Wordpress vs Drupal - The Saga Continues
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I get a lot of emails and comments about my "WordPress is better than Drupal" talks, presentations, videos, slide-shares, and rants. But believe it or not, I'm on Drupal's side! This post started out as a reply to one of those emails, but I feel it would be better to say this once to the world, rather than over and over again privately, in email.
The biggest difference between WordPress and Drupal, is that Drupal is a Content Management System, and WordPress is a blog engine. This means Drupal assumes that there will be many different kinds of users with various levels of control who are administering a website, and WordPress assumes there will be only one. This should be the deciding factor when choosing between WordPress and Drupal (or moving from one platform to the other).
Yes, WordPress is trying to move into the CMS space, because most people who started off as simply bloggers have realized that they need more than just a blog, but they love WordPress already - so why try something new? But the truth is, the more you try to do with a WordPress site, the more brittle it gets. The permission system is not very sophisticated, it doesn't scale very well, the theme system is a huge security hole, all content entered is treated in exactly the same way, database abstraction is weak, etc, etc, etc.
Similarly, Drupal would be complete overkill if all you wanted was a blog. The user 1 account will see way too many options on every page making the user interface overwhelming. Additional modules would need to be installed and configured to get exactly the same functionality as a WordPress blog, and considerable time would need to go into set up and configuration. And don't even get me started on looks - there are a limited number of beautiful themes for Drupal, most of which are already being used on thousands of other sites.
A lot of my original concerns about the Drupal content creation interface have already been addressed by the community - please keep in mind that my "WordPress vs Drupal" talks show a demonstration of Drupal 6. Drupal 7 is different! Drupal 7 does a lot more out of the box, and also provides a "Standard" profile option during installation which will cut hours off configuration at the begining of a project.
There is, however, still no one place to go to find out "what Drupal does" or why anyone should choose it over WordPress - or any other software solution for that matter! This is a problem that still needs to be rectified, and we do have a team of hard-working people redesigning the Drupal.org website, trying to solve problems like this one. The reason there is no clear answer to this question, though, is because the answer will be different for every project. With WordPress, there is only one or two ways to solve a given problem. With Drupal, there could be an infinite number of possibilities, and thus, an infinite number of ways to answer the "why choose Drupal" question.
The reason for this is buried in the roots of each project.
There is a single direction of development on blogging software, with the community deciding what should go into the "best blogging platform" and that is now exemplified by what you get with WordPress. What makes a "blog" valuable is going to be the same - or at least very similar - for every blog, so it's much easier to create the perfect software solution for a single use-case.
Drupal, on the other hand, does everything: blogs, forums, e-commerce, CRM, intranets, social networks, news aggregators, wikis, photo galleries, restaurant review sites, etc, etc, etc. If you can tell me what kind of website you want to build and what features you'd like to see on it, then I can tell you why you should choose Drupal over WordPress. What makes a "website" valuable is not what it does that's exactly the same as every other website, but what makes it different. Drupal is really good at all the little things that would make one project stand out from the rest - but because these differences are important, time needs to be spent making each Drupal site different from all the rest.
This is also why there is a shortage of beautiful Drupal themes. The kinds of companies and organizations that invest in the development of a great Drupal theme realize that there is value in having a unique Brand. Blogs, on the other hand, don't rely so heavily on branding for their success. It's about the blog content or the person writing the blog, not their logo or color choice that sticks in the minds of the visitors.
In short, WordPress and Drupal are still two very different beasts. We do have some things in common, and I still believe that our two communities have a lot to learn from each other. Fortunately this is the world of open source. The code is out there. All we have to do is look!
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Jennifer,
Great points. I have always heard that we don't have enough pretty themes, so I personally set out to change that and increase the amount of beautiful contrib Drupal themes. I have done some research and the best place to find GPL v2+ themes for Drupal.org is on Wordpress.org. I have already converted 4 themes which I have contributed on Drupal.org. I have plans for 4 more :)
There is also a Drupal distribution out there called Brainstormblogger, which looks to emulate a blog engine like Wordpress, but using Drupal out of the box :) The beauty about Drupal distributions is that we can make specific use case products for lots of different types of websites. I think we are covering all the bases pretty well!
