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WordPress vs. Joomla vs. Drupal
The new layout here was sparked by me realizing that I needed to do something to continue to combat comment spam and a desire to redesign this site aiming more around mobile app development that I have started. So I began a hunt for a way to still maintain this site, yet spend a little less time managing this site and more time working on mobile apps.
This is where WordPress comes in. I began taking a second look at my old Joomla site and what it would take to not only update it to the latest version of the core, but also make the site much simpler to maintain. I soon began looking for the best CMS solution that was the right mix of simplicity with flexibility.
WordPress quickly became the ideal simple CMS with amazing spam protection (courtesy of Akismet) and still flexible enough to allow me to design the site how I envision it.
To aid my choice in which CMS solution to use I spent way too much time looking at all the alternatives, but ultimately narrowed it back down to the major three open source CMS options: Joomla, Drupal, or WordPress. After much testing and playing around with these options ultimately I found them to be very similiar with minor differences.
The simplest way to compare them was with this handy infographic I found from DeviousMedia.com that easily compared the three major open source CMS solutions available on the market today.
This chart also includes Drupal, which was the other major CMS solution I was looking into but ultimately ended up with WordPress for simplicity, community support, and flexibility.
You say you looked at a bunch of other CMS products. What other CMS products did you look at and actually try out? Right now, this site is tiny enough to be suitable for Barebones CMS. It is true that the majority of CMS products out there just try to emulate WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal but Barebones is a completely different piece of software.
At the bottom of this page is a statement “38 queries in 0.33 seconds (15.16M)”. 38 database queries, 1/3 of a second of CPU time, and 15MB RAM per request is a lot for a little rinky-dink website like this one. Compare that to 0 database queries (there is no database) and 1MB RAM per non-cached request (rare) or less than 100KB RAM per cached request (more common) of the Barebones CMS. The author of barebones has some benchmarks that I was impressed with enough to try it out and I’ve personally found it to be super responsive compared to WordPress in the projects where I’ve used it. I haven’t used it very often because it isn’t a good fit for every website – no software is – but for a site like this one, it seems like it might be a better fit. I mean, how often are you really planning on posting to this blog? And if it isn’t going to be frequent enough, you might want to rethink the design.
I did try setting up a test site with the three major CMS options in this article, but had never heard of barebones CMS. Do you have any demo sites running this to get a feel of what it can do?