This is part one in a series where I discuss switching from Joomla to Drupal, my experiences after almost one year of intense Drupal development. For those who don't know, Joomla and Drupal are both open source content management systems. Joomla has its roots orginally from a system called Mambo and Drupal was created by Dries Buytaert.

Almost one year ago, I took on the task of developing my first Drupal site. Having primarily been a Joomla developer for the past 3 years, this felt like a daunting task as I have always heard that Drupal is hard to use and not user friendly.

To prepare for my new Drupal adventure, I purchased recommended Drupal books, as well as watching Drupal video screencasts from the likes of Mustard Seed Media, Drupal School, Learn By The Drop and Lullibot. After all, this would be akin to sailing or flying a plane without knowing any of the basics so for me education was of prime importance beforehand.

That’s not to say that once I was knee deep in developing this first Drupal site, I didn’t have issues or difficult problems to solve but in the end it was a whole new world of web development and eye opening at that. Fortunately for me, this first project was also an Acquia Drupal site. Acquia is a commercially supported version of Drupal so it made development straight forward and I was able to hit the ground running because of this. Using the “Acquia stack”, a pre built set of add-on modules really helped see the possibilities of what Drupal can do and inspired me to use a similar configuration in subsequent sites built with pure Drupal non-Acquia sites since then.

Switching from being primarily a Joomla dev to a Drupal dev has been an enlightening and uplifting experience. One year later, there seems to be no end to what can be done with Drupal and any new projects now seem to go the way of Drupal.

Have I given up on Joomla? Actually no, Joomla still serves a purpose and I still use it for some projects but any chance I get, I spec out Drupal.

It’s interesting to note that there are many things that Drupal does really well but every so often I run into a “gotcha” where I can honestly say that Joomla is better for that thing but this does not happen often.

In part two of this series, I’ll have a comparison chart to show who I think is the clear winner, Joomla or Drupal in areas such as installation, content construction, SEO, events, feeds, data handling, permissions, forms, forums, theming, blogging and more.