Peace,
Jason
Maybe we'll get to a day where Wordpress is essentially just a Drupal installation profile, maybe it's even the Snowman installation profile.
Great writeup. I have personally used to use Drupal for my client sites, but have now migrated most all of them WordPress. WordPress, right now, simply has Drupal beat when it comes to usability, especially for my more non-technical clients.
Now, most of the sites that I build are small company sites that have pages / news / eCommerce, so WordPress works just fine. On several of the larger projects I've attempted, I've used Drupal when I need the power of CCK, Views, CiviCRM, etc. But, if I can, I always use WordPress as it is easiest on my clients.
I would LOVE to see Drupal become as usable as WordPress (as it is), as I would love to see WordPress move beyond its blogging roots (as it is).
Maybe in the future, all the CMSs will converge into one optimal CMS. Who knows? :)
you have very good point of view about differences and real judgment in Drupal
and my point is>>> rtl theme` s in Drupal is so weak
you nailed it Jen,
What an article is to CCK, it holds roughly what Wordpress is to Drupal. It's pretty simple to build a WP distribution for Drupal with exactly same widgets etc included if one wanted to. But try to do it vice versa... a Drupal profile within Wordpress?
Drupal is going to adopt more and more object oriented programming principles and things are going to be very interesting in the future. Imagine it is now possible for people to build smart applications on top of Drupal (e.g basecamp, online hotel reservation, managing news and so on)
Am I the only one that finds that completely irrelevant?
I do WordPress and Drupal dev and management at the same time, but putting WordPress into the blogging box only cannot be serious in any way. And I will explain 'why' in 2 words only: Backend usability.
Website is created not for the developer, but for the client/user. The admin panel of Drupal is a mess. Even the one improved admin horizontal sidebar in Drupal 7 is useless. We have done many tests around clients with no experience in either WordPress and Drupal and so far no one has had any troubles with the WP usability unlike the Drupal system which is sometimes complicated even for developers. Please consider that while creating a product - the final result corresponds to the user requirements, but it is non-intuitive for maintenance by the real website owner. Yeah, I do prefer creating views and CCKs and managing blocks, but that's just the developer's point of view.
Themes as well. No themes for Drupal? What the f...? The only way to create something is using the Zen framework theme and start it all over (long way to improvement and development there). No fancy features except changing the color scheme with the default theme. And one more thing - complete incompatibility between themes written for different versions? Seriously?
IMO the only critical lack of functionality in WordPress is the lack of Views and CCK (Fields) modules by Drupal. Yeah, it takes more time to define some custom types in your WP project and list them later (although you could extend the Post type and use the power of title, content, tagging/categories by default, imaging system from the media etc without a bunch of additional modules). The whole extensibility with tons of new tables and relationships is not meant to be used by a WP site, but you know what? It shouldn't be done with Drupal too, because highly customizable projects are usually supposed to be written from scratch or with framework. But that's another topic to be discussed when necessary.
In one of the flame threads on the subject I mentioned the following quote (quoting by memories, not 100% true): "Drupal is trying to reach some point of usability while WordPress started with a perfect one 5 years ago. However, WP designed some complex custom types to be written with piece of code when Drupal has the drag&drop of content creation for the past few versions." So yet again - WP is focused on usability and productivity, while Drupal is the heavy guns of the army. Don't forget that WP has way more plugins than Drupal modules, themes for WP works in most of the versions (unless specific framework stuff is used in the backend) and more - there are frameworks for theme development such as Genesis or Thematic which provide rich flexibility and functionality to modify your team, use sidebars anywhere in the site, separate different areas and logical structures of the WP install and more. The permission management is not that rich in WP too, although there are about 5 powerful WP plugins that allow role creation with allow/deny over every function or page in WP.
But the administrative interface can be changed in Drupal.
Personally, I'm not a fan of the toolbar at all, and thats the first thing I do on a Drupal 7 site, deactivate that, and activate either admin_menu (http://drupal.org/project/admin_menu) or admin (http://drupal.org/project/admin - generally the later, but thats personal preference - either will work though).
