drupal what is it?

Posted January 15th, 2008 by Lucy

Hi,

I’ve been wondering what the difference is between Drupal and Moodle.  I’m familiar with Moodle and from my user’s perspective they seem to be similar.  I’ve looked up drupal on the web but not found anything that answers my question in simple terms.  

Any answers? 

Lucy 

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On January 15th, 2008 bdieu said:

Hi Lucy,

Both Drupal and Moodle are Web platforms. Both allow for collaboration, content management and networking. What makes them different, for one, is their DNA or the main idea behind when they were created. Another difference is their locus of control. Moodle, for instance , is very structured and relies mostly on forums while Drupal offers a more distributed participation through blogs. One is not better than the other - what matters is the nature of interaction you want to suppor and the affordances each platform can provide.

Some more discussion around the subject can be found on the Drupal forums.

On January 15th, 2008 joao said:

In simple terms, Drupal is a CMS (Content Management System) whereas Moodle is an LMS (Learning Management System). At first sight they may seem similar but that little change in the first word makes a lot of a difference. An LMS is designed to organize content that is aimed to be learned by someone. A CMS is a platform desiged to be whatever you want it to be. It can be either your blog or anything you wish. The possiblities are almost endless depending on your expertise and on the capabilities of the software.

Drupal is a CMS but there are others like Joomla.

Other examples of LMS are Blackboard and WebCT.

Joao 

On January 17th, 2008 Lucy said:

Thank you both for your answers, that’s cleared up my confusion.

By the way, do you have any idea why it might be that my school needed to have Joomla running as a basis for moodle? Is that normal? I’ve also heard of people running moodle on top of drupal.

Lucy

On January 17th, 2008 Rudolf said:

Moodle does not run "on top" of either Joomla or Drupal. All three of them are packages of PHP-scripts that run "on top" of an HTTP server such as Apache. All three of them can run side by side on the same server, however, and since their code is open-sourced, they can be modified to provide a degree of integration so that, for instance, you can access two or more of those systems with a single login.

Anyone who runs two or more such applications side by side is likely to have evaluated the packages and to have found that a single one of them does not provide all the functionality they want, so they just combined them.

Here on the SMiELT page, for example, we found that Drupal’s wiki functionality is somewhat lacking, and at one point we considered running something like MediaWiki alongside of Drupal, but eventually decided against it.

On January 17th, 2008 Lucy said:

Rudolf, Thanks so much, that horrid befuddled feeling has lifted at last!

Lucy