c5 vs drupal - why does c5 rock so hard?
by Franz
Ever since osCon08 we’ve been getting this question a lot. We even got it from the Drupal volunteers who essentially asked ‘with Drupal in the world, why would you even build another CMS?’ I think the answer is pretty obvious from just watching the screencast or playing with the demo on concrete5.org, but here’s some thoughts I’ve had with people via email recently:
We are thinking of using Drupal as a basis for a new portal/application server website and became aware of Concrete5.
I would be interested in a brief chat with someone regarding your views of the pros and cons of the two applications, and about some custom work and support for our projects if we decide to base it on Concrete5.
Frz:–
I think c5 is better than Drupal for any number of reasons:
1) It was a successful commercial product for years, so we were paid to throw bad ideas out. Most projects that are open source from the get go have to worry as much about politics as programming. We had the leisure of being paid to make mistakes and fix them for 5 years before giving the core framework away.
2) It actually does what you’d expect out of the box. Look we don’t have thousands of developers working with it yet (I think?) but what’s in c5 actually works well, it all looks and behaves as one, and it’s going to let you solve 90% of the problems you’re likely to run into building the average website. You don’t have to be an expert in which module breaks which other modules in order to get a site built.
3) It’s just as flexible and stable (arguably a good deal more so - but I’m not a Drupal expert and am obviously biased). I can say from my experiences and everything we’ve been hearing from the community it’s a good deal easier and more enjoyable for the end site owner to use. That means a lot when you’re waiting for a check - we know.
–
I’m sure there are a good many more reasons why so many people and shops are taking their Drupal powered sites and rebuilding them in c5, we’d love to hear them here. Is it just the UI, or is the development environment appealing as well? Is it the page types/themes architecture or just that permissions are bundled and you don’t have to deal with thousands of competing modules? Is it our massively complete and impressive developer documentation? <giggles>
We know a lot of people already prefer c5, reach out and tell us what we’ve done right and what we still need to work on. .. oh, and what you hate about Drupal, so we don’t end up making the same mistakes as this grows.
So how do those three points compare to Drupal?
Ulmas
1 Sep 08 at 8:13 am
Uhh, well I thought that was pretty obvious, and like I said, I’m no Drupal expert so by all means tell me where I got it wrong, but here’s the flip side to the above points…
1) Drupal has always been open source and the core was written by one guy and released to the world as a first step. That makes it a bit hard to come back later and say “gee i was wrong in this fundamental approach and all these add-ons you’ve been building are now trash because of a new core update”.. not impossible, just hard.
2) I look at the Drupal module library, I see thousands of modules often covering things as basic as permissions, with no meaningful way to separate the best from the rest. I also believe that Acquia’s business model (the VC funded sister company to Drupal) is to basically package sets of these modules up into builds that actually work. I tend to think it’s a bad sign if you’ve built a framework where one add-on destroys another. Why must I be an expert at everything in the Drupal community to use anything? Not to be too blunt about it, but the business model is cleaning up the mess that the open source project created, no?
3) The editing interface, (that i’ve seen) is a bunch of forms in an admin backend. They’ve recently added “some ajax” so you don’t have to hit submit to change stuff as much. Regardless, when I ask a Drupal developer “how do I edit this page” I am taken to a huge admin dashboard with a lot of overlapping and confusing names and some long forms. At osCon we were chatting with Drupal developers who were saying “oh yes, first thing I do when I’m getting ready to deliver a site to a client is go through the admin dashboard and turn a bunch of stuff off.” That’s not a good sign, is it?
I hear tale that there is a add-on with the latest version of Drupal that gives you a tool bar you can use to edit your site as you navigate - but that strikes me as an afterthought at best.
Listen, I don’t mean to disparage the efforts and energy that have gone into Drupal, clearly it has been one of the best solutions available for quite some time. It’s certainly better than PostNuke. I’m also no expert in Drupal development and I did a lot of the architecture and financing of c5, so clearly I’m the absolute worst person to get a non-biased answer out of…
It just strikes me that Drupal represents the best of the second generation of content management solutions. In the 90’s we had huge systems like StoryServer and web versioning like TeamSite. Almost all small or mid-sized solutions were built from scratch with the idea that some smart production people would be using them. In the early 2000’s we had a second generation of solutions come out. SlashDot popularized the “news portal” architecture and next thing you know we had PhpNuke, Slash Code, Mambo, DotNetNuke, any number of portal in a box type solutions that an independent could use to build a site. This second generation benefited from the fact that the site actually did something out of the box, making a it a good deal easier to wrap your mind around than having some Java framework that took a week to correctly install and displayed a white page. Unfortunately it also meant that development often consisted of turning things off as much as building stuff out. I remember building sites with Mambo where we literally said “gee should we use Topics or Sections to handle these pages? Does it matter?” that’s not good. Kinda like buying a car with the hope of stripping it down to a skateboard. I think blogs fit into this second generation of CMS as well. Hacking wordpress templates to make a corporate site instead of a blog is a waste of time and talent.