This makes the backend navigation much easier for the developer, which saves pain and time in the building process. For clients, however, each site will be different, so its tough to have one unifrom set up thats optimal. As the article addresses Wordpress is for one particular use case; Drupal is more generalized in that it is used for a wide variety of cases.
Yes to me it's really about the admin interface. If there was a "Wordpress Admin Theme" for Drupal I think we'd go a long way to addressing this problem. And not having module upgrades and installation all within the admin interface is a must-have too... disappointed that didn't make it into Drupal 7.
That *did* make it into 7 ;)
Well I guess it was time to update my pre-release version of 7! Sorry for the mis-information. Great to see that in there. Still kinda clunky - ex. why aren't module database updates just rolled into the main updater - separate steps are confusing to non-technical folks - should just be a one-click update. Also it would be nice to search available modules and install directly like WP has -- but this is a great improvement.
Mario When i read the original article, i was inclining towards drupal.
But hey after i read your comment.. am back to being a wordpress loyalist :)
I agree - Wordpress is not a blog to me anymore - it's a CMS.
I know this thread is getting old, but nothing much has changed in Drupal 7 as far as I've experienced. It's still a slow and laborious process to build a website, configure and create a custom theme from a photoshop file.
However, Wordpress now has content types. I found about 3 new plugins that add extra functionality for more custom content types.
For this reason, I gave up on a drupal 7 site that our team was building for 4 weeks. I re-built the same site structure & functionality in Wordpress in a day. The theme was also built from Photoshop in a day. It also has different role permissions and approval workflow included - all drop in plugins.
I think something really needs to improve in Drupals development process, because I'm not experiencing any benefits from it at the moment.
With all due respect, if you have a 20 to 1 development time ratio between Drupal and WordPress you don't have very good Drupal skills. I build robust Drupal sites in a day or two that could not be matched with WordPress.
"There is, however, still no one place to go to find out "what Drupal does" or why anyone should choose it over WordPress - or any other software solution for that matter!"
- ah, but there is a place! DrupalGardens.com - where you can try out Drupal 7 for free. Drupal Gardens can be your tool for evaluating Drupal, and it can be the home for your Drupal site if you like it.
I work for Acquia, the makers of Drupal Gardens, so I'm definitely self promoting a bit, but since it's free to try, and you can export the site you build, Gardens is a pretty good on-ramp for Drupal.
Robert why not just upload the Acquia flash ad instead and save some face with the community. Acquia == being sold too, and the community could give a s***.
Obviously "Anonymous" you don't have a clue who acquia is, who R. Douglass is and what a great project Drupal Gardens is. I suggest next time you want to talk, just do your research first... And no, I don't work for acquia. I use both WP and Drupal, though since most of my projects are pretty complex, WP just isn't enough.
As for what was said above that drupal is not user friendly for the customer, if a developer feels like it he can just add a block seen by specific user groups containing just the options he wants to show them. Same for submission forms. Drupal can be VERY user friendly for clients. All you have to do us spend 1-2 more hours to set user rights, theme your forms a bit and make the administration interface really easy -more than WP. Of course in order to do that, you have to be more than just a blogger. You'd have to be a developer. And just a side-note... when I say developer I don't mean someone who can code. I can't I just use my head and find solutions to everyday drupal problems.
I think DG is competing with WP on the basis of making it available to the masses like WP certainly has. However, I believe they each serve different purposes, as the taglines go:
> "Express yourself. Start a blog."
vs.
> "Create the next social phenomenon."
If you don't just want to "start a blog," then you probably want to build a website with more than simple functionality. There's much to learn from WP, and the D7 admin interface "out of the box" is a big improvement. DG takes that a step further with its Themebuilder. Lastly, you don't get locked-in, as you do with WP. Export your theme or full website anytime, then host it anywhere.
DG's "freemium" service plan is quite fair, IMO. And much of the work is contributed back to the community.
These 2 reasons have made me try to install and learn Drupal. I don't want to be locked-in indefinitely to the format of wordpress.
Strong Points!!
I use wordpress for blogging purpose & also evaluating the experience side by side. The dashboard & sidebar ROCKS! It is much easier to work with Wordpress, find it so easy... even if you are technical also. And no extra headache to manage the server & hosting.
