Comparative Assessment

Transcription

1 Danny Hussey IS: 590 Web Development using CMS University of Tennessee School of Information Science Hamilton Parks Public Library Comparative Assessment Content Management Systems Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal Danny Hussey IS: 590 Web Development using CMS University of Tennessee School of Information Science

2 joomla. drupal. General Right: Image of Hamilton Park Public Library About the Project This comparative assessment report reviews three selected open source content management systems for the use of creating an afforadable and well constructed website for a rural public library in West Tennessee. This comparative assessment is based on the needs of the Hamilton Parks Public Library. The Institute of Museum and Library Services defines a rural library as a library which serves an immediate operation area of 25,000 or less people. Rural libraries sometimes feature common characteristics such as low income, low population, and geographic isolation (State of Small and Rural Libraries). The rural public library covered in this report is located in Trimble, Tennessee. The Hamilton Parks Public Library has a limited technical support staff to implement and manage an online website. Limiting factors include no website currently, very little social media, limited supporting staff, and limited funding. In this report, the selected organizational website was created at Hamiltonparkspubliclibrary.org. Websites were implemented in the various online open source content management systems and organization needs were taken into consideration. The most important programs, services, and tools were selected to be added to each of the test websites. The organization requested the site work across various user devices to ensure ease of access to a wide range of users. The website will serve as a marketing tool for the organization. In this assessment the broad categories of comparison include general user interaction, ease of installation, customization, functionalities, media handling, cost, initial learning curve, community, administration, interface and the skills needed to create a in each content management system. Specific categories of comparison include integration of social media, responsive web design, templates, embedded WYSIWYG, drag and drop features, and module manipulation. 2 joomla. drupal.

3 joomla. drupal. Requirements Right: Godaddy.com popular apps with auto-install features include Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal CMS Finding the Right CMS As noted previously, a major limiting factor of the organization is having very little support and technical staff. This means that the organization is seeking a website that can be operated by users with very little computer knowledge. This position is taken on the grounds that content is the most important aspect of the site. Enabling more organizational staff to participate in adding content to the website should increase the likelihood the site remains active. Apart from being easy to use, the organizational also needs to be able to publish content, create pages and posts, customize the appearance of the website, have social media integration via Facebook, implement a custom logo, and create a website menu. Usability of the performing maintenance staff for the website is the most important factor of selecting the proper open-source content management system for Hamilton Parks Public Library. WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal were the content management systems selected to be reviewed. These systems were selected because they are the most used open source online content management system solutions. Thousands of content management systems are on the market, each having their own strengths. Some are better suited for blogging, some are great for complicated projects which require frameworks, and some are better for multilingual websites. These examples of differences are important to consider when selection a content management system. With these details taken into consideration, WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal were selected because they have the largest supporting user community and provide their tools at zero cost to the user. Each of these three open source content management system will be evaluated on various broad and specific categories and relevance to the needs of the organization and the specified users. 3 joomla. drupal.

4 joomla. drupal. Cost Right: CMS Free Themes and Plugins Availability Survey Open Source Community Cost is an important factor in this comparison because the organization selected has limited funds for the website construction. WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal are all free to download and install. The availability of low-cost themes and plug-ins differentiates the three products. WordPress, with the largest community of developers, boasts the highest number of free and premium themes and plug-ins. Joomla has the second largest community of templates and plugins. Joomla also has several free plug-ins and themes available, but fewer high end and premium themes relevant to public libraries. Drupal had a limited amount of available free themes suitable for a public library in this analysis. 4 joomla. drupal.

5 joomla. drupal. Installation Right: Hamilton Parks Public Library Website created in Wordpress at Ease of Setup Below: Hamilton Parks Public Library mobile wordpress theme Several products and services offer auto installation features in online hosting solutions. In this case, the proprietary service provided by GoDaddy.com provided the auto installation feature utilized in this report. All three apps offer one click solutions for installation. When concerning auto installation features, all three content management systems weight equally in this category of comparison. Installing the open source content management system is a simple as adding popular apps and selecting install. The domain and directory for the installation to take place much must be selected. All three websites were auto installed in different directories under the domain. All three auto installation features required the entering of username and password and an accompanying address during the installation. In this category all three content management systems can be considered successful solutions to rule public libraries in that category of ease of installation if the hosting provider of the organization allows for one click installation. Manual installations were performed for evaluation purposes. The steps needed significantly increase the level of complexity in the process of website creation. This report will not assess the different dynamics of manual installation in the products due to the limited support staff at the organization. 5 joomla. drupal.

