MODx, Joomla, or Drupal: Which CMS is Right for Your Business?
It's great question that has no easy answer. Theoretically, any CMS would be a good choice over conventional HTML. In a nutshell, here are our answers. We'll revise these as we get comments.
MODx
Use MODx for relatively smaller websites of say, 1-200 pages, and when you absolutely, positively must have perfect SEF URLs. MODx is an search engine powerhouse. You can customize the meta tags and keywords on every page with ease. Meristem switched over to MODx for this reason alone.
MODx is a now the easiest eCommerce enabled CMS out there. We're talking extremely easy. MODx integrates with FoxyCart (see foxycart.com). For web developer types it requires us to shift our thinking a little bit. We're used to complexity. FoxyCart returns us to our HTML roots: The best way to develop a foxycart page is the use of HTML forms. The use of forms allows one to easily create a button that contains everything one needs to buy your products.
Community: I see a striking similarity between MODx and Drupal. I think Drupal has the better ACL (access control level: who can do what), but MODx has the easier and better control: users are either Managers (who also have web user privileges) or Web Users. You can create as many web user categories as you want. Then when you create your web pages, you assign them to the web user category. That is to say: you can create a page that is viewable to all, or just certain groups.
Joomla!
Use Joomla when you need to have a slightly more sophisticated back end administration of a very large number of web pages, say 50-10,000; and when you have someone full-time managing your website. You get decent URLs and SEF features in exchange for a large number of pages. That's to say: use Joomla! if you get large traffic nad have a full-time webmaster who can administrate the back end.
eCommerce wise, it's currently not as strong as FoxyCart, but I suspect that to change as they have plans to integrate it into Joomla.
Community: the jury is out on this as the Joomla! community features have always been dependent on an extension that took a long time to learn and to configure. That might change with the recent release of Joomla 1.5 (which is a complete, overdue overhaul of the code base). For now you're pretty much limited to 3 user levels and 4 administrative levels and it's not clear hwat each one can or cannot do because it's not configurable.
Drupal
I like Drupal for its otherwordly approach to CMS. Drupal is a best fit for a large organization that produces content that needs to be viewed from different perspectives, and for generating a powerful online community.
Drupal seems to be used primarily for creating content that can be viewed from different perspectives and different types of users (community). For example, suppose your topic is flowers. You might be interested in growing your own (horticulture), or you might be looking for information about what flowers are native to what region (botanical). Or you might want to know what kind of flowers are available to buy (commercial). Your is best served by having three categories it can belong to. Drupal allows that level of complexity.
eCommerce-wise, it's hard to tell. We have struggled with Druapl eCommerce sites. Now that FoxyCart has come out, we cannot justify to our clients the time spent configuring eCommerce programs. You don't know this unless you're a web developer: Some of those programs can take hours, and hours, and hours to configure to the clients satisfaction. Most web devs are not going to charge you all of that time because most small business, and even large companies don't have the budget to pay for this kind of time.
Summary
If it's eCommerce you want, MODx allows you to get web standards compliant site up fast. If you need more complexity or have a much larger website planned, Joomla! and Drupal are solid choices.