Learning curve with Drupal is steep even for technical & non-tech guys. But! yes Drupal is highly extensible, scalable & customizable. Keeping in mind that i'm an experienced drupal themer :B
When i need to play with things more, with target set ... i will change the pointer to Drupal (installation on self hosted site)
And that time, extra pain will be worth to be entitled for.
So, in nutshell i feel Drupal is for nail biting games. And getting ahead in the same.
Interesting article. We have a simple rule for the people we work with:
*** Use WordPress if you can; use Drupal if you really have to. ***
More and more, we're finding that WordPress is perfectly fine for most cases. A couple of years ago it was 50/50 whether a client would end up with WordPress or Drupal. Now Drupal seems to be painted into a corner where it is only really needed by the most complex multi-user sites, for large corporates or for social networks. That's actually not that many sites, even if it is a lot of site users/visitors.
I agree with those commenters who have pointed out that WordPress dashboard is far superior to what Drupal has to offer. Ease of use and lower training and support needs count for a lot for clients of any size.
The ethos of the two projects seem very different. WordPress developers seem to me more user-centred, Drupal seems more developer-centred. Drupal's Merlin of Chaos is obviously some of kind of software engineering genius, but whole books have had to be written to make sense of the administration interfaces.
Performing upgrades of WordPress is ridiculously easy when compared to Drupal. My own site is on Drupal and I dread upgrades and updates. I haven't dared migrate some old Drupal 6 sites to Drupal 7. But it takes only a few minutes to keep WordPress and plug-ins completely up to date for several of my clients.
I was also very concerned about what seemed from the outside to be poor project management of the release of Drupal 7. It was over-ambitious in all the wrong places. If I take a medium to long-term view, I'm more confident that WordPress will evolve to adopt the most useful features of CCK, Panels and Views long before Drupal adapts to become more user-friendly, let alone build an ecosystem of designers and developers around it that can match what WordPress already has.
WordPress has fewer options than Drupal when it comes to user permissions (although it has more than this article suggests). However, the level of granularity that WordPress offers is suitable for many real-world situations, so recourse to Drupal for this reason is seldom justified.
The wide number of themes for WordPress also makes it preferable to Drupal in most instances, even if themes are to be used as a starting point for design. Design matters.
The findability, usability and usefulness of plug-ins for WordPress is much better. Drupal.org is really a mess and far too many of themodules available seem to be developer-centred half-baked APIs rather than user-centred units of functionality.
Thanks for the writeup of your thoughts, Jen.
Finding out what Drupal does definitely is a content gap on drupal.org. While demoing Gardens is one option, evaluators might prefer to watch a short video, read a one-page page brochure, read an overview of features or check out (an organized list of) site showcases.
All of four of those options appeared as to-do's during the implementation of the redesign but only one, the features overview, actually got completed.
There are still plenty of non-code ways people can contribute to Drupal.org!
I am adamant on denying "I still believe that our two communities have a lot to learn from each other". Neither as a community nor as code we have *anything* to learn from WordPress. As for community, the deception and treachery of their leader is simply not forgivable. Similarly code wise, the security and some other generic views are not welcome either.
If there is anything to learn is what not to do.
We can look at their interface, do something better and just kill 'em all. Eventually Drupal wins, there is no doubt.
You have something to say or you troll on random posts?
If WP 2.7 is the latest codebase you have reached, check the new 3.1 stuff. Things have changed drastically, as they have changed in Drupal 7 compared to the 6 release. Both platforms get more mature in their newer releases.
"We can look at their interface, do something better and just kill 'em all. Eventually Drupal wins, there is no doubt."
But when?
If it so easy why no one do it now?
If we are slow and Wordpress keep getting bigger and bigger, then they also have enough resource to kill us all also. It's like AMD have a lot genius innovation and architecture but they can just sit on their own niche now, they have no resource to match and fight INTEL back ever.
It's real simple: let the content drive the technology. Wordpress is great for light web sites. Drupal is great for feature-rich robust applications. Both are extensible, but in different ways. To use a tired cliche, it really is like comparing apples and oranges. Thanks for stirring the pot. Yawn.
