CMS web design: Mambo, Joomla, or Drupal?
By George Gardner
When it comes to web-based CMS, there are a variety of open source solutions; while each one doesn’t offer everything, there are 3 that clearly stand above the rest: Mambo, Joomla, and Drupal.
A content management system(CMS) is a method used to provide nearly complete control over content on the Web; everything from managing users, documents, various media, and a host of other things (depending on which CMS you use) is completely automated with an entire web structure including the page itself.
Aside from installing a CMS on your website’s server, they are generally easy to use and can save a webmaster weeks worth of development time or just be used by individuals who know completely nothing about web development.
There is, however, a bit of a learning curve when it comes to using a CMS; understanding the data structure (ie. sections, categories, content) is usually the largest obstacle to overcome. Fortunately, each CMS holds its own forums with a friendly community that’s always willing to help.
I choose these three not necessarily because of their ease of use, but rather their functionality. If used properly, these systems can provide a wealth of abilities.
Keep in mind they are by far not simple; you get what you work for. If you’re looking for something simple, it’s likely that these are not for you. A simple CMS, in the end, will offer a simple result.
Joomla is very similar to Mambo, as it was rebuilt from the Mambo structure back in 2005; many bugs were fixed at the time, and a few security issues were addressed as well.
When it comes down to it, you’ll be deciding between Joomla and Drupal; Mambo is an earlier development that was abandoned in 2005 and has many bugs. If you choose Mambo, I can promise that you’ll be spending much time searching message boards and modifying PHP scripts.
In terms of installation, Joomla is clearly the winner; Drupal is significantly harder to install, and requires the user to have certain high-level privileges to the server’s database.
Drupal’s appearance is a far cry from that of Mambo or Joomla; although, looks should take no authority over usability. Drupal is, however, easier to customize; often times a simple change in Mambo or Joomla would lead to other elements not displaying correctly.
As you’re sure to find bugs in all open source CMS, in my experiences, I’ve had better performance overall with Drupal; it is tightly coded, which means fewer bugs and a lot less headaches. I’ve never had the pleasure of wasting an entire day looking for a bug fix on Drupal as I had with both Mambo and Joomla.
While both Drupal and Joomla can be search engine friendly, I’ve found that Drupal offers SEO without sacrificing security as Joomla has been known to do; in addition, Drupal has a more logical URL structure that we would call ’reader friendly.’
In terms of community support, Joomla clearly has a larger following; with this, advantages include overall better support and more add-ons (ie. modules, themes).
One major advantage Drupal has is its category structure known as taxonomy; this is by far Drupal’s strongest feature. With Mambo or Joomla, content is added into a SECTION/CATEGORY/CONTENT structure; this limited method of sorting content has numerous disadvantages when users are navigating your site.
Taxonomy allows you to cross-categorize all content across your site globally, and will classify content automatically in virtually an unlimited amount of ways; as an example of taxonomy, you could set up keywords (known as a vocabulary) to cross- reference pages that contain those keywords to greatly aid in category management and information distribution.
In order to make the decision between Joomla and Drupal, I suggest first trying both out at opensourcecms.com. Ultimately, the decision should come down to how you’re going to use the CMS.
For a site that mostly offers static content with very little updating, such as tutorials, static information, and directories, I would certainly suggest Joomla.
If you’re looking to have ‘real-time’ content on a day-to-day basis, such as a blog, news, or review sites, it may be in your best interest to use Drupal; it is slightly more difficult to learn than Mambo or Joomla, but will surely prove more satisfying in the end.
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March 31st, 2007
First it sounds as if Mambo is a CMS you would recommend and later you state that its buggy and troublesome ?!?
March 31st, 2007
I mentioned Mambo because it is still widely used; however, Mambo has nothing on Joomla. “Stand above the rest” is just meant to mean “popular”; perhaps I should have been more clear on that.
So now you can quit your yaphin’
March 31st, 2007
Personally I disagree on your suggestion. From a developers point of view Joomla shows far more promise than Drupal with all the ease of use from the 1.0 series of Joomla. The new framework of Joomla is something else whereas Drupal, if you have a hard look at the code is probably about to hit the wall. There’s only so many patches the current Drupal can take, besides I’ve had many a Drupal site break as a result of these (upgrades) patches to newer versions. No thanks … for me it’s either Joomla or Typo 3.
March 31st, 2007
That’s a good argument; I’ve heard about that, but have never had any bad experiences. I guess to each his own.
