When tasked with maintaining multiple Joomla websites, in the past it was a lot of work to update, secure and backup all these sites. All that is now a thing of the past with Akeeba Backup Pro & Admin Tools Pro (www.akeebabackup.com) for Joomla.

Akeeba Backup Pro automates backing up your Joomla site files and database right within a graphical user interface within Joomla. It couldn't be easier and there are a lot of nice configuration options such as how long and how many backups to save, what file format, and where to store it. The Data processing engine allows you so store your backups in DropBox, Amazon, Rackspace, remote FTP and more. I opted to install the Lazy Scheduler plugin to have a backup run unattended with the day and frequency of my choosing, but you can also setup a more traditional CRON to schedule backups. Akeeba also can aid in restoring a site should the inevitable happen and you need to restore your site from a backup.

In the first part of this series, I covered what my experience has been so far during the past year that I have switched from being primarily a Joomla developer to a Drupal developer. In summary, the experience has been extremely positive and enlightening.  In fact there seems to be no end to Drupal and what can be done with it. With Drupal I feel like I am building a true web application, not just a web site which Joomla does.

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.

One of the first things I like to do after installing a new Joomla site is to activate search engine friendly (SEF) URLs.  SEF URLs are human readable addresses in your web browser for various web pages on a website.  Out of the box Joomla’s URLs have this basic format: