Plone and Drupal at m.odul.us

I came across a long posting comparing Drupal and Plone at m.odul.us dated 2 Sept. 2007. The author does a good job of examining key CMS components and features. He's clearly spent some time working with both systems, so he can speak with some authority. One sign that Matt is not blowing smoke is that he is knowledgeable about ArchGenXML, something many superficial reviewers miss. For me its one of the key tools that I rely on every week. Another good sign about this review is that community is rated highly. I find this aspect of open-source an often overlooked part of the picture.

The m.odul.us review has garnered a handful of comments, but it probably deserves more. For those who are looking at any CMS, not just Plone and Drupal, a read-through will give you a good idea of what a sensible evaluation must touch upon. Just to give you an idea of the breadth of Matt's piece, here are his headings:

• Easy Publication to the Web
• Flexible Information Architecture
• Extensibility
• PHP vs Python
• LAMP vs Zope
• Scale, Speed, and Deploying
• Hosting Requirements
• Security
• Community
• Contributed Add-ons
• Documentation and Community Support

In the end Matt's conclusions are sound and I share his opinion that you must tie your decision to your requirements.

Drupal is a community content management system, and it largely farms out other tasks (e.g., asset management, CRM, etc.) to other web apps, choosing instead to integrate with them. This is a reasonable stance; Drupal is a CMS, and it integrates into a larger world of Apache served web applications.

Plone, however, looks at a most web application problems as specific instances of content management. Thus, with Plone, is it not absurd to develop extensions to handle your asset management system or your email newsletters (complete with server). Plone is built on a powerful application server and it makes sense to leverage it and your data once you're used to programming for Plone.