It has been an extremely long time since I’ve done any type of comparision between Drupal and Joomla!. While I like to keep a close eye on both of these open source content management systems…I just haven’t felt the need to compare the two applications with each other. The rhythm of each of the two CMS are so different that I honestly don’t know what I would write in the Drupal vs Joomla post. Comparing Drupal and Joomla with each other is like comparing Country music and Jazz with each genre not really capable of diminishing the importance of the other.

This isn’t to say such comparisons can’t be interesting and useful. I definitely know how popular Drupal vs. Joomla! articles can be and the number of visitors such articles will bring to a site.  If you’re interested in reading a new Drupal vs Joomla article, you can find such an article at Achieve Internet.

Some of the comparisons are out of date or lack sufficient technical detail to fully support their conclusions. Furthermore, both Joomla! and the Drupal CMS are on the verge of releasing new versions, Joomla! 1.6 and Drupal 7, that will move both products in a positive direction.

This series of articles attempts to address where the technologies stand now, with a keen eye on the fact that both are moving targets as they approach new releases. The focus will be on using the web design software to build enterprise level websites, including those for large businesses, government agencies, and sizable non-profits, as this is the focus of Achieve Internet, based in San Diego, CA. We will examine the following topics from a technical perspective: baseline content management system (CMS) functionality, back-end appearance and functionality, and coding & customization.

If you’re interested in hearing more from Achieve Internet, the article you’ll want to read is Joomla! vs. Drupal for enterprise web development, Part 1.

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Deciding what content management system to use is one of the most important decisions which is not easy to make, this can be especially true if you are deciding on an ASP.NET CMS. There are a variety of options available, both open source and commercial. In order to make a solid decision, it is important to identify your specific needs and find a content management system that matches your needs. Here is a quick look at 7 of the most popular and most powerful ASP.NET content management systems available (in no particular order).

Complete Story – Top 7 ASP.NET CMS Options

Sharepoint 2010 has just been released and everyone is excited about the possibilities and the unique advantage it can lend to their business. Specifically, there has been a lot of talk about Sharepoint’s new web content management capabilities. A lot of folks are wondering if they could possibly use the new Sharepoint release as the technology stack to maintain both their enterprise collaboration needs and their corporate website. In this article, we will review the new Sharepoint 2010 web content management capabilities and how they may fit your organization’s strategic website objectives at this time.

Sharepoint Capabilities

Let’s begin our discussions by reviewing, at a very high level, what specific business problems Sharepoint was meant to solve.

Microsoft designed Sharepoint as a collaboration platform to address specific business needs, such as – Collaboration, Secure Portals, Data Integration, Document Management, Records Management, Search & Discovery…

Further to this, the platform offers robust APIs, which allow extension of the base platform to third party solutions that address specific business needs for corporations in the mid to enterprise markets.

Sharepoint is generally viewed in the market as an ECM (Enterprise Content Management) platform with enriched web editing capabilities. It has inbuilt support for collaboration, back office integration, secure role based access, workflows & business process automation, document indexing, search & discovery capabilities. Most of all it offers some capacity for consistent branding and layouts across the organization.

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Just started reading Drupal’s Dries Buytaert’s blog posting tiled, Joomla vs Drupal: business models and commercial ecosystem. The article comes just a week after he attended CMS Expo and are some of his thoughts on the Drupal/Joomla! comparisons many of us do with open source CMS.

But what does the future hold? The Drupal community seems to be expanding into the enterprise, whereas the Joomla community is expanding into, well … Drupal. All the Joomla companies that I talked to at CMSExpo were in the process of taking their products and services to the Drupal market and rebranding their organizations to be cross-CMS compatible.

When time allows, I may add my own thoughts about Dries’ article in this post as well as a comment over at Buytaert.net. In the meantime, please be sure to read the comments in the article (no flame war so far, yea!) as there is a lot of substance in the comment section too.

There are right and wrong reasons for choosing Open Source CMS or WCM platforms and explains why Open Source CMS is not free and can actually come with a high price tag…or not.

Los Angeles, CA – In this latest free white paper, “Open Source CMS: Is It Right for your Organization?”, Oshyn shares an in-depth look at the pros and cons of using Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS) or Open Source Web Content Management (WCM) platforms. Oshyn has integrated many commercial and Open Source CMS/WCM solutions. Oshyn helps clients select CMS/WCM solutions based on the specific requirements of each client such as: understanding the capabilities required for content re-use, integration, personalization, ecommerce, workflows, online marketing, multilingual content, multi-device content, affiliate content sharing and future development plans.

