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Comment by shizcakes | Hacker News Reader

Is Joomla a viable alternative here?

Depending on your needs it may be. The NanoHub project has made good use of Joomla for scientific community websites with extensive integration of resources: http://nanohub.org/about/hubzero http://hubzero.org/

No.

Why not? I'm not intending to be malicious or smart-alecky here.

Joomla isn't nearly as extensible as Drupal. If you're just trying to put up a few pages and call it a day, it's great, but Drupal can handle practically everything. I use it to mock up web sites because I can't program: It's possible to use Drupal to create a functioning beta of a fairly complex site without writing a line of code. It's slow and results in lots of bugs, but it works.

For building sites or for building apps? While Drupal can be used to build a great web site for a company (and often is!) Joomla's extensibility seems aimed more at rapid application development using a strong mvc framework.

If you don't mind relying on 3rd party contrib modules and external development roadmaps, you can build apps in Drupal, but if you just want a framework to build and deploy your own web apps Joomla is fully extensible in the OOP sense.

Also Joomla is classier than Drupal. :-P

I've been called for two different cases of compromised Joomla installations. In one case, the 1.0 to 1.5 upgrade process was completely broken; I couldn't get it to work without hacking up the upgrade script.

I didn't play around with it long enough to remember anything about its file or database architecture. But, I think if I were going to develop a CMS, I would want to make it easy to patch and upgrade, and I would want to make sure that it was somewhat secure.

That is a question better asked elsewhere, not HN. CMSses in general, and PHP ones in particular, are mundane topics that shouldn't be brought up in HN unless they advance the state of the 'art' of content management in some manner.

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