Continuing the comparison between Joomla! and Drupal in enterprise settings, this article addresses how each technology separates administrative functionality from public-facing content.
Drupal vs Joomla!- Content Listing.
In the current versions, Joomla!’s back-end is more distinct from the visitor-facing pages than is Drupal. The Joomla! administrative area is a GUI control panel, with icons and administrative menus guiding content management activities.
For example, the content listing in Joomla! 1.5 looks like this:
Compare that to the content listing in the Drupal, which, even after adding the administrator menu module, is much more spartan:
Drupal vs Joomla! - Administrator Interface
Appearance-wise, the admin pages in Joomla!, are certainly more likely to make non-technical users feel comfortable. But even beyond aesthetic differences with the Drupal CMS, it is noteworthy that a the back-end of a Joomla! website looks and works differently than its public-facing front-end.
In Drupal, the public-facing pages are not necessarily distinct from the administrative ones. For this reason, Drupal CMS users may sometimes have trouble answering the question “Where am I?” Joomla! users most likely never have that problem.
With Drupal , a website developer can create a Joomla!-type separation if that is desired, by enabling a different administrator theme and making some configuration and theme adjustments. Nevertheless, the out-of-the-box difference is significant and it drives some potential Drupal developers to the firmer footing of content management systems such as Joomla! and Wordpress.
Joomla! CMS vs. Drupal Social Publishing
The relationship between back- and front-ends in Joomla! and Drupal, unveils a theoretical divergence in approach to CMS. The Joomla! web design approach conforms more to a traditional separation between site content generators and visitors, while Drupal has moved toward collaborative and social web sites by blurring the lines between visitors, users, and administrators. No users, Drupal seems to say, deserve a “back-end” or a “front-end”—they are equal in the eyes of Drupal.
Nevertheless, Drupal developers have reached a consensus that the democratic-software ideology, however sound, should not prevent people from using Drupal, and quite a few of the changes in version 7 are aimed at improving user experience.
A significant development in Drupal 7 is the administrative overlay:
This admin window appears when a user is performing content management tasks and sits on top of the actual site. Because the overlay appears more as a layer of abstraction than a separate area of the web site, user experience is greatly enhanced without betraying the social publishing ideology.
Drupal 5 and 6 users will also notice that some of the confusing nomenclature has been “de-geekified” in Drupal 7. “Users” are “People” and a “Theme” is website “Appearance.”
These back-end improvements should help Drupal compete with Joomla! in the area of administrative user-experience, especially for non-technical users. For those users who prefer a rich GUI for content management, Joomla! will remain an attractive choice.
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Achieve Internet, www.achieveinternet.com, specializes in enterprise-class Drupal development with unique capabilities in project architecture and planning for Drupal web design projects requiring scalability, stability and integration.