CMS - Alfresco, Magnolia, Drupal and Joomla Comparison

Question

I am comparing Alfresco, Magnolia & Joomla especially specific to following features:

a.  Ease of Integration of user created templates.  
b.  JCR (JSR-170?) or CMIS compliance.   
c.  Scalability in architecture.   
d.  Mobile site deployment.   

I used cmsmatrix.org to compare features but I could not get some of the specific information related to above mentioned points.

Any insights based on your experience on working with one or more of the above CMS products will be helpful.

Thanks,
Krish.

Solution 1

While these four products are branded as CMS I don't think they are really comparable. Drupal and, for what I know, Joomla are web publishing CMS (or WCMS), they are designed to create web sites and manage their content. They are not designed as generic CMS, DMS or ECM. Alfresco, and probably Magnolia, are ECM/DMS designed to manage enterprise contents.

For instance, while manageable in Drupal (given enough effort and custom PHP code), complex multi-states multi-actor workflow for multilingual documents (PDF, Office, etc.) are probably easier to manage with Alfresco. And Alfresco is probably not suitable to manage web content with lightweight publishing workflow and user generated content.

Having the managed content published on a web site does not means it has to be managed by the same tools that the one used to manage the web site. For instance, using the Drupal CMIS module, you can bridge it with Alfresco (or any CMIS compliant ECM) to manage your enterprise content in the suitable tools but publish parts of it on a Drupal site.

Solution 2

Summarizing inputs I received here along with what I found in my search from various discussions so far (thanks @mongolito404 and bkraft).

For web content management features - Drupal / Joomla is recommended.

For Enterprise Content Management / Document Management features with minimal web publishing features - Alfresco / Magnolia is recommended.

For specific requirements the best of different tools can be used - Drupal to publish web content via CMIS support. Alfresco as solution for workflow & document management.

Alfresco already supports & continues to have CMIS in product roadmap (contributes to CMIS community).

Drupal is CMIS compliant (OOTB) with strong web content capability.

Leveraging best of both (Alfresco & Drupal) could also be one of the options depending on the requirement. Refer: http://www.optaros.com/blogs/drupal-alfresco-integration#

Another interesting option seems to be Liferay (v6+ specifically) with their CMIS integration capability: http://www.liferay.com/web/jonas.yuan/blog/-/blogs/integrating-alfresco-through-cmis-in-liferay

Thanks, Krish.

Solution 3

Can't speak for the others, but from Magnolia's perspective, ease of integration is certainly a core feature. It runs on the Java platform, so integration is a given from the platform side. In addition Magnolia has been rated the most flexible CMS on the market today by independent analyst Tony White of Ars Logica download his free report (always worth a read, and other reports are also available).

JCR: Magnolia is based on JCR, and was so since the first line of code CMIS: not implemented yet, but planned for Magnolia 5 to be shipped late this year Scalability: Magnolia's got it covered. See our case studies Mobile site deployment: again, comes naturally to Magnolia thanks to its architecture and rich out of the box functionality.

Regards - Boris

Solution 4

Update: CMIS is available as a community module since Magnolia v4.5

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Comments

[happyfeet]

Your insight to use Drupal CMIS module with Alfresco is interesting and was able to gather additional information in that aspect. This is one way I will definitely pursue to find more about. Thanks.