March 31st, 2007
Sorry to take issue with your post, but I think you got this one backwards — Joomla has had to release 12 versions with bug fixes due to the problems they introduced. Mambo is far LESS buggier. Not only that, the codeset is smaller and it benchmarks better, too. I build on them both and run them both and I can tell you right now Mambo is better code.
March 31st, 2007
When you talk about ease of install on Drupal you must mean version 4.7 and earlier. As of version 5, the install of Drupal is just as painless as Wordpress or Joomla. Also, the admin menu has improved greatly.
April 1st, 2007
Ray Ox, I’ll admit that it has been a few months since I’ve installed and used Mambo; quite possibly things have changed since December. Other than my personal experiences, I have nothing left to go on. Truth be told, I did have many frustrating weekends with Mambo, trying to fix problems that didn’t have solutions at the time.
I did learn of the packaged ‘automated installer’ for Drupal which was released earlier this year, but haven’t had the pleasure of using it as of yet.
April 1st, 2007
I’ve been developing with Mambo, and then Joomla for approx 3 years. Each time a new version of either is released, I install and check them out.
In my experience, Joomla now has a very clear advantage over Mambo, which has failed to show any real improvements to speak of since the core dev team dropped it and formed OSM and the Joomla code set. And the new Joomla 1.5 framework and AJAX integration are about to shift it even further ahead of Mambo. Good times ahead.
April 1st, 2007
And Wordpress? Why dont’ you considerate this CMS? I think that it is more userfriendly of Drupal. Wordpress has a big comunity and its plugins are simple but very strong. Create the templete for Drupal is not easy.
April 1st, 2007
@wasabi, wordpress is blog software and is the best at that, but to call it cms goes to far ;)
April 1st, 2007
” A simple CMS, in the end, will offer a simple result.” = Wordpress
April 3rd, 2007
Joomla can have taxonomy with a (commercial) plugin called Tags (by Phil Taylor). Works fine. You can set up menu items linking to a certain tag you created, and all content using this tag will be listed.
I never went back to Mambo since Joomla! was created; just had a look at their announcements where it says something about 4.6.2 and a date long past.. don’t give dates, is one thing the J! dev team learned.
I have never used Drupal, but was often tempted to -so far, I always found a way to get Joomla! where I needed it to go.
Wordpress is not a CMS, it’s a blogging script. Which can by the way be integrated into Joomla! : http://dev.joomla.org/component/option,com_jd-wp/Itemid,51/
April 23rd, 2007
Why you even mention Mambo is beyond me ;)
I do agree with your conclusion. Joomla! has a very bad codebase (with the current 1.0* range) and Drupal code is much more structured. But Drupal isn’t everything either. While my personal preference does lean towards Drupal, the new Joomla 1.5 framework looks quite good.
I’m more of a custom-build person though, so these systems I just look at when I need a simple system.
April 23rd, 2007
First I must disclose that the CMS I am currently using is Xoops which I found it easier to install over Mambo at the time I tried both. Currently besides Joomla I have heard many good things about Typo3. Why didn’t you retain it in your comparison?
April 23rd, 2007
My recommendation: drupal – fast developing, very good codebase, very flexible.
Probably it requires a bit more learning, but after that, you can use it for almost any web site.
It has also a lot of contributed modules and themes, and quite responsive community.
Maybe creating templetes (in drupal terms: themes) isn’t so easy, but it gives you flexibility.
April 24th, 2007
What about Typo3? I agree it has a huge learning curve but the capabilities are overwhelming
April 24th, 2007
It’s a pity that the writer makes false statements to support his bigotry:
“Mambo is an earlier development that was abandoned in 2005 ”
Both products are doing well and under active development. The above is a stupid comment.
Further, Mambo is easier to begin with for the complete novice, because the initially loaded site offers helpful advice on getting started, rather than the trying-to-be-cool rubbish that comes with Joomla. Is isn’t much, but it at least gives a few points for the absolute beginner.
I would also question this stmt:
“Drupal is significantly harder to install, and requires the user to have certain high-level privileges to the server’s database. ”
True, the Joomla community is more active, and 1.5 is probably the real beginning of Joomla. But with Mambo on every Plesk install in the world I don’t think it’s going to become as redundant as this guy things.
In time, it’ll just be another Coke vs Pepsi.
May 2nd, 2007
Mambo dead in 2005? I don’t think so! Mambo is very much alive and doing well. Unlike Joomla, users no longer have to install all those “features” they don’t want. Two distros offering much more choice. Get the “Lite” and you have the core which is fast with a very small footprint. If you want any core components and are on PHP5, you can select them and automatically install right from the admin backend. Gone are all the component/module/mambot separate installs – a universal installer handles them all, including templates.
