Content Management System – Mamboo, Joomla and Drupal

The posts in this series yet:

Ok, now its turn to intro­duce briefly about this jour­ney from mambo to joomla and drupal.

Mambo CMS is one of the ear­li­est open source soft­ware. It has an active group of devel­op­ers that helps to keep the soft­ware up to date. How­ever, over the years, Mambo has declined in pop­u­lar­ity. The pri­mary rea­son for the decline is that the code is becom­ing more and more com­pli­cated. As Mambo started very early, it does not have access to advanced tech­nolo­gies. So parts of its code is still prim­i­tive. Devel­op­ers are find­ing it harder to work with Mambo. As a result, many switch to newer soft­ware like Joomla.

Joomla is become one of the most pop­u­lar open source CMS. It has many pow­er­ful fea­tures. Some of these fea­tures include image gal­leries, SEO, shop­ping cart, and forums. Joomla’s great­est strength is its abil­ity to inte­grate com­mer­cial com­mu­ni­ties. If you are think­ing of run­ning an online com­mu­nity, Joomla would come highly rec­om­mended. Joomla is also one of the eas­i­est CMS to pick up and use. Dru­pal, the next CMS that we are going to dis­cuss, has a slightly steeper learn­ing curve.

Drupal’s growth and devel­op­ment has been pro­gress­ing steadily. There is a very clear growth path. The core sys­tem is very exten­si­ble, which means that there is a lot of room for fur­ther growth. Dru­pal is good for pow­er­ing com­mu­nity based sites. Many of the tools that are incor­po­rated with Dru­pal are meant for web com­mu­ni­ties. For instance, Dru­pal has a sophis­ti­cated sys­tem for han­dling user per­mis­sions. Com­pared to Joomla, Dru­pal wins hands down in this aspect. Many devel­op­ers choose Dru­pal over Joomla because of clearer documentation.

So how do you choose?

First, go to the offi­cial web­site for each CMS and browse the fea­ture list. Make sure that the CMS has all the fea­tures you are look­ing for. If some fea­tures are miss­ing, it means that you may have to install addi­tional plu­g­ins, or hire devel­op­ers to pro­gram the fea­ture from the ground up.

Remem­ber, very few web­mas­ters can find all the fea­tures in a sin­gle CMS. There­fore, the best thing to do is to choose a CMS with the most num­ber of avail­able fea­tures and at the same time, ensure that the plat­form is easy enough for future devel­op­ments. For this rea­son, more and more devel­op­ers are drop­ping Mambo. Dru­pal and Joomla are close com­peti­tors. In terms of fea­tures, Joomla has more. But in terms of ease of devel­op­ment, Dru­pal is the lead­ing CMS. Choose the one that you are most com­fort­able work­ing with.

All the three CMS are avail­able for instal­la­tion if you sign up for Linux host­ing with Cpanel con­trol panel. Using, you can eas­ily install your pre­ferred CMS with a few sim­ple clicks.