Removing both filter tips _and_ the preview button is like a belly dance into nirvana. err, and could CAPTCHA module pretty please state that it's case-sensitive? #omg
It is true that Wordpress is much more user friendly and easier to get a functioning site that has many CMS features. Wordpress isn't confined to blogs. I still do quick mockups for clients in Wordpress but always deliver the site in Drupal. Even if Wordpress would be completely adequate for the customer today there have been too many situations where clients later needed functionality that you can't do in Drupal. You can always do a simple blog with Drupal and give the client only the editing controls they need at the time but my experience with customers is that they soon evolve to multiple editors that require much more granular access to specific areas or roles.
Love Wordpress but too many limitations for me.
And what happens when Wordpress is no longer the "go to" solution for simple blogging sites because it is viewed by some people as overkill compared with other systems like tumblr?
http://wpcandy.com/thinks/is-tumblr-the-new-wordpress
Then, we're more and more unrelevent. Because most people would find we're super overkill for that segment, which is the biggest segment.
Why can't we not able to roll tumblr-like and wordpress-like distro now? (If it is easy)
Thanks to the commenters. This is the best discussion of Wp v Drupal that I've seen. I'm new to Drupal and almost feel I can move my site to it. I've avoided Wordpress only because I need about a 1000 page book, and WP seems to do a poor job on a table of contents (they don't collapse).
But I was shocked to find that Drupal 7 will not let me set the visible page titles and the different from the short TOC titles. are what google puts most weight on (other than inbound links) and what it shows to the pubic. It would have been ultra-trivial to put this in core. One has to wonder how this was forgotten for so many years. Whatever the reason, it has me so concerned, I'm still unsure I'll stay, even after writing a module to fix this (and, no, the modules that do it are not available in 7 and were overkill).
But it would be a great help if others could make specific head-to-head comparisons on books, forums, galleries, etc. I think this might be more telling than generalities. Though both are important.
Great article!
Thanks for the great post Jennifer! I bleed Drupal blue!
Yes, WordPress is great if you want a small site with not much complexity. Plus you get an easy UI admin to work with. Drupal has a little more of a learning curve but it's because it's much more robust like you pointed out. If you want a site to really build off of and do some really awesome stuff with, Drupal wins! Anyway, thanks again.
@jnorthcott
How about we look at the argument from this angle: If Drupal never existed, what niches that Drupal currently fills would WordPress be filling and how well?
Conversely, if Wordpress never was, what niches that it currently fills would have been taken up by Drupal and how well?
For instance, would whitehouse.gov be running on Wordpress right now?
Food for thought.
Why is it that every time I read one of these online blog comparisons extolling the virtues of certain CMS packages, the author (and the commenters) forgets that custom post types (custom data types) are useless unless one of the field types is "Relationship," i.e. one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many.
Wordpress 3.0 core (don't flame me -- I know relationships are hack-possible with plug-ins) is NOT Drupal, nor is it EE in this respect. Until it is, it's useless to talk about custom post types. Data relates, period.
Challenge: make a Wordpress 3.0 deployment display a simple database listing of bands, their albums and their band members over time without hackery and plug-in madness. Why dev's and designers think that a custom post type is so cool is beyond me. Could we please take a clue from 20+ years of Filemaker.
- one Student takes many Courses and has many Teachers
- one Teacher teaches many Courses
- etc.
This requirement isn't overkill people, it's the reality of reporting our daily lives.
I can go on for those who need to display their road race results.
Or how about those with portfolio sites that have many projects for many clients.
Yup, reality is tough to ignore. Just saying'.
Hooray for FileMaker reference. Up until a few years ago FM was my basis for all manner of successful projects. I'm new to Drupal but it reminds me of the accessibility and malleability FM offered. Perhaps this is a core difference - Drupal builds on databases/structured data, whereas WP builds on content/posts.
"Challenge: make a Wordpress 3.0 deployment display a simple database listing of bands, their albums and their band members over time without hackery and plug-in madness. "
I think you are talking about the SQL structure - and not the php files that make up the CMS or Blog - The DB would maintain the relations, not the CMS... perhaps I am not understanding what your point was?