4.6.2 is also fully localised, with an inbuilt language manager. SEO has been rewritten and is much improved, but legacy SEO is also included so older sites don’t lose their links. So, what’s coming? Development is well along with 4.7 which is the confirmation of the new direction Mambo is taking. Mambo is committed to becoming a fully accessible CMS. In 4.7, users will have the ability to deliver sites validating xhtml 1.1 if they want. S.508, WCAG priority 1 & 2 are met and much of priority 3.
Mambo is 6 years old and Joomla is not the first fork that has happened. Losing all the core development team in 2005 set Mambo back for a time, but also allowed time for a complete reassessment of what users wanted and where the project should head. 2005 was a long time ago. Just like life, FOSS development moves on.
May 3rd, 2007
Oh wow. I’ve just been looking at all the commits on the Joomla SVN. They are seriously close to 1.5 Beta 2. No more legacy Mambo code … whoopeee!
This new Joomla baby is going to rock.
June 7th, 2007
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September 12th, 2007
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January 21st, 2008
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February 9th, 2008
very nice information thank u
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February 20th, 2008
I find Joomla very easy to customise and the level of community support means that I can get most things done using this “platform” – I’ve never used Drupal but I might have to soon – I read that its a lot harder to customise – is that true? and what is the community support like?
April 5th, 2008
Personally, I like CMS Made Simple…always surprised it doesn’t get mentioned more.
May 7th, 2008
I have personally implemented over 50 Mambo websites, two Drupal and 3 Joomla – Why more Mambo? – there are more free working components for Mambo, joomla components work in Mambo also (later versions), Joomla 1.5 has its problems with older components, Drupal is well coded, however a real problem to customise. Mambo is by far the easiest to setup and customise, with the release of 4.63 I look forward to even more work with Mambo. One problem I have had with Mambo however is the MySQL database being bogged down with too many requests and the site can shutdown, don’t know if Joomla or Drupal have these problems.
May 28th, 2008
All MySQL database-driven CMS’s can run into those problems and much depends on the server setup. There is database optimisation work being done with Mambo which should improve things (its certainly made Mambo faster with the release of 4.6.4) and more improvements are coming.
I’ve worked with most of the popular db-driven CMS’s and found that if the server is set up for them (no persistent connections, decent memory size) there’s rarely any problems with MySQL. Its worth checking on how your host has set things up.
July 21st, 2008
I agree with Elpie : Mambo has evolved. I can see the difference and I began somewhere at v4.5. I just regret DocMan updates are only done for Joomla now. A kind of DocMan should be native in Mambo (Joomla users request this also…)
August 21st, 2008
I’ve always found Drupal to be really heavy and slow for shared hosting. Ecommerce CMS systems are even worse.
October 16th, 2008
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January 22nd, 2009
I have built dozens of Joomla 1.0 sites using advanced components, modules and templates to created beautiful, functional websites that are all in the top ten of the Search Engines, especially Google. Check out my work at http://www.trigwebdesign.com
February 1st, 2009
Let’s see. Say about three years ago, you started with wordpress because you wanted a Blog. Then you found it too heavy for your contributors and started researching CMS. You landed on Joomla just when 1.5 was released – and dove in, deep. I read almost everything out there about CMS comparisons and would expect that if someone did exactly what I did but ended up with Drupal, that is where their allegiance would be. Go Drupal people. I hope you would furnish me the same consideration. Go Joomla !!!!!
March 27th, 2009
Joomla and mambo are worse than having your contributers type html straigt away. I had to take over a few joomla and mambo driven sites so I know what I’m talking about. Dig a large hole and bury those two, the world is a better place without them. The code on which it is build was ugly and unreliable from the start and the developers have no idea how to improve it. No real progression has been made in years.
Wordpress is completely different. Although it is a blogging tool and not so much a cms, it surpasses mambo and joomly completely with its CMS features, reliabiliy, solid design and ease of use.
And if you want an advanced cms, try Typo3. That is a mature, advanced cms but is complex to set up and administer.
The strength of drupal is mostly in community-sites.
June 13th, 2009
Great side.
September 30th, 2009
Drupal? never been tempted for some reason?
– Though I must admit that Joomla has become very bloated since 1.5 came in and loading time reflects this in large sites. Also the admin is too complicated/overwhelming for the average client.
I’m moving over to WordPress for small sites, though might try CMS Made Simple soon (hoping that it will live up to its name).
October 5th, 2009
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