigning the J! DB to hold all user data.

The key is to not tie the core to any one routine. If it simply calls to an ACL library (like the one Hackwar suggested with PHPGACL) then the implementation of ACL into the core is easy and the hard part (which is collecting organizing and judging) the user rights can be written as a seperate entity. Just the way a plug in currently works!

But how will you deal with the different actions from components? How will you list them somewhere to manage them in an easy way?

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When a component is installed that requires ACL it calls to the PHPGACL subroutine to add it's required parameters to the user data. PHPCACL would be the go between the Core and the ACL module for all operations. think of it as the translator in a tri-language conversation.

When it comes time to check auth, the component again calls to the PHPGACL routine (passing parameters to it) and that routine passes them onto the ACL module to return True/False. that answer is then passed to the component and the comonent either runs the protected subroutine or returns saying you are not authorized.

the issue your concerned with RE:Components can not be solved any better by a built in core ACL system. If a component requires 50 shades of security that component is going to have to tell the ACL system at some point what those 50 shades are anyway and will have to have parameterized those shades in it's code so the built in (or module) ACL can run the checks.

Now I am not on any ACL design team and as I said Hackwar seems to have done the best work on this topic to date....
But here is what I would do in regards to ACL for components....

Each component has a finite number or access levels it will use. That may change after an upgrade but any changes can be handled at the time of the upgrade.

So lets say a component has three operations (for simplicity sake,) that it needs to do ACL checks for...

You install it and it calls to the ACL system and tells it to add a "COMPONENT A" column (or table with user IDs, you can go many ways with this) to the ACL DB.
It fills that column or table with a default flag of a binary number. One Bit for each security setting.

Since component "A" has three security settings, the binary number flag would look something like this "111"
First bit "110" sets read privs for pages, Second bit sets Write privs for pages "101" third Bit sets Edit Privs "011"

Note how I set flags to the opposite of usual in the binary....this helps me during an upgrade proccess cause if my new version adds a security level I simply do a simple operation to read the existing data from the old version
read $bit
$bit =$bit + 1000
Save

the bit was just changed to 1110 (if all they had was read privs before) adding a 4th level of security to the system.

The componet during checks will send a comparative to the ACL to see if that features bit is on or off and deal with the process of what to do in both cases. Either it finishes the subroutine or returns. Parameters would include "User" and component setting needed to run

the ACL takes the user parameter, looks up the ID, returns the bit for that ID (could even make the true false comparative if it wanted to but PHPGACL could just as easily do this!) and then sends that back to the component.

No matter how you do that (modular ACL or Core) that is going to have to be built into your component.
What the core needs to do (and as I said I think the PHPGACL is the way to go) is to make the interface that will allow those systems to talk to each other.

the hard part is organizing all the different settings a subsystem might need.
And a core ACL system is not going to do that any better than a modular one!
The core simply needs to define an arbitor to interface the core (and by extention the components) but in either case the component is going to have to have the security broken down into routines in it's core code and provide the parameters it will use to ask the ACL system for Auth!

If all (Core, Com and ACL module) are written to use the PHPGACL then the problem is standardized and easy for any 3PD to hook into any ACL module used.


But what I was referring to in regards to the MYSPACE concept is that ACL should be completely seperate from the core CMS system altogether...
In that case a MYSPACE component would handle it's own user data and ACL and even run it's own DB so that you do not have to worry about some user who has a private page getting access to the infrastructure those private pages were served from!

ACL for Joomla should be limited to Joomla operation only!
If you need something like a hosting solution that hosting component should run it's own ACL seperate and distinct from the ACL that can turn the entire site off!
If for no other reason than security!

Abusive, trolling post was removed.

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I'd like to post here what it has been written in sundry public threads:
ACL --> scheduled for 1.6 version in order to avoid any delay for 1.5 stable release
Categorisation stuffs --> scheduled for 2.0 version as per its hard "revolutionary" work

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