13 Drupal, Wordpress, & Joomla

Drupal

Drupal is a free and open-source content management system and content management framework.  It is written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. The basic program contains most features common to content management systems. These include user account registration and maintenance, menu management, RSS-feeds, page layout customization, and system administration.  Because the program is open source and his based on a plug and play framework there are also a number of add-ons available either at no or reduced costs that extend Drupal’s basic functions.  Drupal offers the basic building blocks of websites in a module-styled format where content and rules can be created quickly. The program offers a sophisticated programming interface for developers.  Supported databases include MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, SQLite, and Microsoft SQL Server.  The system also has in-depth reporting generating tools for advanced administration.

Because of its flexibility Drupal is used as a back-end system for at least 1.5% of all websites worldwide ranging from personal blogs to corporate, political, and government sites including such top notch sites as: The Economist, Examiner.com, The White House, Popular Science, Harvard, MIT, Ubuntu, Sony Music and more. Drupal now displays contents in 182 languages by over 538,813 people in 228 countries.

Using the program does, however, require a tough learning curve and is considered more of a developing platform than a simple CMS tool.  Additionally, Drupal is a relatively new system and is not backwards compatible with other software so if you have other content, systems and programs in place that you have become accustomed to then Drupal might not be the system for you.

While no programming skills are technically required for basic use, the system is generally used by more advanced developers and administrators and might be overkill for smaller sites. Basic users usually go with the more basic CMS platforms including Joomla! and WordPress, although they can create basic sites simply using Drupal. While Drupal is a great CMS, for some it can be too much. Consider the advantages and disadvantages to using Drupal as your CMS.

Joomla!

Joomla! is also a free open source content management program.  Joomla! too is written in PHP and uses object-oriented programming.  It is designed for quickly creating highly interactive multi-language Web sites, online communities, media portals, blogs and eCommerce applications.  Its features include such items as page caching, RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, news flashes, blogs, polls, search, and support for language internationalization. Joomla! supports only MS SQL databases.  First introduced in 2005, it is now up to its third version which is set to be introduced in September of this year.

Joomla! is considered easy to use. Once Joomla! is installed and running, it is simple for even non-technical users to add or edit content, update images, and to manage the critical data that makes your company or organization effective. Anybody with basic word processing skills can easily learn to manage a Joomla! site.  Yet the program is still more powerful and robust than WordPress.  Additionally, there are tons of YouTube videos and other training material easily accessible on the web.

The program does have some disadvantages.  Javascript and CSS can get bulky causing slower loading time and possible additional hosting costs.  The program is not SEO friendly out of the box and development is clumsy if you want to change the layout. 

Otherwise, Joomla! is much easier to use than Drupal, has many good features and is a good fit for most users.  Additionally, if you have a group of people working on the same site, then Joomla! is a solution for you. Different authors of the site can easily upload their content instead of waiting for programmers or Designers. Uniform website templates used in Joomla! provide a consistent look to the whole site.

WordPress

WordPress is a free and open source blogging tool and a dynamic content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL.  While it has many features including a plug-in architecture and a template system it is considered primarily a system used for blogs.  The program was first released in May 2003 with the current version being 3.0.

WordPress has numerous plugins and widgets, small modules that offer users drag-and-drop sidebar content placement and implementation, are available to extended the capabilities of the program. Historically WordPress supported one blog per installation.  However, later advancements allowed multiple blogs to exist within one installation that is able to be administered by a centralized maintainer.

WordPress is a very user friendly blog system. You can create pages and posts, and with plugins, you can add a lot of functionality included standard in Joomla, except that all code is web standard. Anybody can learn enough in two hours to create content with WordPress right away, including using categories and subpages. 

However, adapting the look requires some knowledge of CSS. For instance, adding or removing postdates, need to be changed in design mode and it requires knowledge of WP scripting. The navigational structure is determined by the layout template you chose. Changing that structure requires knowledge of the WP scripting language and CSS.  With Joomla, you do not run into this problem because menus are controlled via the control panel and attributes like dates, author name etc, can be turned on and off per article or for the whole site in one go. In that sense, Joomla! is much more a content management system.