6 joomla. drupal. Usability Right: Website created in Joomla at On the Developer Side The usability portion of this assessment outlines the specific details involved with managing the organizational website from a developer standpoint. In this case, Wordpress leads the way as the most intuitive and easily accessible user interface control panel. The left sidebar menu includes all the major functionality of the website including posts, media, pages, appearance, plug-in, tools, and settings. In order of importance, each menu items include submenu categories which specify the different levels of control for each item. Post adds a subcategory of add new post, which is an important link in the content management system. The media link offers a submenu for the media library and adds new media. Pages incorporate a submenu to add new pages. The system is laid out conducive to adding new content. The intuitive layout of the developer side user interface encourages the user to add new content as adding new is an accessible menu item on the sidebar of the WordPress user interface on every page. Joomla attempts a similar layout of user interface by supplying the content menu and article manager in the upper left corner. Although the Joomla interface does allow for the easy addition of new content, the user interface is more difficult to navigate. Joomla offers posts and pages to be added easily but users more obscure terminology such as article manager to identify where posts as managed. Many of the terms identified in the menu are not as easily identified to the novice user. Above: Mobile theme in Joomla 6 joomla. drupal.

7 joomla. drupal. Usability Right: Website created in Drupal at On the Develper Side cont. Joomla supplies a strong visual editor within the article content and page content creation window. Much like WordPress, each new post and page window includes both visual editor and HTML editor. The visual editor in Joomla is smaller in size on the page and can be more difficult to work with due to size constraints on the screen. WordPress does a better job at this by offering a larger visual window tab which can also be increased to maximum window with. Both Joomla and Wordpress offer powerful visual editors which allow for bolding, italicizing, quoting, inserting hyperlinks, underlining, fonts, changing font sizes, shapes and altering alignments of content. Drupal does not include a visual editor within its basic core installation. In Drupal, this feature must be added manually. One of the weakest areas of Drupal in the usability category is having to manually install a full visual editor. The WYSIWYG tool must be uploaded to the website directory and the module selection must be enabled. To do this requires installing a new module in the modules tab. The term module is used in Drupal similar to extension used in Joomla and the word plug-in used in WordPress. To attain a visual editor in Drupal, a plug-in such as tiny MCE must be installed. The WYSIWYG tool files must be uploaded into the website directory and for the module to show up. Then the module must be configured under the operations button. TinyMCE was used for filtered HTML and CKeditor as used as the full HTML editor in this assessment. This section of the install is very tedious. Joomla and WordPress both offered powerful visual editors bundled within the content management system by default. These steps are difficult to complete in Drupal. WordPress has the most intuitive visual editor and Joomla a close second, but CKeditor and TinyMCE editor are both fair worse in comparison. This was one of the main concerns of working with the Drupal CMS. One of the goals of the Hamilton Park Public Library website is to be easy to manage due to the lack of time and technical abilities of library staff. 7 joomla. drupal.

8 joomla. drupal. Usability Right: Enabling visual editors in Drupal On the Develper Side cont. The level of complexity of installing the site, theme, and visual editors along with the general complexity of navigating the Drupal CMS exceeds the abilities of the average rural public librarian. This complexity produces negative feedback concerning the Drupal CMS. From a functional standpoint the system performed well at managing and adding the pages and media necessary to populate the website similar to the Joomla and WordPress website, but Drupal falls short due to requiring more work from the developer in setup. Above: Joomla WYSIWYG article editor on mobile 8 joomla. drupal.

9 joomla. drupal. Content Right: Drag and drop uploading featured in Wordpress Media Handling Ease of adding various media to the site is an important aspect regarding usability of the site. In this case, WordPress is the most advanced open source content management system because it allows for drag-and-drop of various media and file types. This is a powerful feature and helps to facilitate the requirements for this organization. It allows for easy instruction and training for the content developer. Instructing the librarian to simply drag-and-drop the files into the page is much less difficult to train for than selecting actual files manually or with URLs. PDFs, images, and documents can be simply drug and drop onto the media library and added to the website. Above: Wordpress media library 9 joomla. drupal.

10 joomla. drupal. Templates Right: Envato operates a group of eight online marketplaces that sell creative stock assets for web designers. The site shows 1,000 s more Wordpress themes than any other available CMS templates Viewing the Websites On the user side, all three CMS s weigh differently for different users. In this project, the WordPress website was able to be more developed due to the abundance of supporting information accompanying the selected website theme. Wordpress has a large community with an abundance of resources to help instruct a new user. This made the website easier to construct. A well-constructed website is easier to navigate. Pages appear to load quickly and the menu appears to function successfully in Wordpress. Both the WordPress and Joomla template sselected use media query to adapt their design elements to the device which is viewing them. All three content management systems offer what is called responsive templates. Finding available templates for each content management system came prove difficult considering the different sizes of the community groups which support the various content management systems. WordPress has tens of thousands of templates available to change the Above: Template.net featuring free themes for CMS look and feel of the website. Finding free and premium WordPress themes was easy. Joomla also provided several free themes in its core install along with other free and premium basic and responsive themes. Drupal was more difficult for finding templates. Many of the wellconstructed templates were not free. The ability to spend revenue on a template may not be a possibility for the organization, so the content management system with the most available professional templates is an important factor regarding selection. 10 joomla. drupal.