As far as Drupal usability goes we find that mostly what clients want to do is visit the page they want to edit, click "Edit" and do their editing. And they can do that with Drupal. And with the admin menu, there is no real need for a dashboard or "admin panel". We certainly wouldn't let them loose with CCK or Views admin.
Everybodys situation is different though.
After reading everything, I figured I'd throw my thoughts in as someone who started learning Drupal from scratch in the beginning of January. This is my first foray into web design/development. I had no prior experience in coding of any type, themeing, or web design. I do however, come from a design background in a completely unrelated field.
After a lot of research,( I looked at , Joomla, Wordpress, Concrete 5, Modx, and many other "CMS's") I decided on Drupal to create my first website, even though I knew the learning curve would be steep. My choice was based on how customizable Drupal was , and that intuitively felt that I could grow with and create any kind of website I wanted with Drupal.
That being said, as a "Newbie", I was/am extremely disappointed with the UI. Seemingly simple things, like being able to send a custom email from the Admin to a single member on the site is difficult and there isn't even a module for it. There is a "standard " body in the email sent from the contact form that you need to override the core Contact module to change.
This is just one of my many experiences as a "Newbie. One that might scare many others off from learning and using an awesome system. Next on my list is to learn php so I can work on contributing modules back.
Getting this far wasn't easy...but it was worthwhile! But then again, I love a good challenge and learning something new.
Thanks for this. Last summer I went through the steepest part of the 'Drupal learning curve' and this summer I am talking to a prospective employer involved with WordPress. This article was a helpful starting point and confirmed many of my suspicions regarding complexity, options and blogging. (I'm not yet familiar with WordPress.)
If your curious, I had Googled 'wordpress vs drupal'.
We get this question a lot when talking to clients about CMS as they normally know about Wordpress but less or nothing about Drupal.
As well said in this article Drupal is much better for systems, and site which demand specific customisation and Wordpress is cleaner for small sites.
However one comment always heard is about the Wordpress back-end being much easier to operate.
This is very true, but the one thing rarely highlighted is that if your system is restricted and simplistic it is easier to develop a cleaner back-end as it does not have to deal with the kind of complexity than Drupal has.
Drupal's custom content types, levels of user and structure (etc) which allows its flexibility and customisation means it is harder to accomodate a simple UI for admin.
So rather than this being considered a flaw of Drupal, its a reality due to Drupal's complexity.
If WP worked like Drupal, it is unlikely the back-end would be some easy to use, because it'd have to handle much more complexity.
Which goes back to the main point in that WP is great for small sites, with low complexity, and its back-end will really complement it.
Drupal is for heavier and complex sites, and the back-end has to accomodate.
Drupal's back-end interface can also be themed if time was really taken on it, but (as is the point) the back-end has to be customised to suit the custom nature of the site's functionality.
Title: Drupal Imposes a Caste System and Stifles Independent Creative Expression.
Nice post. You make some good points. Let's cut through the proverbial bologna and tell the truth.
WordPress users, like me, use WordPress because it allowed us to jump from making Static HTML sites (which still rock BTW) to Dynamic Sites with the least amount of trouble for the time required. It just works. For me personally, finding WordPress was like finding Adobe PageMill back in the day. For those of you under 40, PageMill was the first DreamWeaver and it was revolutionary for the time. Usng PageMill I went from :-( to :-) overnight. I could make complex, eye-catching sites quickly and easily. (yes the code was bad blah blah blah) WordPress had a similar effect. In WP, suddenly and without knowing the ins and outs of CSS, I could make gorgeous sites with supercool dropdown menus and consistent typography. And, with an array of cool plugins, I could instantly add anything from tag clouds to video blogs by simply installing a plugin and hacking my way through documentation.
