Joomla and Drupal are not just blogging platforms anymore. Communities are springing up all over the place on the web, and platforms for creating them are not necessarily keeping pace. Two platforms that are making serious moves towards becoming social networking platforms in addition to content management systems are Drupal and Joomla.

Drupal is a powerful and secure open source platform with extensions and plug-ins for turning your blogging site into a social networking powerhouse. With modules for extended profiles, relationship linking, email management, instant messaging, and shopping carts it’s quite the full featured platform. Check out Drupal 6 Social Networking, by Michale Peacock, for more information and visit www.drupal.org.

Joomla is a highly customizeable and secure platform that has been gathering quite a developer following for several years. Their Community Builder extension is quite powerful, and has over 120 plug-ins for extending its functionality! Check out www.joomlapolis.com for more. Another powerful community builder extension is JomSocial. For more information go to www.jomsocial.com. Any kind of site can be built using the various modules and plug-ins.

For getting a website up and running quickly and easily, with a minimum of administrative tasks, these are two platforms that are really making the lives of content creators easier. Don’t just put up a site; make it social and foster interaction to make your users keep coming back.

And do it quite easaily with Drupal or Joomla.