Contrasting multi-site management in Drupal and Joomla

Added By Tony Byrne at 18-Feb-2009 | Twitter: @TonyByrne |

Last night I had the pleasure of presenting to a DC-area Drupal Users' Group on the past and future of open source web content management. Among other topics, I outlined some of Drupal's strengths and weaknesses that we tallied in our Web CMS Report. Most of our research comes from end-user customers, so it was nice to gets some feedback from this group of mostly consultants.

We debated a fair bit about multi-site management. By multi-site management I mean one enterprise operating multiple properties with arbitrary inter-relationships, as opposed to a hosting company with multiple tenants running off one install.

Few Web CMS products accomplish this effectively, and it turns out that in Drupal, like most packages, enterprise multi-site management requires various work-arounds that feel too jerry-rigged to me. To be sure, there are various modules and sub-projects out in the Drupal community that attempt to address this, but they seem to be geared more towards data- and module-sharing across subsites, rather than a more object-oriented approach to managing numerous properties in a way that effectively exposes dependencies (and non-dependencies) to authorized business users.

One developer described how Joomla! was fairly advanced in this area, relative to other open source tools. We hadn't uncovered that before (though we'll look into it now...), but if true, this suggests how sometimes it's difficult to pigeon-hole a piece of software by its reputation. So, the reputation: Joomla! is one of the easiest packages to install and use, but -- some customers learn only later -- has perhaps the fewest "enterprisey" features of all the Web CMS tools we cover. Joomla!'s multi-site management services may be alluring, yet, I think, only as long as you are considering a set of fairly simple sites in a primitive development and configuration-management environment.

In any case, welcome your thoughts on this topic.

Categories: Tony Byrne, Web Content Management, Implementation, Marketplace at Large, Open Source, Drupal, Joomla!