I think there’s now a third generation of CMS to which c5 belongs. To me, the key is the end site has to be easy for any office worker to edit with no training. Yes, there will be times where the average joe’s inability to build a table in HTML is going to slow them down. The same is true for the more advanced features like Mail Merge in Word. That doesn’t mean the basic editing interface can’t be intuitive however. There’s also a huge push to deliver meaningful frameworks that make it easy for developers to quickly build custom solutions without having to hack at the core, or drape the site in so many add-ons that it can’t be updated later. My belief is that c5 does both of these very well, resulting in sites that are easy for developers to work with and can be run by just about anyone with some computing experience.
Anyone more experienced than I with Drupal have some input here?
Franz
2 Sep 08 at 9:49 am
Yep, me.
I’ve been using Drupal for a while.
Okay, I admit it I love to test CMSs. And I’ve got my favourites. I hate Joomla, but it is good for a portal of any kind and I use it quite often. For smaller websites, I prefer CMS Made Simple - doesn’t have tons of modules, but has good ones and it’s kinda easy to play around with. Drupal is somewhere in the middle. You can make it a bug portal or turn it into a tiny personal website, often mistaken with WordPress or some blog system.
I can review many, many content management systems, but that’s not what I wanna do now.
In fact, I’ve been using Concrete5 for like 5 hours and I’m already in love with it. It’s so… simple, yet flexible. Small, but powerful. I’ve never seen such a huge flexibility ordered in such a good way. It’s so intuitive. Okay, you’ll have to work on the file structure a little bit, I had a little trouble finding my way around, but that’s not a big deal.
I think Concrete5 and SilverStripe are going to be a good competition to every single CMS out there.
But I’m just an end-user. I win from competition between you guys
Razor
11 Sep 08 at 6:22 pm
Tearing down Drupal misses the point entirely. I’m running a drupal site now and I think you overstate some of the complexity in content management with drupal.
Based on working with your demo site, the GUI is prettier for sure and that will sell the package to many clients for the same reason they chose buying a mac. It reinforces the appearance of prosperity and good taste. It’s a good engine for brochure-style sites and wordpress vanity sites, but adding pages is complicated in many ways that drupal is not. That will be good for some, bad for others.
If you want to be different, then do what drupal refuses to do and make connecting other DB-driven things like phorum, phplist easy-ish.
Another wish list item is a way to elegantly replace old sites static or otherwise. Functionally figure out all the current paths and build a tree with empty pages to fill in from there.
Another wish list item is having virtual robots.txt files. Odd, I know, but somethings shouldn’t be indexed and others should whenever the customer wants and there isn’t any way to do this in drupal.
There’s lots more opportunities to improve concrete than get negative about Drupal.
asphaltjesus
12 Sep 08 at 11:28 am
hey asphaltjesus:
I didn’t want this to become a rag on drupal parade, which I think is pretty clear from the original post. I recognize in my reply to the “well how does that compare” comment got a bit ranty - but I think its more generally ranty at the state of CMS than it is on drupal..
To speak to your points:
1) yes, drupal works fine, particularly for a technically savvy site owner like yourself. It’s way better than messing with html files. I think you might be under valuing the importance of a intuitive UI. Lets put our product aside. I’ve started half a dozen blogs with blogger and thought “this sucks”. I spent 30 minutes with wordpress and “got it”. I think it’s really easy for smart engineers to put aside ease of use and experience as “extra” or “for those people who need it”.. the reality is, if the tools are fun to play with, you experiment, you do more.. you engage.. if they’re big ass forms that just get the job done… all you ever do is get your job done and get out of there.
im not sure what we could do to make adding a page easier. You go where you want it to be, you add it. You can also add pages from the sitemap in the dashboard of c5, i think that’ll make building out a site a lot easier for ya…
I think drupal may have it right when it comes to integrating with other apps. Building a message board is easier than making two systems speak to each other well. Since our competitive advantage is ease of use, I don’t think it’d be wise to just stick phpBB in there and share user databases. It’s not okay to have to tell a site owner “well to edit this page you go here, to edit that post you follow this completely different UI over here”… well at least its not okay with me… if drupal has the same philosophy on that, I applaud them.
