These are my notes from the Ultimate Showdown of CMS Destiny panel at #sxswi.
* Colleen Carroll - Palantir.net
* George DeMet - Palantir.net
* Matt Mullenweg - Automattic/WordPress
* Steve Fisher - Idea Market
DESCRIPTION
This panel will feature the results of an `Iron Chef' style
competition pitting three teams of all-star Web developers from
the Drupal, Joomla! and WordPress communities against each other
to develop the same Web site in each of their chosen open source
content management platforms.
Super crowded
Decision making tools to decide between Drupal, Joomla and
Wordpress, the "three leading content management systems"
Wordpress the overwhelming crowd favorite in applause test.
I would not have put them in the same category of animal but with so many plugins perhaps they are now.
A comparison of the three:
http://www.goodwebpractices.com/other/wordpress-vs-joomla-vs-drupal.html
The same spec was given to three separate teams who were
challenged to build the site in their preferred CMS
Drupal theme song ha
Colleen Carroll at Palantir.net led the Drupal team.
Team Joomla... led by Steve Fisher of Idea Market...
instrumental theme song kind of a downer what the heck?
Joomla has blogging extensions called Tamka which fill in the
Wordpress gap
Team Wordpress led by the creator of Wordpress, Matt Mulleweg
Theme song: "it's called Wordpress, it's my CMS, it's the best
thing to hit the web since porn" A++++
Leadership Evanston set the challenge... a community leadership
network site for Evanston IL and other communities
Build a web site for use by a community leadership program
Site should utilize a variety of web-based social networking and
collaboration tools
Site should be as generalized as possible and be able to be
downloaded for use by a wide variety of organizations and
communities.
The requirements given:
User accounts with granular permissions
Contact and application form
Listserv integration
WYSIWYG
Embedded content
Version control
Editable general pages
Image galleries
Events
News
Blogs
Classifieds
Wiki pages
Polls
Forums
Ratings
Banner ads
User directory
This strongly reminds me of the work we've done for Duke University with
Symfony. Sure enough that experience has motivated us to create our own open-source PHP CMS,
pkContextCMS.
To put together a spec for the job, they went to Mark Boulton of Design Ltd., the Five Simple Steps:
Designing for the Web guy. There were ready to go PDFs so it was
an implementation challenge mostly... makes sense, front end layout wasn't the challenge here.
No more than 100 hours could be spent.
Only freely-available software could be used, all sites must be
freely available.
Site must function on provided shared hosting (LAMP). Shared
hosting = bad permissions = ow, but they wanted to simulate realistic low-cost environments for nonprofit sites. Fine, but why not go with Slicehost or other low-cost virtual machine hosting for a little security and sanity?
Joomla team's comment: "Specs From HELL"
Drupal guy: "building a web site in Drupal is a lot like making
a car out of bacon. It's not much fun getting there but once you
arrive it's delicious."
2 weeks ago at midnight was the deadline...
drupalshowdown.com has the drupal site. They went with all your
base content. It doesn't seem to do much.
The Wordpress site implemented the Derek Zoolander Center For
Children Who Can't Read Good And Wanna Learn To Do Other Stuff. Definitely the best sample content.
The teams were spread over eight time zones etc, the Joomla team
have never met, the Drupal team went out of their way to work in
the same room.
No live demos which is disappointing. I really think they should
have done that. Now we're hearing them talk about what the
experience of building the sites was like, which doesn't really
give us much insight into how the tools compare or how the
results compare.
DeMet: "Did this feel like Drupal to you or were there parts
where you felt `this is difficult for Drupal?'" Carroll: "no.
Drupal's awesome." Later she acknowledged that breadcrumbs are
kind of a pain in the ass in Drupal. Fisher and Mullenweg:
"yeah, it's built in." "Yeah, we didn't have to think about it."
Mullenweg: the menu system got big and crufty.
This is an example of why Refresh Philly isn't hooking up
nonprofits with volunteer coders yet... the results are
intriguing but sustainability and maintenance are big questions.
All three teams seem to have found bugs and contributed features
back during the project.
They all had fun and wrote theme songs and built web sites. Not
a lot of takeaway here.
The Wordpress guys wrote by far the most custom PHP and JS code
at 1,808 lines. Drupal and Joomla! went with 220 and 30
respectively. But how well did they implement the spec? If they
all did an equally good job that would mean something...
Ah the WordPress stats included theme files which the others did
not. So never mind.
The designer called it a tie between WordPress and Drupal and
dinged the Joomla! team for not following his typography...
which doesn't say anything about the relative usefulness of the
CMSes.
Okay finally... they did do some user evaluation with users who
didn't have a CMS preference already... finally the crux of the matter
All three sites involved quite minimal amounts of new PHP, which
emphasizes that all three have core features and plugins enough
to more or less stamp this site out as far as the back end is
concerned.
drupalsxsw user testing summary: "I don't understand this, and
all the forms are too complicated, where why what OH GOD
SPIDERS"
The joomla user test hit problems too and she would retry and
retry and retry kind of banging the point home
The Wordpress dashboard still had the Wordpress development blog
on it ouch
It's possible they didn't give her an account with the right
privileges to do anything? Oh they tried it at multiple
levels of user auth. Why not show us more representative video then?
The user tester found joomla and drupal the most useful and
wordpress a distant third. She had a lot of difficulty finding
the administrative features for the wordpress site's
site-specific features.
cmsshowdown.com will have links to everything soon.
They did not evaluate performance issues.
"How much time was spent making the site look right in IE6?"
"Too much."
"We almost forgot. Last hour. IE6: crap!"
Drupal used the Zen theme which has that under control already.
No one used all 80 hours.
And now the beauty contest... the
audience objected loudly to being asked to vote when they
weren't shown demos of the sites. I agree. And I never quite heard who won. I had something else to attend to. Here's a tip: never shave your head with a cheap disposable razor.
