Drupal vs. Joomla

When I went CMS hunting in 2008 I researched several options - ExpressionEngine, TextPattern, Joomla, and Drupal. I first leaned towards, EE, then Joomla, but eventually developed a preference for Drupal.

UX (user experience) & the Default Template

While Joomla 1.5 is relatively end-user friendly, Drupal 5-6 seemed harder to understand at first. Joomla's default front-end template layout has a corporate layout feel to it (with lots of little information blocks subdividing the larger content areas), which lends itself more easily to service driven corporate websites, while Drupal's default "Garland" template has a Blog layout, and when logged in, includes the administration menu (which I found incredibly confusing initially). Joomla's Admin area also seems more conventional, graphical, and understandable, while Drupal is not graphical, and lacks the most basic menu management (e.g. drop-down menus) out of the box, and felt like "info overload". UI Improvements are planned for 7.

Taxonomy

What impressed me first about Drupal was the taxonomy module. It is an incredibly flexible module, that in combination with "Views" is incredibly powerful. Joomla is sorely lacking in this area.

Business Model

In my early comparisons, I noted right off the bat the lion-share of Joomla modules had gone commercial - I haven't seen one commercial Drupal module yet.

Performance

From a performance perspective Drupal does Joomla in. and Drupal has won Packt Publishing's CMS Award 2 years in a row: http://drupal.org/Drupal-Wins-Best-Overall-2008-Open-Source-CMS-Award-Packt

Performance comparison: http://buytaert.net/drupal-vs-joomla-performance

Joomla "Articles" vs. Drupal "Nodes"

I was super frustrated the other day when we were trying to build a BEFORE/AFTER gallery for my Orthodontist clients Joomla site. Turns out you can't add multiple image upload fields to a Joomla article (even using the K2 module). I'd gotten used to Drupal affording me the ability to add just about any field type via CCK to Drupal content types. So I ask my developer about it and he replies that Joomla's good if it already does exactly what you want it to do out of the box, but Drupal's far better on the development side.

CCK or Views for Joomla?

There is nothing in Joomla that compares with CCK or Views. Development in Joomla just feels all over the place with "Extension" developers all doing their own thing, i.e. the K2 module tries to imitate CCK, but imagine having a site where some Articles are in one section of the admin area, and other Articles are in another section - totally insane. Basically if you want to do anything fancy with custom lists you need to know how to write a SQL query. Joomla lacks good development tools. Drupal feels so much more like a 'frame-work' with 'modules' leveraging other 'modules' (which at first was a strange concept to me, but which now seems to me to be its strength).

More to come as I dig deeper into Joomla...