Because WordPress is web standard, Google really loves it.  So, from a marketing standpoint, WordPress is hard to resist. Setup is very quick and you can be listed in Google within 2 days.  WordPress can handle tons of visitors.  It will not break down easily.

The basic difference between WordPress and Joomla! is that Joomla! is a portal- or community type site while WordPress is a blog.  Both overlap each other in several areas and can be extended beyond their original purpose thanks to the use of plugins. You can find those plugins almost everywhere on the internet.  Both have a large user base with a lively community where tips and tricks are shared.  Both are free to use and many hosting providers have them as an option in their web tools section. 

3 XML vs. HTML

Xml stands for EXtensible Markup Language and Html stands for hypertext markup language, meaning they’re both markup languages they look and are very similar but not the same. In short, the purpose of html is to display data, Html is really only for the web, while xml sends and stores data.

Xml tags are case sensitive, must have an end tag (while some html tags don’t have an end tag and some html end tags are no longer needed when you get into html5), must be nested in order, some characters must be written differently, and attributes in tags must be in quotes unlike html. Which sucks, because that makes it easier to have one character wrong or nested incorrectly the whole thing not work and harder to find the error in the code with xml, because of newer versions of html like html4 and html5 html is more forgiving than xml. The upside is that unlike html, that has predefined tags aka you can’t use anything but those tags, xml you make up your own tags; and xml saves all the spaces you typed when html just gets rid of white space, I mean how many times have you had to figure out the code for an indent with html but with xml you can just indent like you normally would!

Examples:

Nesting…

Correct <b><i>text</i></b> ok for html and xml

Incorrect <b><i>text</b></i> not ok for xml but like will still work in html

Html tags that don’t have an end tag…

<br><img><meta> <hr> (for more examples see http://webdesign.about.com/od/htmltags/qt/html-void-elements.htm)

Some end tags are no longer needed when you get into html4 and html5 (explained here http://webdesign.about.com/od/htmltags/qt/optional-html-end-tags-when-to-include-them.htm)

Correct <p> text</p>        will work for xml and html

Incorrect <p>text               will never work in xml but you can get away with it with html

Attributes in tags must be quoted…

Correct <body color=“navy”>content</body> ok for both html and xml

Incorrect <body color=navy>content</body> again will work with html but not at all with xml

Case sensitivity…

Correct <title>the title text</title> ok for both xml and html

Incorrect <Title>the title text</title> will work in html but not xml

Odd characters like > < ^ & “”   ‘’ must be written differently…

Use &amp; for & and &quot; for “

The truth is that you’re supposed to write odd characters like this for html but html will let you get away with these. With xml you must use the code for these kinds of characters, not type it out like a word document.

For more examples and more info about xml see http://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_syntax.asp

All RSS (really simple syndication) feeds are (a type of standard way of writing)  xml, for those of you guys that don’t know or don’t use RSS feeds, RSS is like a special bookmark instead a bookmark you would save on your browser to link to a favorite website. RSS feeds are like news feeds or rather updates feed of that website so for example: if a new webpage is added to the website the RSS feed would show that update and link you to the new page - Or link you to whatever the update might be like a new story (a lot of newspaper websites have RSS feeds) or new song all in a short drop down list with most recent update up top.

  (screen shots of the bottom right of homepages of http://www.msnbc.msn.com/     News and http://www.foxnews.com/)


(Despite flash and php) Still nothing can replace html for making websites, xml just complements html. Xml was created with the idea in mind of the conundrum of “how to we send this info from a website into our database (or other application) easily when they’re incompatible?” The answer, xml stores data in plain text format that reads as if you’re reading a word document (a more accurate description would be reading .txt file in notepad but with an .xml file extension instead) and since almost all programs can read text documents it’s much easier for other programs to translate and transfer the data into them. One of the most annoying problems with technology is that it keeps changing which means updating to the new, and updating is a pain with all the incompatible software and hardware and converting data, since xml comes out reading like text this is no problem.

Xml isn’t just data sent from a website to an application xml sends data to reading\voice machines for the disabled like a computer that reads out loud text that’s on their screen on your website.