After working on the Pligg CMS and experimenting with the Drupal “Vote” modules I’m no longer torn between which management system is the best. What makes one better than the other? Well, Pligg looks, feels and acts much like digg.com so utilizing Pligg gives the developer a direct focus on the goals: a digg clone.

Drupal, however, has modules which handle thousands of unique designs and feature sets. With a few modules you can simulate that of “digg” (or pligg) with a little point and click integration. The difference, working Drupal to look like digg/pligg is a bit more effort; this may or may not be your goal.

What if your goal is to build a vote site that has the scheme of digg but you want to expand it or support it with other engineering efforts such as blogging, aggrigating news, RSS, e-commerce and more? Pligg won’t work in this manner.

What I’ve found is that Pligg’s strong points are for sites that want to adopt the digg concept. For instance: www.plugim.com a site dedicated to copying digg with a focus on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and not technology news. They do it well and it’s very simple. If you want to expand your site in the future you may want to think about using something like Drupal.

Other big features, based on my own experiences, between the two content management systems (CMS) supportability, security and stability. Drupal is solid, well tested, developers are very reactive to bugs and patches and security notifications are sent when issues are found (in core and sub-modules). This is important to me.

I’ve found pligg doesn’t really have the same level of development and stability as Drupal. Perhaps this is because Drupal is maintained by a very picky set of developers that choose what goes in and what doesn’t go into the Drupal core. In any case, the fact is, developing for Drupal takes me less time than fixing the issues in Pligg that managed to escape testing. I’ve been working with Drupal long enough now to jump into developing my own modules and features quickly.
The downside? Drupal requires learning, experience and clean PHP development. You don’t just install Drupal and start coding, however you can install Drupal (as a designer or non-programmer) and have a feature rich site in under an hour.

Which is better? For me, I’m leaning towards Drupal.