Drupal Vs WordPress

Once you are all set up with your hosting service, a new question arises: what should be used to display the content of the website?

A Content Management System (CMS) is, as the name suggests, a system to manage content: articles, pages, images, videos, PDF, menu items, real estate properties, portfolio items, etc. etc. There are quite a few options when it comes to select your CMS, but we will focus only in the two most widely adopted: WordPress and Drupal [note]. The versions to analyze are WordPress 3.x and Drupal 7.x

Learning Curve

The success of any application relies, with no doubt, in the easiness of use. Even if a tool is considered as more robust, secure and complete —as it’s suggested with Drupal— it doesn’t mean that it’s the best solution, even less if it requires a longer learning curve.

WordPress is much more intuitive than Drupal; even people with little or no previous knowledge of the platform catch up very fast and can start producing content after a couple of hours getting acquainted with it. Moreover, once the end-user (the person who will end up managing the content) is comfortable with WordPress, s/he’s more likely to face less stress while working with website makeovers or restructuring. Inclusively, the end-user could improve the performance of the installation by providing the developer with feedback that could allow a deeper customization.

Community and Support

Since WordPress is the number one CMS, there is more people experiencing and solving issues thus there is an overwhelming amount of resources to review when you face a specific situation.

More importantly, the Codex —the website that teaches how to customize your installation— is a jewel, well documented and with practical examples that can help you get started.

On the other hand, Drupal Documentation website is a mess; it becomes a tedious task trying to understand and “decode” the way the examples, tutorials and explanations are displayed.

Furthermore, a lot of the examples get mixed and you end-up being confused between explanations for different Drupal versions.

Themes

Being the dominant CMS out there, it is obvious that WordPress holds the title with more Themes developed: There are thousands of ready-to-use templates, free and paid, for hundreds of different industries.

As mentioned above, new WordPress themes are being developed according to the specifications of a targeted audience. Some examples:

A theme built for a restaurant may contain menu items, promotions routines or different daily menus.
Real estate templates my include areas for adding properties or to announce an open house.
Artist could use it to display portfolio, recent projects, projects in process.

All of this, in a very simple and, once again, intuitive admin interface.

Developing Costs and Security

Any well-educated PHP programmer could easy add, remove or fix WordPress issues, even for old versions of the software. This makes WordPress a more economical option.

Working with Drupal requires the programmer to be acquainted not only to the most recent version of the CMS but with previous versions as well. Having said that, a Drupal-proficient programmer who masters version 6 and 7 could be much more expensive that a programmer working in WordPress.

Regarding the security of the software, I believe that there is no 100% safe system; both platforms are open source and any person with the enough knowledge can find, and potentially exploit, errors.

So make sure your programmer takes basic security routines in order to protect your site.

Conclusion

Prior to WordPress v.3.x, it was highly pointed out that you couldn’t create custom post types (for example: posts, pages, articles, books, videos) and taxonomies (like tags or categories). This certainly gave an edge to Drupal.

But when WordPress v3.x arrived, it marked a milestone in its development: the introduction of custom post types (to what many in the Drupal community called to be “as good as Drupal 5“) and the possibility to improve design integration with a non-intrusive software upgrade.

Upgrades are another issue, keep in mind that many websites will need upgrades in order to pass from Drupal 6 to 7 and this, obviously, imply a cost if you want to have the most recent version.

In WordPress, major improvements have been implemented virtually hassle-free since version 2.5 and if an issue arises due to the improvements/corrections in the new WordPress files, you will most likely find in the Codex the deprecated function with a link to a newer/substitute function, and possibly a practical example on how to use it.

Today, WordPress is used by 56% of the Top 10,000 sites, while Drupal only accounts for 22%; in other words, for every Drupal there are over 2.5 WordPress installations, and the tendency points to a constant increase in WordPress usage.

Which CMS do you prefer, and why?

Comments and reactions

nomad411

Drupal has a steeper learning curve, but once mastered, allows you to build and integrate anything. In the end, it might simoly be more entreprise oriented, for Intranets for example.

I’m now working my way through WordPress for the smaller clients who require a quick job.. Since 3.x, i do find it matured nicely. It now has the guts to start being seen as a CMS system over being the blog app it was known to be before.

I still think there’s room for both, saving Drupal for the big heavy jobs, especially those requiring integration with other systems.

I also hope they’ll start implementing basic features like multi-languages, Views, etc as modules in the core package, or rather free and well-integrated.
- http://veodesign.com/ E. Oxoa
  
  Hi Nomad411, that’s the thing, although Drupal provides you with a lot of tools, the issue is how technological-savy the end-user is. Many people has little or no idea about what an “Intranet” is (let aside all the network considerations to set it up).
  
  And you hit the spot, the backbone of the economy is the Small and Medium businesses, who are already busy trying to sell their products/services or to have an online presence to showcase them: they have no time to learn a CMS, they want something that works out of the box.
  
  I completely agree with you, there’s room for both platforms and it’s not a matter of which is better than the other but the scoop of your project and how well the CMS satisfies your current and future needs.
  
  Regarding integration, I do believe that any well-educated PHP programmer could achieve any type of integration for any service, regardless the platform chosen.
  
  If you have a nice calligraphy, you will write nicely with pens, crayolas, pencils or even a pice of chalk :)
James

Sorry the WordPress community is inflating at a rate to include much less knowledgable people and profit hounds.

The communities are not comparable. One is more knowledgable than the other.
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