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.

Answer 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.