MODx, Joomla, or Drupal: Which CMS is Right for Your Business?

Updated March 31, 2009.

It's great question that has an easy answer: MODx. Theoretically, any CMS would be a good choice over conventional HTML, but having worked with many clients in these 3 CMSs, the one that works the best for everyone is MODx.

MODx

Use MODx for relatively smaller websites of say, 1-2000 pages, and when you absolutely, positively must have perfect SEF URLs to go along with SEO ready templating. 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 the easiest E-commerce enabled CMS. 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 think Drupal had the better ACL (access control level: who can do what), but MODx is easier and better control. You can create as many web user categories as you want.

Joomla!

Use Joomla when you want to frustrate yourself, clients and webmasters. Out of the box, Joomla works fine for basic websites that focus on plain old content. The biggest obstacle to Joomla is and always will be the Menu Builder. Master that and you master Joomla, but at the expense of SEF/SEO features. For some reason Joomla continues outputs its content in 100% wide tables. It's pointless and a big turn off.

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.

Drupal

I like Drupal for its other worldly approach to CMS. Drupal is a best fit for a large organization that produces complex content that needs to be viewed from different perspectives. But this is not rocketry; many Drupal webmasters and clients feel restricted by this CMS.

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.

E-commerce wise: Now that FoxyCart has come out, we cannot justify to our clients the time spent configuring E-commerce CMS to get them to look exactly like their existing site. Besides, that might be impossible because different CMSs use different templating and HTML. For example, many use tables for layout making replication impossible without spending several week hacking the core.

Summary

For any type of website, MODx is the answer. Learning it though isn't as easy as other CMSs, so it's best to get an experienced MODx Developer to set up a site to looks and feel like you want it to. Webmastering a MODx site is far more simpler than the other CMSs though.

If it's E-commerce you want, MODx allows you to get web standards compliant site up fast. The shopping cart sets up in minutes, and then the product(s) or services to sell are created with straight forward HTML. It's extremely flexible and a joy to put together.