Question

I’m developing an e-commerce community website, and i’m not sure which cms to use.

Here are more specific details:

1. It has to be themable, as i’m not a designer, with plenty of high quality templates online. (WordPress, joomla and drupal are good examples of this).

2. It has to have a good e-commerce plugin. (I’m leaning towards virtuemart plugin for joomla)

3. It has to have a good forum plugin. (I’m leaning towards kunena plugin for joomla)

4. Very easy to use, with minimal coding, as my development partners are not not programmers (Its more of a hobby project). (WordPress is the king here no doubt, only some css editing required to adjust a template).

My current choice is joomla with virtue mart and kunena. I think it has a very good combination of functionality, ease of use and plenty of high quality themes.

Is there a better choice ?

Please mention pros and cons of your choice and the amount of coding required.

Answer 1

I had to make this decision once – and I chose Drupal.

My decision was influenced by the need for Internationalization in addition to what you listed
; however, a couple years later, and having used Joomla in mean time, I still think Drupal is the way to go. Here’s why:

1. Ubercart is a great open source e-commerce module and is widely used with solid group of forum goers. This is especially useful because there is more abstraction in E-Commerce plugins than plugins in general – so you may need help somewhere.

2. Drupal has a built in Forum system that is easy to use and fairly customizable. It isn’t as full featured as some, but there are 3rd party modules for that.

3. Drupal’s Administration: Maybe it’s because I have more experience in Drupal, but Joomla’s administration is just clunky. It lacks intuition and documentation.

4. Joomla is more Object Oriented – which makes some of the design harder to grasp if you’re not a programmer. To extend/change a Drupal Module is much easier.

5. I would say they are about equal in terms of Themes.