Drupal VS. Mambo 6
Multiple Sites with One Installation
Imagine if you could set up several sites with just one installation; all installed add-ons and themes would be instantly available for use in all these sites, and any security patches you need to apply (after all, all software has bugs, as we know all too well), need only be applied once.
And, to make it all even sweeter, imagine if you selectively share the configuration settings and databases tables between these sites so that, for instance, you could share user accounts between some sites, or maintain only one large content archive, selectively using and sharing articles between your sites. Wouldn’t this be great?
Guess what. Drupal does all of the above, and it works perfectly. It’s not too bad to set up, and once done, saves a bunch of time and effort.
We figured out a way to do most of the above in Mambo as well, since XE2 has some access to the relevant PHP variables before handing control over to Mambo’s core. The multi-site support in current beta versions of XE2 is buggy, but the concept should be sound. It would take a lot of work to bring it up to Drupal’s current level, though.
Fine-Grained Access Control
As far as access controls go, this is simply a no-contest. We all know how lacking Mambo’s access control scheme is; hopefully there will one day be an improvement to it.
Drupal allows us to define arbitary roles (for instance, “moderator”) for users, and assign permissions to these roles on a module-by-module basis (for example, one selection is “moderate comments”). It’s intuitive, very fine-grained and very flexible. There is even a module available that will automatically handle giving a user a new role after they’ve paid for a subscription with PayPal, as well as many other add-ons that allow true micromanagement of the website’s access control policies, should that be necessary.