Authored by Oshyn’s Chief Operating Officer, Travis Cole, and Senior Consultants, Christian Burne and Prasanth Nittala, this free white paper draws from Oshyn’s extensive experience in Content Management Systems development and integration. Specifically this Open Source CMS white paper explores:

• The Real Cost of Open Source Content Management Systems
• Importance of the Open Source CMS Development Community
• The Wrong Reasons for Choosing Open Source CMS
• Open Source CMS Security
• Outsourcing Open Source CMS projects

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Is Joomla the Best Choice for Your New Ecommerce Website? Joomla has always been known as one of the best content management systems available. However, is it the best option as an ecommerce solution? There are many viable alternatives such as Wordpress, Drupal, and Magento, but how to they stack up? When most people think about Joomla and ecommerce, they automatically think about VirtueMart. However, there are several other options available to Joomla users. Maybe an option like OpenFreeway or iJoomla Digistore is better suited to fit your needs.

This week we added three Web applications to our CMS Focus top 30 list.  The CMSs and ECMs listed in CMS Focus are not necessarily the most popular in content management and are not meant to meet everyone’s requirements for a CMS. Instead the content management systems that make up this top 30 are what I consider content management “game changers” or “attention getters”. New to CMS Focus are the following CMS/ECM: EPiServer, Umbraco, and an unknown CMS called Omeka.

My thanks to all those that made their suggestions to me via Twitter. Besides the three CMS that made the top 30 list, we had enough tweets to call our attention to Enano, Coremedia, Alterian, OpenCMS, SDL Tridion, Jahia, and Nuxeo. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of these additional CMSs making their way onto CMS Focus in the near future.

In order to make room the new entries, we dropped three Web applications out of CMS Focus and into our “Hall of Fame”. These applications were Gallery (2006-2010), Frog CMS (2009-2010), and SMF (2006 – 2009). All three applications are fine pieces of softweare for what they are designed to do and are still be worth a look. However, our focus continues to shift to more complete information systems and retirement to the hall of fame were long overdue for these applications.

Choosing the right content management system is a task that cannot be taken lightly. Making a poor decision can lead to a loss of time and money. The CMS will manage your content and design and should made adding, updating, and changing the website simple as easy.

Complete Story

In the world of open source CMS there is no comparison more attention getting than an article comparing Drupal and Joomla!. Probably, the grand daddy Drupal versus Joomla! comparisons of them all was posted over three years ago by the Joomla SEO company, Alledia. I extended the discussion Alledia started with my own comparison between Drupal and Joomla. My article evidently struck a chord in late 2006 and currently is approaching near 200,000 reads.

Good comparisons between Drupal and Joomla! are popular because quality comparisons between the two applications are rare. It’s very difficult to have passion for one CMS, be well informed on both CMS, and in the end be non-bias in your comparison. In the three years since I wrote my article, I’ve only come across three additional comparisons between Drupal and Joomla! that I thought worthy to bookmark.

I haven’t updated my own article comparing Drupal and Joomla because I have developed a bias opinion over the years that I can’t overcome…I prefer Drupal over Joomla! Both are good applications in their own right, but in the end I almost always recommend Drupal over Joomla!. That’s why I’m glad to see Alledia update their own comparison between these popular CMS with Joomla and Drupal – Which One is Right for You? Version 2.

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This year, I had the privilege of participating as a member on the judging panel for Packt Publishing’s Overall Best Open Source CMS Award. As I mentioned last month, WordPress was declared the winner of the award followed by MODx, SilverStripe, DotNetNuke, and finally XOOPS. Since the award announcement, I’ve had a lot of inquiries asking me how and in what order did I rank the content management systems. I decided to wait for a month before my posting my rankings of the Web applications because I wanted focus to remain on the declared winners and not my individual choices.

My rankings for the Overall Best Open Source CMS (with number one being the highest) were:

1. WordPress
2. DotNetNuke
3. SilverStripe
4. MODx
5. XOOPS

Each of the judges on the panel, selects their top three CMS from the five included in this category. The judges are given a lot of reign for how they rank the CMS and may consider a number of factors such as performance, usability, accessibility, ease of configuration and customization, scalability and security. Despite the criteria given, the fact is the best CMS is the CMS you determine is best in meeting your project requirements. In other words, you may find that all five CMSes in this category meet your project needs or in some cases none of the given applications will meet your requirements. Despite how I ranked the CMS you still need to do your own homework before choosing what your “best” CMS.

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