I like the idea of a site import, but i think that’s a tricky one to get right. I’m thinking you may be on to it with do a basic tree buildout but let the content move by hand.. One day we might figure out a way to migrate a wordpress blog..
.. the thing is you don’t want to give up the opportunity to use the new tools correctly just to make it easy to say its “using c5″.. It’s gotta use templates right, have a good block structure… etc.. I think migrating static sites is gonna be a nightmare..
robots.txt files is interesting, we’re also doing a sitemap.xml file generator as part of some client work that should be in new builds..
no desire to get any more negative than we need to in order to spark discussion.. thanks for the comment!
-frz
Franz
12 Sep 08 at 1:43 pm
having stumbled across C5 reading the sf.net project of the month it is a damb shame to come across an instant pissing match between C5 and Drupal. people going around comparing peckers is just deeply uncool. if yours is bigger just keep quite and let the facts speak for yourselfs and avoid launching an unsightly religious war of pure personal opinions. face facts, this whole page is just vacuous and poisonous.
Simon
9 Oct 08 at 9:37 pm
I need to set up a small website for my own open source project and don’t want to jump into that HTML/CSS/etc stuff again, so I did a lot of research on all the well known CMSs and finally decided to give drupal a try.. when I stumbled over c5 as the “Project of the Month” on sourceforge. Never heard of it before here in Germany, but it looked interesting and fascinated me when I tried your live demo..
I agree that it is not very wise to share user databases with phpBB and don’t like any other bridged solutions also for security reasons (on drupal and joomla! often declared as “alphas”), but at the same time I cannot make friends with the integrated forum of drupal - at least after I set up and tested a phpBB.
What I’d really like to see on c5, would be a block to show some infos/news from phpBB (and maybe some other forums, too) - e.g. “latest postings/topics on forum” with links. This could really be helpful and a reason for phpBB users to use c5 as the CMS of their choice and delivers some dynamic content for free. And I think it should not be a security risk (eventually adding an extra user to phpBB for c5?). Could that be worth considering ?
Kind regards,
sb
Sascha
12 Oct 08 at 5:28 am
Sascha,
Our forums app will be out before long.
You might do what you’re talking about above with the RSS block, that’s what we did on concrete5.org to pull in the latest posts from this blog.
Franz
12 Oct 08 at 4:46 pm
Simon,
It’s a question we get a lot, so it deserves a post on the blog. I think you may have misread the tone of humor in the title, no one is trying to get into a pissing match.
You can’t really compare apps without describing them, and at several points I acknowledge aspects to Drupal’s approach that strike me as right. I take exception that this post is “vacuous and poisonous,” I think I make several valid points about approach and strategy, and sadly I still wait for a Drupal expert to come tell me where I’m wrong.
We did have a Drupal voulunteer at oscon ask us why we’d even bother to make a CMS since Drupal existed. With that kinda mindset, I think we’re allowed to be a little snarky in our blog titles.. But like I said above, perhaps the sarcasm got lost in translation.
The simple fact of the matter is it’s gotta be harder to be a hugely used app with thousands of installs to support than it is to be the underdog. So it’s pretty easy for me to poke holes in something I didn’t make. Drupal works fine, plenty of people love it.
Franz
12 Oct 08 at 5:01 pm
I’ve installed C5 and played a little with it. I’m impressed, shocked, I fell in love. But… localization?…. pages translation? Building a multi-language site?…. Guys, that features are *really* needed. No kidding. Anyway, you rock.
mityok
25 Oct 08 at 6:48 pm
yeah we know! we know!
localization for the interface is coming out THIS WEEK. building a multi-lingual site is possible today, but I agree bears more thought in the big picture.
Franz
27 Oct 08 at 10:50 pm
I’ve looked at a lot of CMS applications (and when I say a lot I really mean *a lot*) and actually used between one or two dozen of them. Everytime I find a new CMS I like, I get really exited and use it on one of my sites, but usually my enthousiasm quickly dies down after using the product for a few weeks (yes, I’ve tried Drupal as well; it’s nice, but it’s not for me). Now I’ve found C5. I instantly liked it. Hopefully my quest to find ‘my’ CMS has come to an end!
Lost
1 Nov 08 at 5:43 am
Pardon me, but where can I download the version with localization support?
SF downloads page contains only 5.0.0_2 release.
mityok
7 Nov 08 at 11:24 am