Congratulations to Drupal which won both of Packt Publishing Open Source CMS awards this year. Drupal also won last year and Joomla won in 2006. What interested me wasn’t really the decison but the explanation:
"Comments were also reserved for Drupal’s strong social applications capabilities and how it integrates seamlessly with content management."
Much as I love Joomla, I agree. Its true to say that Drupal currently offers more social networking power than Joomla. It has high-quality groups, profile, tagging and ACL features. Its also being used for higher-profile social networking projects, as Acquia show here:
Can the Joomla Community Catch Up?
I’m glad you asked. Yes, it can. Here are the two most likely projects to suceeed:
Open Source: Community Builder and GroupJive
GroupJive is one of those promising projects that never managed to get around the Open Source Wall. It faded away and has been revived several times. Now its finally joined forces with perhaps the most successful of all Joomla extensions: Community Builder. With Uddeim (Joomla’s best private messaging system) already working closely with CB, lets hope the projects can grow together into something more powerful than they are separately.
Commercial: Azrul’s JomSocial
Now this is bad (meaning good, not bad meaning bad). Azrul has developed two good extensions in Jomcomment and MyBlog, but his latest project looks like its going to be an enormous leap forward. JomSocial offers groups, profile, private messaging, tagging and a whole lot more. Its commercial, but its one of the most exciting projects I’ve seen in months. Its hugely ambitious but he has a demo site that you can play with and its working well. Head over and test with it now. You’ll be impressed.