Joomla, Drupal and WordPress are three from the most well known CMS (Content Management Systems) that you can find for free on the Internet. Open source applications are gaining ground in the Internet market share and are preferred because of their simplicity and convenience they offer to the end user and administrator. All three applications offer similar functionality, but of course, each has its strengths and weaknesses. We summarized the most important ones and we present them below:
Joomla
positives:
+ Large template (themes) availability. The community around Joomla, individuals and businesses, are constantly provide new themes for a small fee or even for free, so a theme that meets the needs of most websites can be easily found and with a minimal effort to produce a visually perfect website.
+ User / Administrator friendly. Because of the vast user community and the long development of Joomla, usability and UX design (user experience design) issues have been put under the microscope and are at a high level.
+ A lot of free and commercial modules/plugins/components.
+ Large and devoted community with great support.
+ There is not a high level of technical knowledge requirement to create a really good-looking and functional website.
+ Easy upgrade. In the latest Joomla versions the upgrade process is taken as an important consideration, so with simple actions a website's administrator can upgrade core components of the installation. The plugins update process vary in convenience. It will be good to use plugins from known sources that are constantly updated, so they can always be compatible with the latest version of Joomla.
negatives:
- Around the internet there are complaints about Joomla SEO. There are several pages made in Joomla which are doing very well with SEO, so the application obviously gives considerable potential, but many experts (SEO Experts) say that SEO could be better.
- The more components/plugins/modules are installed, the more unstable the application will be. A careful selection of the plugins can eliminate this problem, but if there is a big offer will certainly there will be mechanisms that will not work optimally.
- Websites based on Joomla are common hacker targets. Whenever a new version of Joomla is announced, the vulnerabilities covered by this version are published too, unless there are no flaws in this new version. This causes the hacker community to search for vulnerable applications that are not updated.
Drupal
positives:
+ Modular structure and very flexible configuration.
+ Great SEO.
+ Very well organized users, groups and rights management.
+ Stability and performance - websites based on Drupal does not require a lot of resources on the server and run faster.
+ Focused on safety. Drupal is now using some components of Symfony framework. HttpFoundation component is designed by security experts to provide maximum assurance in http request / response level. There is great care and supervision for the requests and responses of the application. Security flaws are clearly shown, but essentially concern the way in which Drupal incorporates the specific infrastructure. The important is that the growth is made on safeguarded components.
negatives:
- It requires more time to get used to.
- Not so user friendly.
- Less themes.
WordPress
positives:+ Very user friendly.
+ Very good SEO.
+ Large number of available themes and plugins for free or paid.
+ Very good support.
negatives:
- A hacker target because of it plugins. WordPress counts the most installations than any other application and naturally all of it's functionality has been put under the microscope from hackers to discover and exploit security holes.
- The most WordPress updates are done for its own good and maybe not for the direct benefit of its users, in terms of usability and ease of interaction.
- It's slow for simple websites, due to the large code incorporated in the application. Maybe for some small websites some mechanisms (eg. heartbeat etc.) could operate more simply and with less overhead.
Conclusion
Any of the above applications you will select for your website is almost certain that you will be impressed by the variety of functions that it will provide.
The most important is to be careful with the selection of the plugins, modules, extensions, components, themes etc. which will you add to your applications and clear the security policy that you will establish, so there is enough concern for the control and the upgrade of each application, every time a new version is distributed to the community that supports it.
This is perhaps the downside of open source applications, that there should be continuous monitoring for vulnerabilities and patches.