Then Drupal came along and messed everything up. I succumbed to the institutional, "you're an idiot and you don't deserve to be alive if you don't use Drupal" pressure and installed it only to find out that a new version is released every other day and CRITICAL updates are announced twice hourly. Technology is supposed to allow me more goof off time, not make my gums bleed. Moreover, when the institution adopted Drupal as the gold standard, WordPress users began to lose out. New tools that might be integrated with either WordPress or Drupal only get Drupal developer cycles and I lose the freedom and power and swagger that WordPress delivers while giving me more time to goof off. The sky-is-falling Drupal mafia will scare us all with claims that "WP isn't secure!" "WP doesn't scale!" and then force us to use THEIR templates. Have YOU been a part of a Drupal install that doesn't work? Have YOU ever had a Drupal developer (and you need actual developers to use Drupal) quit mid project? Drupal forces us back to the days of scribes. Drupal is just a 21st century scribe that we all have to kottow to in order to get TEXT ON A PAGE! You want to sound really smart? Just ask these questions at meetings and conferences and people will cower and whisper to each other.
1. "Well, how does that integrate with Drupal?'
2. "What about Drupal integration?" (Raise one eyebrow for added effect.)
3. "Well, you might consider Drupal."
I have resigned myself to the fact that keeping my job probably depends on learning Drupal but the time required could have been spent on other tasks or on goofing off.
Joseph
Links - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_PageMill
Joseph, I love it.
I share your Drupal experiences. Just when I start liking Drupal Wham! right between the eyes. Then I find myself cursing it.
I started looking at other more lightweight CMS like Silverstripe, Concrete and Wordpress.
Wordpress is beautiful.
I have to admit however I am fearful of using it for larger projects. Working my way up to that.
We're starting another round of "platform wars", and Drupal is being talked about as "what we've got to use." Our first foray with WP on a large site basis was http://cookcountyil.gov. This site has an ill-chosen theme from a crappy development company. But it looks 200% better than what we had before. If you click around, you'll find a second proprietary site that cost about $1 million and is a piece of crap.
Now we've created a couple more sites, most notably this one: http://cookcountyil.gov/2012budget . Nice game application buried in a WP site. Some would say you could never do this in WP. Others would say you cold only do this in Drupal.
One of the things I think gets lost in this is the average user. For us, the average user is a person working in one of our departments. They'll update or add new content to the site 4-6 times/year. The other 366 to 364 days a year they'll be working on other things. WordPress is perfect for them. Easy to pickup, easy to reacquaint themselves with.
The developers in our IT shop? Some aren't real crazy about WP, because as someone so aptly put it, Drupal is for developers. Others don't like WP because it's not SharePoint. Or DotNetNuke. Others don't really care, as long as it works properly. I appreciate these people.
But here's the thing. Who's job is it to manage the website? Mine.
When I started reading this post, I immediately checked the post date, assuming it must be a couple of years old. Could not believe it's from April 2011. You're not keeping up with developments:
WordPress WAS a blog engine. With the arrival of Custom Post Types in concert with Custom Fields and Custom Taxonomies, it has arrived as a CMS. Does it take a reasonably savvy developer to configure it as a CMS? Yes, but once configured properly, it's the easiest to use CMS available, which is what really counts for end users.
Great article! I was split between WordPress.org and Drupal. My husband has created a Drupal website and he feels it gives you "room to grow" instead of just being a regular blog.
The learning curve scares me, but I am going to give it a shot.
Cheers,
Louise
Jen,
Thanks for the article. After struggling with D6 for a while your "WordPress is better then Drupal" talk convinced me to look at WordPress, and I'm glad I did. I also looked at the BuddyPress plugin and was very, very pleased with how WP user-friendly simplicity was also evidenced in a very nice social networking solution.
Since then I've been struggling with an evaluation of WP-BP versus D7-OG for a community of practice web site I want to set up. I've been blogging a bit on how I am going about making up my mind as I go through the process. (architectedfutures.info)
The most insightful analysis I've read on this subject is Jennifer Hogdon's article at http://poplarware.com/articles/drupal_vs_wordpress. I especially recommend a careful read of the "URL Handling" section. I think it says a lot. (Ms. Hogdon is a consultant/developer using both tools.)
