CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hello,

lcdweb stated in a recent post that

civicrm works great in joomla, and at this point, there really is no significant benefit to using drupal over joomla. it's a matter of preference.

I have several Joomla sites that I have built, and chose Joomla for the one for which I am using CiviCRM based on my experience and comments such as above.
I find though that there are features provided for CiviCRM in Drupal that are fairly essential.  Such as the Webforms integration, and the Rules capabilities that can allow for Drupal user account creation, for example, when a CiviCRM contact is created, automatically.  There are many others that I have encountered over my 14 months using CiviCRM.   It seems, from the forum posts, that there are APIs that can be invoked at certain system events, however, not being an experienced php programmer, I have found this difficult (and many others have stated so on the forums).

<<edit>>  I should add that I am mostly speaking of ways that users/members can access the Joomla/CiviCRM website for self-service.  I can do most if not all tasks manually.  << end edit >>

Perhaps I am missing workable alternatives for the solutions found for Drupal, but if so, can someone point those out?  A blog or wiki article would be most helpful for Joomla users to have equivalent methods pointed out.

I appreciate all the CiviCRM community has done to provide the CRM / Joomla integration!

Craig

the reason I didn't factor those into my "essentially equal" statement is that they are third party extensions, not strictly "core" functionality.

Joomla has a growing number of extensions that extend integration between CiviCRM and Joomla, and I'm sure WordPress does too -- some of which do not have any equivalent module in Drupal.

so my statement above was not intended to say all CMS's are equal or identical -- but that in terms of integration with core CiviCRM, they are essentially equivalent. as with any implementation project, you would need to ask the broader questions of what tools each CMS brings to the table, and what unique attributes each has, and in this case -- whether a particular CMS has existing extensions that are important for you particular integration.

I suppose you may need to take that differentiation to some points of integration with core as well. for example, both joomla and drupal have full ACL integration with civicrm. the drupal model for ACL (roles/permissions) uses an implied deny, explicit allow model; the joomla model (groups/permissions) has explicit allow, explicit deny, and group inheritance (joomla's ACL groups may be hierarchal, whereas drupal is flat). as it pertains to integration with civicrm, I would argue the integration is "complete" -- when you hit a restricted civicrm resource, civicrm just asks the simple question -- is the user allowed access. the structure and options for how that actually plays out is left to the CMS. but in my thinking -- that isn't a question of whether civicrm has better/worse integration with one or the other CMS -- it is simply a matter of differentiation between the CMS's themselves.