Composr vs Drupal

Newbie member here.

I am not sure whether I can open a comparison topic here. I decided open one anyway.

I searching for a CMS to suggest my friend. He approached me for help as I have exposure to CMS as a user. I am not a coder. There are many WordPress vs Joomla! vs Drupal articles to read. I came to know about Composr CMS. But would love to know more. Is there any such comparison article for Composr?

Can the forum members help me out with the pros and cons for Composr compared with other biggie CMS products?

Thanks in advance.  

 

Wordpress is ideal for a simple site that consists of blog posts and pages. It's strength is that the simplicity facilitates:

1. Really beautiful content, as features don't get in the way of really nice graphics – e.g. really good images and use of white-space and typography. It's great for brand websites.
2. Availability of lots of themes, as themes don't have a whole lot that they need to style. This is related to the above. It's relatively easy to make a beautiful Wordpress theme and very easy for people to install it.
3. People without a lot of skill to setup and maintain a simple but attractive blog.

Some teams will push Wordpress beyond what is reasonable, and that is really messy, but it's understandable as they want to focus on one technology base for their clients.

Joomla is built to be extendable in a cleaner way than Wordpress. Its popularity has reduced though as Wordpress has got more sophisticated, it's been getting squeezed out I think. It's still very popular though and has many really sophisticated addons.

Drupal is a much more complicated system ideal for programmers who don't want to write their own CMS but expect to be doing a decent amount of custom coding. It's a good choice for higher budget sites with teams of well-paid coders.

Composr is probably most comparable to Joomla. However unlike those 3 we focus on having a lot of features available out-of-the-box and well-integrated. Composr is a great choice for people who can't afford to hire a Drupal development team, but don't just want a simple blog.

Because Composr has a lot of features, it does bake in more assumptions than Drupal does. The code is very terse so that performance is maintained, and so that we don't need 10 million lines and an incomprehensible architecture to implement all we need. If a team is building something really custom or complex they may prefer the cleanness of Drupal, requiring a lot more expertise (i.e. cost) but coming to a cleaner end point.

So to summarise…
Wordpress = Great for simple beautiful websites, often pushed beyond its limits
Joomla = Mostly squeezed out by Wordpress, but its cleaner API allows more sophisticated addons and it has many
Drupal = Complicated and expensive, but maintainable for complex custom projects in a way no other system is
Composr = Very broad functionality, very cost-effective so long as that functionality aligns well with your project

I've tried to be honest in my assessment. Any of these systems might be the right choice for any individual group, it really depends on their needs and their budget.

Personally I'm trying to encourage the promotion of all these Open Source CMSs as great tools depending on what you are needing, while also letting people know just how feature-packed and efficient Composr is compared to them.

Great write up Chris,

As an end user of composr I will tell you about about my goals and why I decided to go with composr.

I have been playing around with websites for a number of years, ranging from commerce to just fun. Here is my take on the before mentioned cms's, as I have used them before:

• Drupal - Very powerful, but also very difficult to build a functional website. This may be best suited for the power users who have scripting and theming knowledge. From my view Drupal is more of a cmf (content management framework) as apposed to a cms. Think of drupal as a wireframe building, but you have to build the house around it.
• Joomla - As Chris says, composr and joomla are very similar, however with the features of composr so nicely integrated you really do have everything you need, without relying on 3rd party scripts.
• Wordpress - Started as a Blog system, then identified itself as a cms. Heavily reliant on 3rd party work, for both the themes and the extras you may need to get you site to run the way you want. But it is pretty. Do be careful of the wordpress bloat though, installing too many modules causing your site to really slow down. For me wordpress was not suitable for a community.

Then there is composr. I think I have bounced back to comosr 3 times now. Now here to stay. It is feature rich, with well integrated addons straight out of the box. It is also very nice having support from both the community and the lead developer.

Composr is by far my cms of choice.

Thanks Chris and Paul.

I thought Drupal will be simple for beginners like me. Seems its not.  Drupal is favourite choice if there is a requirement for enterprise complex system.

I couldn't install and test Joomla in local environment using XAMPP. The configuration changes suggested in their support forum is not working.

I am successful in installing WordPress and Composr. I prefer to spend more time with Composr to understand the additional features comes by default.

noting beats compo / ocportal; great team,