Multi-site Management with Drupal, Plone and Joomla! Open source web content management systems are starting to gain some traction in the enterprise as the ever growing need to be cost conscience continues. Most organizations are looking for a single solution to manage multiple sites — whether they be microsites for marketing campaigns or fully fledged websites. This means multi-site management capabilities are becoming a critical differentiator for Web CMS solutions. But not all multi-site management capabilities are created equal. We took a look at the multi-site management capabilities of three of the most popular open source web content management systems and this is what we found. Multi-site management has been a difficult aspect of content management to master for the open source community. And although this is changing with various recent releases and updates, it's not clear which of the popular options we considered — Drupal, Joomla! In a recent article on CMS Watch, Tony Byrne contrasts Joomla!
Lineage for Plone Joomla! Joomla! Open Source and usability: Plone — Netsight Blog. An article was recently published comparing the usability of Joomla with Wordpress for simple tasks. The article argues that whilst Wordpress is not necessarily as powerful as Joomla, it does many of the simple, common tasks that one might want a CMS for and does them in a much simpler, easier manner. So just for completeness and to see how Plone stacks up doing the same things I'm going to present how Plone fares doing the exact same tasks in that original article.
One aspect that Plone has always been really hot on is usability and accessibility. Before some of these other CMSes were even born, Plone had access keys, tab ordering, and a pretty strict concept of what functions go where in the UI. Back in 2004, at the Plone Snow Sprint in Austria, we had a woman from the Austrian Institute of the Blind come in to test out Plone.
She was not only just navigating the site with text to speech software and a braille reader, but she was actually authoring and workflowing content! Vs PLONE/ZOPE. How does Drupal compare to Plone? This question is prompted by some comments made over at I'm not familiar with Plone at all. In fact, I couldn't even tell you what Python code looked like if I saw it. Zope sounds like a dark force ready to suck me into another universe. But its technological intimidation factor aside, it is the mother of all CMS software, at least from what little I've read and heard. Given that it even has some of code written in C for performance purposes, I can only assume that Plone is an industrial, heavy-duty CMS system. I'm just wondering what Drupal's niche in the CMS software ecology is compared to Plone. What advantages does Drupal have?
The CMS Matrix - cmsmatrix.org - The Content Management Comparis.