I haven't finished my process and I won't tip my hand here, but one point that I'd make here in Drupal's favor relates to permissions. I've looked quite a bit a users and permissions as a critical factor in my decision process. WordPress has some good basic facilities around permissions tied to nodes (blogs, pages, custom content), it has core support for a permission structure and it has a nice add-on module that can provide administration of permissions for users. However, the other side - enforcing permission on non-node content - is not there. (Don't just say you need permission to do something, enforce it!) I've seen a lot of commentary about permissions being equal between Drupal and WP but I think it fails to take non-node content into account. This becomes an issue when BuddyPress gets evaluated against Organic Groups and one is trying to manage groups and group resources. It's less of an issue for custom developed add-ons of my own design because then I can obviously enforce the permission structure for my own content.
Again, thanks for keeping this discussion alive. Both camps have a lot to learn - as long as people can keep from falling into a religious war. (Which seems to be a very, very hard thing to avoid. ;-) ) That's not where the dialog should be.
Largely I agree with the comments above that say the WordPress has a better end-user orientation and Drupal is more oriented to the developer. This is not necessarily a bad thing. (It's up to the Drupal developer to make the delivered product easy for the end-user.) But you need to understand what your mission and orientation is, and work from that base. WordPress works very well for end-user self-developed sites, or sites to be turned over to the end user for ongoing management and maintenance. Drupal is a tool that turns out sites that need ongoing management and periodic maintenance by professionals. There are going to a lot more of the former, but the high volume sites will be in the latter camp. Or that's how I see it at least. Neither bad nor good. Both have their place and their market. They just aren't the same, and neither fits very well trying to be the other.
Regards,
Joe
WordPress supports five different users called roles:
Administrator
Editor
Author
Contributor
Subscriber
I develop WordPress sites for companies and associations large and small. Because time is money for me I choose the #1 CMS in the world, WordPress.
My experience is not in agreement with your conclusions on WordPress. My web clients are able to learn WordPress in one hour of tutoring however I would shudder to think of the days required to train them in Drupal.
The developer community for WordPress features (called plugins) is enormous, along with the community of theme designers.
I don't really see what's so complex about Drupal's administration, it's perfectly straight forward. For me Drupal offers all the functionality I need to produce websites of all types and sizes, end of story!
I really enjoyed the article as well as all the comments from both Wordpress and Drupal developers. As a developer of both, I would agree that wordpress fits quite a few projects we start with. A typical company startup budget is generally small and the required features are limited. A perfect fit for Wordpress. Install it, grab a free theme, install the top 10 plugins and you're good to go. The same project takes twice as long in Drupal... but is that the end of the story?
What we've run into in 80% of the Wordpress installations is that they outgrow what Wordpress can offer. The client's requirements exceed what we can find in the plugin directory and their budget will not cover a large custom plugin development project. In more than a few cases, we have to break it to the clients that Wordpress cannot meet their needs and then convert them to Drupal. It's these limitations that scare me away from choosing Wordpress on future projects, no matter how simple they begin. I fear hitting the ceiling of the framework and costing my clients more money in the long run when I could have easily chosen Drupal to begin with.
I don't mean to dog Wordpress, it works great for small projects. It's the clear choice for simple photo galleries, blogs, websites with a few pages, and anything you want to launch quickly. I completely agree that the user interface and updating process is stupid easy compared to Drupal.
For social networks, payment systems and intranets there is no question which framework we choose, it's Drupal every time. It gives us the flexibility to quickly design any type of interface we need. Comparable development in wordpress would be a nightmare.
The topic of "Custom Post Types" has been brought up a few times regarding Wordpress's abilty to mimic CCK and using "Query Posts" or "Virtual Pages" as plugins to get some Drupal "Views" functionality. As somebody who has actually tried to use these plugins, comparing them to drupal views and CCK is laughable. The reality is that Wordpress has a long way to go before it's easy to just plain list information with any parameters you can imagine like Drupal views has done for years.
Need a small company website or blog? Choose Wordpress.
Need room to grow or almost any functionality you can think of? Choose Drupal
You wrote this in 2011.. ??!!
"WordPress is a blog engine. This means Drupal assumes that there will be many different kinds of users with various levels of control who are administering a website, and WordPress assumes there will be only one"
umm.. what have I been building last few years then ??
>> sites (not blogs) with multiple editors, multiple roles/capabilities, lots of data types.. and NOT in Drupal.. #justsayin'