Drupal vs Joomla! part 1

I've been using Joomla! quite extensively over the past few years, and at the moment have four websites built in Joomla! (version 1.5.11 at the time of writing):

Flies&Bikes (this site - uses the commercial blogging component MyBlog)

North Bucks Road Club- my bike club website

Northwood Wheelers - a long defunct cycling club

Team Grumpy - my long-standing 2-up team time trial partnership

So, with this experience, I've set out to try and put together a Drupal website, because at work, they use Drupal rather than Joomla!  So how do they compare?  Well, first up, it seems to me that the two CMS systems are intended to achieve pretty much the thing: a functional and sophisticated website.

The first problem I face is similar to that encountered when moving from, say, Windows to Linux: while the systems do similar things, the locations, structures, nomenclature etc differ.  And of course, being used to the Joomla! way of things will undoubtedly affect my learning curve.  So, on we go...as usual trying to pick things up as I go along.

I am installing Drupal on my Ubuntu 9.04 notebook, using lampp.  I have been instructed to ensure that the site I develop uses "clean URLs" - that is, to ensure mod_rewrite is functioning properly.  Well, that wasn't too difficult, as Drupal comes with links to pretty clear handbook pages.  Most of the pieces of the puzzle were already in place.

Next I tried downloading some templates themes.  This is pretty straightforward, the only glitch being that one of the templates had a very large "thumbnail" that interfered with the template theme navigation page.  Still, that was also easy to deal with.  Installing templates themes is easy in Drupal (as it is with Joomla!) - tweaking the temptheme willno doubt be as fiddly in Drupal as in Joomla!, but I'll cross that bridge later.

Now, the first real criticism of Drupal - why in heaven's name doesn't it come with a WSIWYG editor by default?  I couldn't even seem to get html tags to work, even when I tried enabling it.  The obvious thing to do is to install the appropriate module.  The approved module for my work is FCKeditor.  So off I go to download it.  Here, installation of modules seems to be a bit fiddlier that in Joomla! (where installation really involves telling the system where the zip files is and clicking install).  This may be connnected with some sophistication of Drupal that I've not so far noticed.  Still, there's a neat video in which Victor to shows me what to do.  Installing a pretty basic WSIWYG editor was considerably more fiddly than I am used to in Joomla!, but with Victor's help it seems to be working.

I have found a nice simple template theme to use.  I expect most Drupal templates themes in use correspond to the beginning or the end of the alphabet - there's a huge list of them in alphabetical order!  Anyway, ever onward...