Information about two Joomla and Drupal CMS competing open source content management tools

Today I will tell that how Joomla and Drupal are three competing open source content management tools that are similarly organized. Each one have a basic usage model of submitting entries, managing users, setting themes, and organizing entries into categories, menus, etc.

Joomla is an open source content management system.  Like Drupal, it is designed for supporting the content management and presentation needs of an organization, such as a company, a school, a group, etc.  You can define pages, categories, etc., and then place content records into them.  It is kind of like building out the structure of a newsletter.

If we compare the other CMS with Joomla then we can see that Drupal and Joomla! seems to directly complete with one another, while Moodle is more specifically focused on education and technical requirements.  That appears to mean that it uses the term “courses” instead of categories, but more essentially, it has modules that deal with scheduling, registration, and quizzes for online courses.

There is a user and access management system.  Joomla was derived from Mambo, which was an earlier system. The download is free, and is about 5MB in size.  This is for the basic version, as there are additional tools and plugins.  There is an extension to manage a wiki, as there doesn’t seem to be basic support for wiki’s built in.

However, Joomla can be used as a blog quite well out of the box.  In fact, blog is one of the three basic types of content (blog, link, and table).  There are a variety of themes (called “templates”) available for Joomla web design!

The initial page shows a top menu, a main menu on the left, areas for news, latest news, and popular news.  There is a very useful facility to increase or decrease all font sizes with one click.  These regions are called “modules”, and the module manager allows the administrator to place modules into the different content areas (e.g., “left”, “right”, “footer”, etc. of the layout).

Joomla! Features

•             Completely database-driven site engine

•             News, products or services sections fully editable and manageable

•             Topics sections can be added to by contributing authors

•             Fully customizable layouts including left, center and right menu boxes

•             Browser upload of images to your own library for use anywhere in the site

•             Primary objects include postings, stories, polls, surveys, FAQ’s, forums, etc.

•             Runs on Linux, FreeBSD, MacOSX server, Solaris and AIX

•             News feed manager. Choose from over 360 news feeds from around the world

•             Change display order of page objects including news, FAQs, articles etc.

•             Random Newsflash generator

•             Remote author submission module for News, Articles, FAQs and Links

•             Object hierarchy - as many sections, departments, divisions and pages as you want

•             Image library - store all your PNGs, PDFs, DOCs, XLSs, GIFs and JPEGs online for easy use

•             Automatic Path-Finder. Place a picture and let Joomla! fix the link

•             Archive manager. Put your old articles into cold storage rather than throw them out

•             Email-a-friend and Print-format for every story and article

•             In-line Text editor similar to WordPad

•             Custom Page Modules. Download custom page modules to spice up your site

•             Template Manager. Download templates and implement them in seconds (these are called ‘Themes’ in the other systems). 

•             There is also user editable look and feel.

•             Banner manager. Make money out of your site

Each one model supports uploaded files (images, .ppt, .doc, etc.) as well as basic HTML content.  Each one has a developer support community that has added more plug-ins. They will be always in touch of your queue. There is always a great deal of activity underway and communicating with other developers in the community is essential. Each is designed to help build a virtual or on-line community, such as one for an organization, a school, a church, a museum, etc.

It providing information and road maps to all the resources available for developers interesting in extending the Joomla CMS, writing applications for the Joomla developmentPlatform or helping to improve the Joomla codebase.

IF you want to hire Joomla developer OR hire Joomla programmers read this article carefully.