Cost of Drupal development in Thailand

This post does not address the COST of developing in Drupal vs. the cost of developing in Joomla, but focuses more on VALUE. Sadly, I think a lot of people purchasing web development services often miss this point and focus on price without looking at long-term value. It's a hard proposition to sell to somebody that does not understand web development--so good luck!

First off, Mambo is all but dead--the core developers took the code and moved over to Joomla and that's where the development is happening.

I have developed one site in Joomla. It's main advantage is a really slick admin interface and a lot of integration of third party modules (forums, shopping carts, etc.). Creating sites with Joomla is often done by some script-kiddie that just slaps together a mish-mash of modules and a pretty free theme and calls it a community site. The modules often share nothing more then the user-registration system and have their tables tucked into the same database--but other than that they are completely separate apps with their own theming system, their own code, etc.

So yeah, you can find cheap developers because they don't have to be very experienced to create something that loks pretty but is going ot be difficult to maintain. (If you ever intend to upgrade to a newer version of Joomla or the 3rd party app that is integrated, things break as there is often no consideration made by the people that made the integrated app as to whether the code changes break the "bridge" to Joomla).

I feel strongly that Drupal is light years ahead of Joomla. Drupal is a thinking-mans CMS. It's powerful, it's secure, it's extensible , it's tightly integrated between the core and the modules and it's... it's... well, it's just better! You need to know more to develop a Drupal website--but then again it means you have people that really know the system they are developing on building a site for you--and that's always a good thing. But those people are not as cheap.

And of course, you get what you pay for. Buy a cheap website upfront and you pay later on for maintenance, upgrades, and all the things that the cheap develpoer didn't know how to plan for.

Here are some points you can use to "sell" the redesign team on Drupal (not like you don't know this stuff, but I am throwing it out there anyway):

• Security: Drupal offers a more sophisticated access control system with fine granularity; you can control who accesses what in great detail, Joomla does not. Security seems like it's a concern for your school. If Joomla is cheap but cannot protect the student data, it's no value at all.
• Much of Joomla's power relies a lot on 3rd party modules. The problem with 3rd party modules is that the more 3rd party modules you have, the more places for security loop holes to crop up and patching and re-patching a Joomla system will require new versions of bridges--which sometimes are not maintained at light speed--so even if a patch is available for the 3rd party app you might have to wait for the bridge to be patched before you can upgrade leaving you with a security flaw that has been advertised to the world.
• Those "cheap" Joomla developers are often script kiddies that just slap together modules and know nothing about the code they are using. They know nothing about what is happening under the hood--they might not even be able to upgrade the modules properly to new versions leaving you with a spaghetti-bowl of modules that are full of security holes.
• Joomla allows content to be organized two levels deep: by Category and by Section--that's it. It's hard coded that way and if your information architecture does not match their way of doing things--well, you have to change your information architecture.
• Slow release cycle. When I did the Joomla site, they were launching the 1.5 beta 1 version of Joomla (about the same time that Drupal launched 5.0 beta). Joomla is now at 1.5 RC3 and Drupal is almost ready to launch v6.0. (Joomla 1.5 is, admittedly, a large upgrade for Joomla, but still, it's a long time in coming.)
• Joomla v1.5 does not offer an upgrade path from the 1.0.x version. You need to redo the site and re-import databases. Ugly. And probably beyond the skill set of a lot of script-kiddie Joomla developers.
• Joomla is just terrible for SEO. (Maybe not a concern for a school website.) SEO is an afterthought and simple things like friendly URLs are a cumbersome 3rd party add-on that is not well supported.

For more about Joomla vs. Drupal, see http://forum.joomla.org/index.php?topic=4364.msg35306 (which is on the Joomla web forum and really kinda disses Joomla), http://www.alledia.com/blog/general-cms-issues/joomla-and-drupal-%11-whi... and http://www.communicopia.net/blog/joomla-versus-drupal.

If they want cheap--yes, use Joomla. If they want a website that does what they want it to do and is maintainable, extensible and secure--use Drupal. Drupal offers long-term value. Joomla makes crappy eye-candy cheap and fast.

Maybe the best sales tactic is to tell them they are saving a lot of money using Drupal. After all, a $US 5,000,000 CMS for free makes it easy to justify spending a little more on a good developer.

John F.X. Berns

Travel Guide.com
Travel Photographer.com

Maybe the best way to get some real numbers from Drupal developers here is to post detailed project specs. Without detailed specs, people will just be guessing--and those numbers will mean nothing.

Do you have detailed specs yet--or at least a list of key features?

John F.X. Berns

Travel Guide.com
Travel Photographer.com

Actually our project specs are pretty simple:

1. We need to have our site be secure with multiple levels of user permissions.
2. We need to have the cost of development not be prohibitive as we are a school.
3. We want teacher blogs, user forums, faq's, and page specific themes.
4. We'd like relatively easy administration of the site, and updating the site possible for non-programmers.
5. It is crucial that we have a robust mature translation solution. We serve 5 major nationalities in the school, all of which will want the site content and interface translatable.
6. If we have a problem with the site, we need to be able to find support easily and cheaply.
7. We want clear easy to read urls that help search engines find our site (as part of marketing).
8. We need to have a clear way to track site visits and log statistics.

I have done some research, and it seems feasible to produce this site using either Joomla or Drupal, but as you say, the Joomla modules will all cost extra money (whereas the Drupal versions are free) and can contain their own security holes. Also there is some indication that some of these features we want are difficult to implement in Joomla.

Now I am certain that if I had sufficient time, I could build this site and maintain it using Drupal. But what happens when I leave the school? Where will the school turn to for support in Thailand? These are the questions that I have to be able to answer when we have our discussions with our web design team.

My person preference is to go with Drupal, which I think everyone on my web design team is clear with. I am very familiar with the interface in Drupal (although I have used Joomla to build a very simple website one time, and it is pretty easy to use) so that's part of the reason for my preference.

What I was hoping was to be able to attach a dollar amount to the cost of development in Thailand using Drupal. That way it makes it easier to give the people on my team the tools with which to make their decision.

Dave