We've done an extensive analysis of the major community-based environments out there, and Drupal was our clear top choice. As Dave said, Drupal has a strong developer community and out of the box covers a majority of our requirements. Additionally, we can fill in the gaps with custom modules and a theme, which are contributable back to that developer community. Joomla doesn't have this second part in nearly as robust a manner as Drupal.
I could go on about Drupal if you like, but our rationale is in a document on our project management system. In short, there's a Goldilocks scenario among the three major Open Source CMSs: - Joomla, geared toward set-and-forget, no-muss-no-fuss, not very extensible past that - Plone, way powerful, but resource-intensive, hard to prototype and stage solutions with, fewer people with the skills to build (hence expensive, harder to get volunteers on board) - Drupal is juuuust riiiight Joomla, while it provides a good out-of-the-box solution, is meant for smaller scale situations that require less customizability. It's for people who want to quickly get a site up and running, slap on a theme, and get a little more mileage out of their CMS than Wordpress. Drupal, on the other hand, has a highly active developer community that we can reach out to for help, encourages additions to the platform, and has been deployed in countless large scale applications with headroom to spare. It also scales down fairly well, so people can prototype on their own machines instead of requiring online sandboxes and consuming hosting resources just to play around. Hope this answers why Joomla isn't a good fit. We do welcome the scrutiny though. If you'd like to take a look at the Google Doc with all the geeky details of the pros and cons of each platform, let us (Liz Bacon, Amyris Fernandez, or myself) know. - Nasir On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 4:15 PM, dave malouf <[email protected]> wrote: > Den, we are not "re-designing" the existing site. We are tearing up > the platform from the ground up. We needed a platform and Drupal is > that with one of the largest developer communities out there today. > I'm not sure where you get the "doing one thing" part of Drupal. > It is a highly extensible platform for managing content, people and > data and gives us a huge amount of flexibility for what we want to do > towards creating a robust virtual community of practice. In fact, with > the Civic Space modules you can say that it is well on its way to > already being a strong CoP platform. Of course our requirements are > quite different from Civic Space. > > Liz, et. al. is there a public place where people can see our total > requirements list so that the community can better understand the > total scope. > > Regardless of whether this info is available or not, people who > aren't doing the volunteer work, should assume in good faith that we > are all actively doing our due diligence as much as the limited > resources of a volunteer organization can do. In this case we have > done quite a bit. > > -- dave > > > > . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . > Posted from the new ixda.org > http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=39726 > > > ________________________________________________________________ > Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! > To post to this list ....... [email protected] > Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe > List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines > List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help > ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
