CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi Folks,
 
I am confused and I'm hoping someone can put things in perspective for me.
 
I am working on updating a website/community portal for a non-profit.
 
Here are my history and requirements in brief:
 
1) site is currently based on PostNuke (therefore is woefully outdated)
2) I need to have a public portal with about a dozen pages of static content
3) I need a member portal with internal content, a strong event calendar and basic collaboration
4) member management, groups, opt-in membership, mailing lists, article publication etc. are all desired
 
I started searching for a replacement over a year ago and found CivicSpace.  CivicSpace sounded interesting, but I didn't really understand what it was.  I then found CiviCRM and realized it's functionality was a great fit for number 4.
 
I decided that an implementation of a CMS along with CiviCRM was really what I wanted and should cover all my requirements.
 
I saw that CiviCRM integrated with both Drupal and Joomla.  Looking back at the pages I found for CivicSpace, it appeared that it was tightly coupled with Drupal and I made the, perhaps erroneous, assumption that because of the similar names the integration with CiviCRM would also be better with Drupal.
 
I have had CiviCRM and Drupal installed for some time now, but have not gotten much further.  It is clear to me that I want to use CiviCRM, but I am uncertain whether I made the right choice with Drupal over Joomla.  In particular, the event calendar choices with Drupal are not great (at least last I looked) and I have not found an administrator book  for Drupal as there is for Joomla (although there appears to be one coming out in August).  I am not adverse to removing CiviCRM and Drupal and starting over.
 
So, can anyone help me with the choice between Drupal and Joomla?  One recurring comment I have read is that Drupal is better architected, but Joomla is easier to get started with - I don't know if this is still true.  I am a developer, but I do not intend to create modules for these installations... I'm looking for existing solutions in the community.
 
And what the heck is/was CivicSpace?  Is it still relevant?  If so, how?
 
Sorry if these questions are answered somewhere.  I looked and looked.
 
Thanks in advance,
 
Dale Hohm

Dale,


I feel your pain with PostNuke - when I started here our main website was PHP-Nuke! A security nightmare!


Your post made me recall the confusion I experienced when I got started with this stuff. Let me try, briefly and no doubt imperfectly, to shed some light here.


Drupal and Joomla are both open-source, PHP-based content management systems, each with their ardent supporters (this you know.) I have not used Joomla, so can't really comment on whether it's better for your needs than Drupal (anyone else?)


CiviCRM (as you also know) is a separate open-source project - a PHP-based system for nonprofits, community orgs and the like to manage their supporters, volunteers, donors, donations, etc. It has built-in bulk e-mail capabilities.


CivicSpace is a highly-customized distribution of Drupal that grew out of software written for Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign. It included many specialized Drupal modules that help nonprofits, campaigns, and issue advocates get their message out, plan and manage distributed events, etc, and was made available for free download. Almost all of the code CivicSpace wrote was contributed back to the Drupal community in the form of modules on Drupal.org. When CiviCRM became available, it duplicated (and arguably improved on) some of the functionality in CivicSpace, so the CivicSpace team integrated CiviCRM into their Drupal distribution and released a few versions including CiviCRM.

Over the last few years, CivicSpace has focused on offering a low-cost hosted solution that integrates pre-configured Drupal and CiviCRM for organizations and campaigns (They call this "CivicSpace on Demand"), and to this end they hired at least one member of the core CiviCRM development team. You can check out their offering at http://civicspacelabs.org/  If you are looking for something quick and easy, and don't plan on writing your own modules, it may meet your needs (as a hosted service, I don't believe you have control over which Drupal modules are installed on your site.) They have a demo available.


Event calendars in Drupal
Off the top of my head, here are 3 different approaches to doing an event calendar in Drupal - the first 2 are independent of CiviCRM, while the 3rd is integrated.


Use the Event module - easy, less set-up, but an older approach that's less flexible


These days many people are moving away from the Event module, and use a contributed module called CCK to build their own Drupal content types; there is a date field-type available that has gotten increasingly powerful. Coupled with the als0-ubiquitous Views module and the Calendar module, you can build powerful and flexible event calendars without having to write code. However, it can take some time and learning to set all this up, thought there is some good step-by-step documentation here and here.


If you are using CiviEvent in CiviCRM to add and manage your events, you can pull them into Drupal via an iCal feed and display them via the aforementioned Calendar module. I've done this and it's not that bad...


Another effort you should be aware of is CiviNode which extends integration between CiviCRM and Drupal by creating actual Drupal "nodes" (content pieces) form CiviCRM contacts, groups, etc. Currently it does not work with CiviCRM Events - you'll need to use 4.3 above to tie those together.


Again, I have no experience with Joomla. I chose Drupal for our websites almost 3 years ago and have no regrets - it's handled everything we have thrown at it and is very easy to start extending with your own code should you need to.


Hope this helps!


--
Andy Laken

Adding my comments form the mailing list for posterity:

Read the comments at opensourcecms.com for both:

Drupal
http://opensourcecms.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=132

Joomla
http://opensourcecms.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2097

...ignoring the obvious kool-aid hype ("best CMS EVER!!!!"), and paying special attention to those who have tried both, and those who seem to have a similar level of technical inclination as yourself.

BTW, as far as I know, if you need any real tiered permissioning (admins can do this, managers, can do that, members can do something else) Drupal is the only choice, but the Joomlites can correct me if I'm wrong.

I tried both briefly, and decided on Drupal. After your message, and discussion with other Joomla users, I decided to investigate it again, and have not regretted my choice.

Some will say Drupal has a harder learning curve. I disagree; I just think the quirks between the two are different. I suspect some people have tried Drupal as their first ever CMS and though it was too hard, and then found Joomla easier because of transferred learning from their Drupal experience, in regards to general CMS concepts.

I will say that Joomla's library of stock templates/themes is somewhat prettier. Maybe templating is easier; I don't know, but it won't matter for CiviCRM, which uses Smarty templates either way.

I will just comment to say that we run Civi for some sites as a dual install with Joomla and Drupal.

Joomla is much easier/better from an end user's perspective in my view - so our clients use it to manage their general website content.

For fine grained permissions we have a Drupal install that shares the same database so that people who are not website administrators and are members of different civi groups can be given different permissions.  We haven't played much with the new built-in civi ACL to determine whether it will soon enable us to do that fine grained permissioning through Joomla! now/soon so that it can be run all through the Joomla! front-end - without civi administrators having access to updating website content through the Joomla! backend.

I echo the previous comments that Drupal seems to be the better development/acl environment at present but that Joomla! is an easier to use system for website management.  We are hopefully that the new Joomla! 1.5 framework will enable it to catch up on the ACL side of things soon!  It is certainly a much better development environment than it used to be.


Kind Regards


Andrew Perry
Director - Legal & Technology