Drupal, Joomla, and Wordpress Go Head-to-Head at SXSW's Ultimate Showdown of CMS Destiny

The three most popular open source web content management software platforms finally went head-to-head in a long-awaited, highly anticipated SXSW sponsored competition that has been compared to a "pit" fight or "cage match," in the style of "Iron Chef." Except they weren't all in close proximity and didn't have to build a website all at once. Teams of top-notch designers/developers were given 100 hours each to build a site on their respective platforms to specifications created by Palantir.net, a well-known Chicago-based web development firm specializing in Drupal. Here are the project specifications and contest rules, and here are the finished products: drupalshowdown.com, joomlashowdown.com, and wpshowdown.com. Amy Stephen And Steve Fisher have posted a number of videos on Vimeo showing how their site works, doing a usability test, and responding to the official usability test of their site for the contest.

Each team's development process has been throughly documented. They each had to submit a self-evaluation along with all their correspondence and commentary on the project (e.g., Twitter, email, IRC.) This material will be a good resource for fledgling designers and people who need a website but aren't sure what to look or ask for. The packaged end products may also be distributed for public use as well; this is definitely the Joomla team's intention.

The Joomla team included Arno Zijlstra, a founding member and core developer for Joomla and previously Mambo. The Wordpress team included Matt Mullenweg, founder of Wordpress, Automattic, and Akismet. The Drupal team included Jeff Eaton of Lullabot and a bunch of people from Palantir.

The three contest sites are now complete but will not be judged until March 16 as part of SXSW. They can be viewed externally, but only the Drupal entry currently allows you to register a user account and access the content and functions that are restricted to registered users. Unsurprisingly the Drupal team delivered the least attractive, least engaging site--and I mean that in the best possible way. Good theming is very time intensive with Drupal. On the good side, the Drupal team seems to have delivered all the main features. It's not clear that the Joomla and Wordpress teams completely accomplished that, but their results are engaging, attractive, and appear more intuitive and usable. This in itself is a pretty good indication of the main differences between the three, from a designer or customer standpoint.

CMSwire explains the judging process, which is a bit hazy as to how (or if) a single winner will be selected. Mark Boulton, who is deeply involved with the Drupal project, "will evaluate how well each team articulated the design concept, as well as the Palantir.net community leadership consultant, who will evaluate how easy each site is to use." CMSwire adds, "Palantir will also be testing the sites for things like validation, page weight, number of lines of custom code, etc. These results will be presented at SXSW, and then the audience will get to offer their opinion on which site is the overall winner."

"Hold on, just a minute now! We've got specs from a Drupal firm, a team from that Drupal firm, Drupal judges including members of that Drupal firm....Is the fix in for Drupal?"

Good question! it gets better...

Adding to the ongoing Drupal-Joomla-Wordpress rivalry, a few weeks ago Drupal founder Dries Buytaert announced that he intends to "eliminate the web developer" and make Drupal (or likely his commerical services and Drupal distribution, Acquia) "the dominant platform to build websites." I interpret this to mean that Buytaert is not really interested in eliminating web developers, just independent ones who are not paying members of his Acquia network, if/when Acquia Drupal becomes as dominant as he hopes or intends. (I think Buytaert is having delusions of grandeur to go with his Bono goggles.)

As for the SXSW competition, let's give the judging the benefit of the doubt and see what happens on the 16th. The project specs are certainly not skewed to favor one platform more than another. For example, if CRM, document management, project management, or multi-site control features were called for, Wordpress would be unable to compete, period.

But there is nothing I can see in the project specs that seems likely to play to the biggest strengths or weaknesses of any of the three contestants--except perhaps one requirement that each website allow its users to "create groups to facilitate group project planning." There are to be "group pages" that allow members to upload Word, PDF, and other common document formats for peer review and commenting, as well as collaboratively edited wiki-style pages."

Most of the main feature requirements actually involve things that Joomla and Wordpress do better (and in more ways) than Drupal: an events calendar, file download repositories, embedded multimedia, classified ads, discussion forums (apparently omitted in what the Joomla team actually delivered), galleries, blogs, rating systems, and banner ad management. But the ways you might allow user-created user groups with special access privileges in Wordpress and Joomla is not as well developed or fundamentally as good as Drupal's organic groups.

This distinction is mainly due to the lack of custom user accounts and permissioning in the Wordpress and Joomla core distributions. Wordpress lags the most in this respect. Joomla has more and less klunky workarounds but aims to take care of its user and permissions deficits in the next big (1.6) release. That said, I actually don't see groups functionality in the Drupal team's end product, whereas the Joomla team did create a groups section of some sort. They also used an in-development, as-yet-unreleased group blogging extension suite, and maybe they were even able to make use of relatively new content versioning extensions--one of the other functionality specs for the project that only Drupal can meet out-of-the-box.

Well who's the winner here? We'll see what they say on the 16th, but people do judge books--and more appropriately websites--by their "covers." The overwhelming majority of honest onlookers will say Drupal looks like last place. The Wordpress and Joomla entries both look good and are harder to call. This does not mean Drupal can't be pretty. It can, but you need to put in a lot more hours--and money--to make it so.

If this were a real project RFP, the buyer would get the best value from Joomla or Wordpress--unless rock-bottom cost (while still getting high quality) is not an issue. Otherwise, Acquia's unique value for long term support might make Acquia Drupal the best fit for a client building the leadership/organizing site described in the SXSW contest specs. Assuming major functional improvements are not wanted in the future, total cost of ownership might be lowest with Wordpress and highest with Joomla due to the way upgrade availability information is currently disseminated and the ease at which upgrades can be made to the core software and add-ons. Which CMS is really best for the job/client? The answer in every scenario is best encapsulated by Barrie North's handy flowchart.