Alldrupalthemes.com did a performance comparision between Joomla 1.5 & Drupal 6.1. As the author of the post infers, the numbers collected may not mean much to the user in the "real world" and limitations in the test results should be noted. Nevertheless, numbers that compare Drupal and Joomla performance are always interesting.

The conclusions drawn from the results are:

1. Drupal is significantly faster than Joomla in all 4 setups
2. Drupal cuts down pageload time by ~74% when caching is enabled on the fresh install and ~86% with the more populated setup
3. Joomla cuts down pageload time by ~23% on the fresh install and ~20% on the more populated setup

These numbers are interesting and I bet the study pulls in a lot of visitors for All Drupal Themes. Not only are Drupal and Joomla users interested in these type of posts, but so are potential users shopping around the first time for a CMS. As always, you should judge a CMS by what it does for you and not what it does for others.

One of the neat things about managing a site like CMSReport.com is that discussion on a topic can happen when you least expected. This is exactly what happened in the comment section of a rather benign post regarding a Latin American University's use of the content management system, Joomla! I was thanked by Open Source Community's Amy Stephen, also a Joomla! user, for posting an excerpt from one of the Joomla! working group blogs. Instead of a "you're welcome" I decided to ask some questions that have been puzzling me about the Joomla! community for some time.

Instead of hiding that discussion, I've attached the comments so far in the conversation. I'd really like to continue the discussion further with other Joomla! users. I think this is a good discussion for anyone like me who is trying to get to know Joomla! and its community better. Before I continue, let me share with you two personal motives for why I want to strike a conversation about Joomla!

1. I'm considering using Joomla! for a project. While I've installed and played with Joomla! many times (mostly 1.0.x though recently 1.5), I've never actually used Joomla! for a live production site.
2. Converstations with Joomla! user now using Drupal. While attending a recent Drupal Meetup, I spent my time talking about Joomla! and SharePoint. There was a new Drupal user at the meeting who was frustrated with the short-comings of Joomla! and was beginning to migrate over to Drupal. However, he still spoke highly of Joomla! and its community. It was an interesting one-on-one converstation in that while he wanted to like Drupal, he didn't quite get Drupal. It struck me that while I have wanted to like Joomla!, I have never really understood Joomla!. I left that Drupal meetup wanting to know more about Joomla!

So there is there is my motive for wanting to have more discussion about Joomla! In a nutshell, I want to like Joomla!, I just don't quite get it. Let's continue the discussion we've already started and help more non-Joomla! users like me out.

"Whereas Vista has been a PR disaster, it is unlikely that its cousin
Server 2008 will meet the same fate. There are solid improvements over
the predecessor Server 2003, including IIS 7.0, granular installation,
improved terminal services, the Server Core, command-line control, and
changes to Active Directory. Hyper-V is nicely done, and although it is
nothing special in relation to competing products from VMWare and
others, its integration and neat tools will win users when it comes out
of beta."

Complete Story at Reg Developer

"One of my favourite clients (he let me ride his new motor bike)
created this comparison grid when they were deciding on a platform for
the future. They chose DNN of course. This is the list of CMS's they
investigated. AxCMS.net Cuyahoga DotNetNuke mojoPortal MOSS 2007 OXX
Publisher 3 Powerslave ECMS QuickerSite Rainbow redcms(c) Sitecore V5
Smartsite CMS TrioVis.CMS umbraco VWD-CMS
The table is very comprehensive and should serve you well when talking
to your clients."

Complete Story

I'm still in need to read this InfoWorld article in its entirety, but thought it was worth mentioning now.  InfoWorld's Mike Heck has written an article, Open source CMSes prove well worth the price, which reviews and compares five content management systems.  The five CMS under review are Alfresco, DotNetNuke, Drupal, Joomla, and Plone.

The good news is that all five CMS ranked Very Good or higher. However, Alfresco was the only CMS that ranked Excellent with a score of 9.2.  Plone 3.0 received the second highest ranking with a score of 8.6.  DotNetNuke and Joomla tied for third and fourth place with a score of 8.4 which put Drupal a fraction lower with a score of 8.3.  While none of these CMS ranked poorly, I'm sure the open source communities are bound to scrutinize over how the individual criteria were scored and ranked.

Steven Peck, associated with the Drupal project, wrote about an article he came across regarding a comparison of the vBulletin forum and Drupal's forum. The article is titled, Goodbye vBulletin, Part 1: Reasons to Switch. The author of the article writes:

The aim of this article is not to poke holes, or say ‘vBulletin sucks’, but to provide constructive criticism of a successful product, proving that vBulletin is not always the best choice. In places the article compares vBulletin to Drupal, this is the platform The Webmaster Forums will be switching to and represents many of the things vBulletin should—in our humble opinion—aspire to.

Mr. Peck's reaction to the article (and my emphasis in bold):

Now this was a interesting. A well written article on why one site is switching over to use Drupal's built in forum rather then continue to use vbulletin.

In other words, Peck and many of us that pay attention to how the forum applications stack up against CMS native forums don't see too many articles like this. It is rare to see someone using a standard forum application such as vBulletin, SMF, or phpBB switch over to Drupal primarily for its forum functionality.

Mike Gifford, Open Concept, commented here at CMS Report that his company had just posted a report they did for a client comparing three open source content management systems. His company needed to recommend to their client whether Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal would be a good replacement for their current CMS, Back-End (BE).

We've just done a report for one of our clients comparing Drupal, Joomla & Wordpress for (1) multilingual capabilities (also called internationalization or i18n); (2) end-user usability; and (3) developer usability.

As a national organization in Canada, being bilingual was a must. Check out our CMS comparison.

This is a good report and I'll let you read it on your own to find out which CMS they recommended the client utilize for their next CMS. I like the fact that the analysis compared criteria consistently and observed pros/cons in each of the Web applications.

Not long ago, Development Seed posted a fantastic comparison of multilingual handling between Drupal 5 and Drupal 6.

Many people who’ve heard the buzz about multilingual features making it into Drupal core have asked me if they should go ahead with their multilingual projects on Drupal 5 or push them back to wait for Drupal 6 to be released. Of course there are many factors to consider, but with multilingual websites there’s no doubt that two big factors are workflow and contributed modules.

Jose just pulled together an excellent comparison chart that should help make that decision easier. The chart below compares the multilingual support with Drupal 5 to Drupal 6.

One of the criticisms of many open source CMS is that they're not fully "international", especially for those languages that are written/read from right to left. Many projects, are quickly addressing the critics by placing significant focus on improving the multilingualism in their CMS. For example, not only will Drupal 6 (still under development) have improved multilingual support but so will Joomla 1.5 (nearing release candidate stage).