I am a big fan of Joomla! – but I am beginning to find Drupal a more flexible and perhaps powerful CMS tool in the hands of a developer , who is smart enough not to consider building his own CMS software from scratch.
One such flexibility comes from the user permissions system in each of this software.
Users are people or machines with access privileges to areas of a website other than that made public and accessible to all.
In Joomla! (versions 1.x and 1.5.x) all users are predefined, titles/names, access privileges. The only flexibility allowed the developer or the website’s owner is the choice of which category of user to allocate who!
In Drupal the predefinition stops at the user titles/names, privileges are set by the developer to suit the clients’s needs and these in themselves are not set in stone. Owners can set privileges site wide and can hone down to individual components of the website allowing or disallowing access to.
In Joomla, once a user has access to modules and components, access cannot be restricted to any module or component
Drupal thus gives oweners of sites built with these software more ownership as to how their websites behave far and over what Joomla currently allows.
For Drupal, I hesitantly say, thumbs up!