11 joomla. drupal. Editors Right: Image of Hamilton Park Public Library Wordpress Install showcasing the Divi theme Div WYSIWYG layout tool. WYSIWYG and Custom Layouts In this project the WordPress theme called Divi was used. It included a powerful WYSIWYG editor to align various components of the site. Joomla does this in a similar way with modules, but was significantly more difficult to work with. One of the goals of the website is to be easy to manage due to the lack of time and technical abilities of library staff. The level of complexity of installing the site, theme, and visual editors along with the general complexity of navigating the Drupal CMS exceeds the abilities of the average rural public librarian in this case. This leads to negative feedback concerning the Drupal CMS. From a functional standpoint the system performed well at managing and adding the pages and media necessary to populate the website similar to the Joomla and WordPress website. Drupal uses blocks to alter alignments of columns and layouts. Drupal was the least effective in regards to laying out custom blocks and custom layouts within a timely manner for a beginner or novice website manager. The interface is simply to difficult to work with in this application. Above: Using Drupal Blocks to create content on main page. 11 joomla. drupal.

12 joomla. drupal. Appearance Right: Changing theme appearance in Wordpress Customization The template or theme selected for each of the content management systems allow for various levels of customization. The quality of the theme or template selected often times decides how customizable the look of the actual site will be. If the user has the ability to change code and styles of the site manually than they won t be limited by this factor. In this application the librarians have limited knowledge of altering website coded so the quality of the template theme selected must support the ability to make significant changes to the look and feel of the website. WordPress offers an appearance window which has a settings and theme appearance submenu which allow for literally every aspect of the website to be altered. The header footer and body can be changed by altering the column layouts, the colors can be changed of every item, the fonts and media selected for each page can be altered, and the website can be manipulated to meet the needs of the developer. The Joomla template set up was much more complicated as several template styles required activation prior to functionality. The slideshow on the Joomla homepage required manual setup. Various images were selected for the main page slider along with menu slider URLs, and not until selecting the module manager and enabling it did the site operate correctly. Constructing the menu and position in Joomla also required manual setup. Creating modules was a very important part of the creation of the website. Setup for the homepage slider included selecting the slideshow animation in the advanced detailed options. Images were selected and uploaded and attached to the menu slider URL. Although difficult to setup, the Joomla template slideshow was a excellent addition to the Joomla library website. 12 joomla. drupal.

13 joomla. drupal. Appearance Right: Arranging menu items in Wordpress Creating Menus In Wordpress the menu manager allows you to manually lay out your menu just as you want it to appear or use the menu category or ID number to setup the menu order. Drupal menus are arranged in the content window under menu selection window and the item weight menu. This works well, but is more technical to work with. The Joomla template was advanced enough to allow customization and creation of menus and menu items, but was more difficult to set up when compared to the WordPress. Left: Menu items in Wordpress 13 joomla. drupal.

14 joomla. drupal. Integration Right: Implementing Javascript SDK into websites with Simple- Facebook plugin Social Media Integration Social media integration was an important category discussed with the organization. The organization required that Facebook.com be featured on the homepage of the website and preferably feed in content such as images to the homepage of the site. This is done so that one post can be made to the organization Facebook account and in doing so the post image will appear on the website automatically. This helps to guarantee the website is up-to-date with events and images if the website content manager is unavailable to add the particular events to the website directly. Several plug-ins are available to help implement the Facebook feed into the three created websites. For the WordPress installation, the Facebook widget JavaScript SDK was implemented into the website, in Joomla Simple Facebook plugin was used to add images to the homepage. In Drupal the website was linked directly to Facebook with a social badge in a custom module. For Wordpress, the social media button module was used to show icons to the social media points of the organization. A text module was used in center for the Facebook widget integration which was an important part of my design. Facebook is most often used by the organization and needed to be accessible in various points. In this section the Facebook Widget Plugin and JavaScript SDK provided at the Facebook Developers portal at Facebook.com allowed the creation of a Facebook widget and embed code along with embedding JavaScript into the home.php file. 14 joomla. drupal.

15 joomla. drupal. Selection Right: Homepage user interface created in Wordpress Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal For use in rural public libraries such as the Hamilton Parks Public Library, WordPress is the selected open source content management system for this organization. Joomla is the next selection for the required application, and Drupal last. The CMS Drupal offered ease in adding new content and working with menus and arrangement of content. Drupal is a powerful content management system for other applications, but not in this case. Drupal has the steepest learning curve of all the CMS s reviewed. Being able to deploy a public library website and train existing staff how to manage the website with the CMS is crucial in the success of this project. In this case, Drupal is far too complicated for this application. Joomla offered easy to use tools to create an organizational website and offered many advanced features to customize your website. The problems with Joomla include not having a large enough community and having fewer free templates. Wordpress s large user base is its major strength. A wealth of information about various plugins and themes allow WordPress users to access strong toolsets and create well developed websites. This report identifies WordPress as the best selection for the Hamilton Parks Public Library website. Left: Mobile view of Hamiltonparkspubliclibrary.org in Wordpress 15 joomla. drupal.