I recently got an email asking me this question:
A quick question about Drupal, Civic Space and Joomla and other PHP Open Source CMS?
Why choose Drupal over Civic Space? Why Drupal over Joomla/Mambo? Or PHP Nuke?
Which is easier for a novice to use? I've checked http://www.cmsmatrix.org/ and http://opensourcecms.com/ to learn and I've talked to one developer who is a big fan of PHP Nuke...
This is an interesting question for me. Personally I have only used a handful of content management systems and I've built a handful of similar tools from the ground up. But I'm very clearly a Drupal consultant at this point, so how did I get here and why Drupal? Now that I'm using and endorsing Drupal, is that the right decision? Is there reason to stay?
The Nuke Series
The first Open Source CMS I used was PostNuke - a member of the Nuke family of forks and hacks - and it worked pretty well. It gave me integration with Gallery, which I really liked, and it seemed to work pretty well. I had also used phpBB and while I liked it, it was clear that phpBB was more or less just a forum system and it was a security riddled one at that. When I needed to integrate Gallery and phpBB with Postnuke to get the functionality I wanted, and then I added a calendar which crashed the whole thing....I knew that something wasn't right. Many many megabytes of code that wasn't intended to work together and, not surprisingly, doesn't work together.
At the same time I tried getting help in the forum and was surprised by how weak the support was. I tried to ask my question as intelligently as I could and tried to help myself, but the response was really weak. That ended it. On to find something new, that included lots of functions, and that had an active community of support with major sites using the software. I wanted to know that other tech luminaries were using the product.
Finding Something New
At this point I had some certainty that I wanted to make a good decision on the software because I was pretty sure I was going to become a freelancer and stake my livelihood on the product. So, what to choose. Since I don't know the needs of my customers other than flexible, "quick to market", and reliable I went with those requirements. I then tried out Mambo and Drupal and looked at their communities and the software. I found them similarly easy to use, but Drupal struck me with the relatively large number of features supported out of the box and the powerful Taxonomy system. I looked around and noticed one or two of the sites that I visit were using Drupal to do drastically different things and that pretty much sealed the deal. I started using Drupal, posting questions in the forum, having problems still but at least being able to resolve them. Since that time Mambo/Joomla has forked (or I became aware of it, maybe) which makes me glad I didn't choose a project with an unknown future.
Confirmations All Around
Now that I'm here, is there good reason to keep using Drupal? I think so. IBM thinks so. Spike Source thinks so - Drupal is the only CMS or Community Building Framework that they support.SongBird thinks so. SnowBoard Magazine thinks so. Linux Journal thinks so, and wrote a case study on their move from PHP Nuke. Forrester Research thinks so, if you are looking for a blogging platform and "have open source experience and want blogs to be an integrated part of a publishing and community platform" - well, that's the vision that I bring to most of my clients because I believe Newsletters (aka Blogging) are a cost-effective marketing tool.
Two Images to Say It All
Here's an image comparing Drupal to the other Content Management Systems based upon IBM's review:
And here is the Forrester Map of the Corporate Blogging Platforms that they reviewed:
Drupal, WordPress, and Movable Type are the only three that are in both reviews, which says something in itself about popularity and credibility if not usability and feature sets. While IBM's developerWorks clearly favored Drupal as a CMS, Forrestor favors it only if it fits with your goal for your Corporate Blog as being a part of a community.
It's almost as interesting to me what these don't show: anything from the Nuke series.
That's how I arrived at Drupal, and it's also why I think that for at least the forseeable future it's a good piece of software to be working with.
