Dutch Joomladagen / days

Today I was a guest speaker at the business day of the Dutch Joomla Days. While this might seem odd, the subject of these days is "building bridges". Building bridges towards other CMS-es, other databases, other communities and hence towards Drupal.

I give these kinds of "pro Drupal" talks almost a bi-weekly basis now, where often other CMS-es are present as well. Last week I did one at eduvision where 100+ people where impressed by Drupal. Most often, the "competition" is Joomla and Typo3, both rather popular in The Netherlands (and Germany). While I do think that Joomla is good (enough) for the SoHo market and the audience of Drupal is much broader (from enterprises to personal blogs) and deeper (from video towards for example a resume site), these CMS-es are often compared. So normally, I try to make clear why Drupal is so much better then Joomla; better user management, roles, hooks, CCK, views, workflow, tableless design, multi-site install and almost forgotten but still miles ahead of any other CMS; taxonomy. There are zillion of ways where Drupal is clearly the leader in the field, but leading is sometimes not the same as "fitting".

This time however, I tried not too bash Joomla to much but to start building bridges. We do have a lot of the same problems that we can work on together. For example, we both use the GPL and we both have to protect our assets. Be both have a legal body protecting the community and facilitating the community, in Drupal's case, the Drupal Association.

That is why I was interested in the talk of one other speaker; James Vasile. James works for the SFLC and he is on the board of OpenSourceMatters and helping as a legal counsel for the Drupal Association. Most of the other Board Members of the Association spoke to James on the Boston DrupalCon ut since I was not there, it was good to speak to James during Lunch.

We taled about his passion, RMS, his other Open source projects / customers, how the SFLC is financed and the GPL3 as well as some other things. It is good to say the face you have exchanged mails with and it is good to build a relation between the SFLC, Joomla and Drupal. Communications is all about building bridges.

Building bridges

I meet a lot of Joomla People. Slowly I am beginning to change my attitude. Sure I want them to get over to Drupal }:]. But there is much more to the picture. Look at this site http://www.alledia.com/
Absolutely great. The goal must be to coexist and to learn from each other. With Joomla and even the more Wordpress being so popular, they must be doing something right.

Interesting would be to cooperate with Joomla and Wordpress Developers on a RDF Standard that allows to easily migrate Content between the systems, with users, comments, as much as possible. Cause together we definitely rule the web.

There is no such thing as "winning". The only one that should win is the user because the web gets more open and easier to use and is an important asset in Democracizing the world. I get to this notion more and more often when I find myself over-evangelizing people about Drupal. We should not be over-religious. If Drupal is really better it will grow a lot anyway.

By eigentor (not verified) at Mon, 07/04/2008 - 1:52pm | reply