CM Tools: Drupal, Joomla, & Rumba

CM Tools: Drupal, Joomla, & Rumba

John Blyberg

Ryan Deschamps

Ryan
ModX
How not to have to use drupal
Cms in general
Why joomla
Why switch to ModX

Good content mngmt system should facilitate division of labor, support overall development, ensure best practices and standards
Halifax public library now in modx looked the same in joomla
Its not about the front end, its about the cockpit, ask long as the front end performs its about making the lives of your staff happy

Why they choose joomla
Number 1 in market share
Huge community of support
Templates
http://www.opensourcecms.com – demo of anything, can see how the back end looks and works

why they switched to ModX from Joomla
painful upgrade
started looking useful stuff – code etc, wanted to look at new services, joomla is not that great for adding unique
nice interface but doesn’t help the development of the site

ModX
Has fine grain user access, can restrict access to specific pages
Resources

What he does like
Still needs work
Needs more documentation
Some syntax knowledge required

Joomla really good for an intranet, wouldn’t recommend for a front end site,
community engagement is more important that community size
application framework

John
If youre not thinking about cms at this point you are doing yourself a really big disservice
Drupal – named open source cms of the year for the last 2 years
Not as easy as joomla – steep learning curve

How drupal handles content
Nodes – not a page, not a post
Blog post could be a node, drupal considers that content type

Content creation kit (CCK) – allows you to create new content types
Taxonomy system – drupa allows you to create your own classification system for your content types
Drupal allows you to structure sites so that content is on more than one page, on front page and on book groups page for example

Templating system – php standard, html with php tags and code
Sopac is completely template driven
If you don’t like how something looks you can make it look exactly how you want it to

api system api.drupal.org
hooks
drupal website is the place to start if youre interested in having drupal in your system

sopac was built on top of drupal because they were confident that drupal was a viable product
thesocialopac.net

questions
if you were starting with drupal now would you go with 6 or 7? Answer 7 hasn’t been officially released yet, so use 6
learning curve problems – some people have a problem with the taxonomy system, even John runs into things he doesn’t know and has to go to the site and look it up
moving from one system to another, are there tools to facilitate a move from joomla to drupal? Ryan – probably but the tools might not be that trustworthy, always be looking forward, what is the next upgrade, how difficult is the next upgrade John – migration is not easy, he advises against if possible

mentioned not hacking the core code, can you explain – John if you tweak code & drupal upgrades the file that you changed might have changed so you need to compare, very time consuming

modx has snippets, allows you to change code from back end with out breaking it

how easy to migrate from an existing site in php to one  of these tools?  Manually migrating your content,

if modx went away where would you go? Ryan – drupal