Vancouver’s big on Drupal. On almost every corner in Gastown you’ll find a passionate advocate who’ll talk your ear off about its flexibility, the benefits of leveraging its community of developers and the extent to which out of all the choices for Content Management platforms it sucks the least.
But surely the primary function of a CMS is to make content management simple and idiot proof for non-technical users. It’s here that Drupal fails so spectacularly that I’m astounded it is even referred to as a CMS. Developers often argue that it’s unfair to expect Drupal to be user friendly because then it would inevitably be inflexible. A classic logical fallacy if ever I heard one, sort of like saying “all developers work faster if they use a command line interface therefore everyone who wants to work faster should use the command line.”
My crash course in Drupal included being presented by a local Drupal shop with a content management interface that consisted of a seemingly randomly organized list of every piece of content on our site, some of which could sort of be edited, some of which required direct editing of the raw html rather than text and none of which offered even the most rudimentary workflow management, scheduled publishing or approval process. Oh, and if you want to deal with really advanced stuff such as, I don’t know, images, you better brush up on those programming skills. In about five minutes it would have been possible utterly and irreparably to decimate the website, with no hope of restoring it without programming expertise. Going back to that argument about flexibility, it’s interesting to note that it’s all theoretical. That is, in theory any beautifully intuitive content management interface can be created to manage your Drupal site, but here I’m reminded of a classic bit from Seinfeld:
JERRY: So, when do I get my dinner?
KRAMER: There’s no dinner. The bet’s off. I’m not gonna do it.
JERRY: Yes, I know you’re not gonna do it. That’s why I bet.
KRAMER: Ya well, there’s no bet if I’m not doing it.
JERRY: That’s the bet! That you’re not doing it!
KRAMER: Yeah, well, I could do it. I don’t wanna do it.
JERRY: We didn’t bet on if you wanted to. We bet on if it would be done.
KRAMER: And it could be done.
JERRY: Well, of course it could be done! Anything could be done! But it only is done if it’s done!
In other words, without substantial customization Drupal simply isn’t viable as a CMS. To paraphrase those irony-deficient Ronseal TV ads from the UK, Drupal doesn’t do what it says on the tin.
Start to venture into virtually any kind of basic functionality present on a moderately interactive website and you’ll quickly get to know and fear the words “that requires us to write a new module”. You’ll also discover various peculiarities that either force bizarre user interaction patterns on your audience, or again demand the creation of a new module. And because Drupal is primarily deployed by development shops rather than a guy you have sitting in your office, you’ll pay through the nose, again for the alleged benefits of flexibility.
Recently the Drupal community has seized on Chris Pirillo’s use of the platform as the basis for Gnomepal, which has the noble objective of making Drupal more of an out-of-the-box solution for real publishers. Perfect, except that (no disrespect to Pirillo intended) I’m not sure there’s anyone less connected to the real-world demands of normal, non-technical users than Chris and the army of geeks who follow him.
The belief in the Drupal community is clearly that it’s all about the… community. That is, the power of a disparate community will be harnessed to deliver the features and usability desired by end users. But the fatal flaw in the Drupal community model seems to be that its community consists entirely of developers and not publishers. Or worse still development shops who make money by customizing Drupal.
I stumbled upon Mike Stopforth’s excellent overview of Drupal vs. WordPress while writing this piece. I’m sure he’d disagree with my overall assessment of Drupal, but nevertheless I completely agree with his comment:
Drupal’s problem is that the community behind it - genius’s that they are - simply don’t get marketing - they need more people like the gang at Lullabot, and I daresay you and I to help them ‘humanise’ Drupal.
Saying that the Drupal community doesn’t get marketing is an epic understatement, but that is perhaps what it comes down to, and where the power of the WordPress community becomes particularly relevant.
WordPress doesn’t pretend to be a CMS (although for many websites’ needs it’s actually more than enough), but it’s become close to the de facto choice for anyone seeking to create anything from the simplest blog to the most sophisticated magazine-like content site. The guys at Automattic clearly were driven by exactly the right kind of singular purpose: take something very difficult (creating and managing a website) and make it spectacularly easy and idiot-proof.
This kind of game changing innovation creates a very different kind of community — users who are passionate because they’re able to do something that was hitherto as close to impossible as makes no difference, and do so for free to boot. Putting this kind of control in the hands of non-technical publishers hasn’t stopped being a revolutionary thing, but what’s possibly more revolutionary is the way in which WordPress’s critical mass of users has created an entirely new ecosystem of innovation around plugins.
WordPress plugins are designed to make still more difficult / impossible / utterly alien tasks and features immediately accessible. Many of these are things that can help your website make money (the excellent AdSense Manager, for example), integrate with other popular services (such as Twitter and Flickr), or aid in the promotion and discovery of your site (All-In-One SEO and the Google XML Sitemap plugins). Imagine that, tools to make your life easier. Isn’t that a better kind of flexible?
So going back to Drupal… It’s really not for basic or moderately sophisticated content-based businesses, and it clearly doesn’t, can’t and won’t work for anyone who wants to publish not program, at least not anyone who hopes to do so without a huge investment of time and money. And yet it’s unlikely to be your platform of choice for building a large-scale website. It’s all-but impossible to find in-house Drupal experts, and while I’m in no way qualified to get into Rails vs. Django vs. doing it yourself vs. everything else debate, 99 per cent of the start-ups I know wouldn’t for a second consider Drupal to build a community site, a SaaS application or much else for which the website and the business are one and the same. They wouldn’t pick WordPress, either, but it makes no claim to be a powerful framework for building applications; instead it just does what it says on the tin.
But finally my biggest beef with Drupal is that it appears from my outsider’s perspective to be a platform always ensuring it has an excuse for its failings. It’s not user friendly because it’s flexible. Your project requires vast, expensive customization because Drupal provides oodles of functionality for free as long as you stay within its limits. We tried to please everyone and in the end kept no-one, including me, happy. The lesson, I think, is that great technology knows what problem it’s solving and relentlessly chases it down, and ultimately that’s why WordPress’s limitations pale in comparison to its brilliance.
Comments 61
Hm. Not sure how you’re arriving that WordPress is more flexible than Drupal in the specific items you mentioned. There exists:
- http://drupal.org/project/adsense
- http://drupal.org/project/twitter
- http://drupal.org/project/flickr
- http://drupal.org/project/xmlsitemap
And SEO package looks like a combination of http://drupal.org/project/nodewords module and http://drupal.org/project/pathauto.
In the vast majority of the cases I’ve been exposed to, the answer is not “that requires us to write a new module” it’s “You could whip that up in CCK and Views.” No programming required there, although the UI for Views is a bit tweaky.
Does Drupal have a learning curve? Absolutely. The “tin” never implied that it didn’t.
But I’d recommend spending some more time with Drupal, particularly with some of its “building block” modules, before writing it off entirely. There are tons of helpful people in the Vancouver area who I’m sure would love to help you out!
Posted 05 May 2008 at 12:27 am ¶Oh, and regarding the usability problems, that’s definitely something the Drupal community is working on improving. We took a huge step earlier this year with some formal usability testing at University of Minnesota (http://buytaert.net/first-results-from-usability-testing) and one of our Summer of Code projects this year is a Usability Testing Suite (http://drupal.org/project/usability_suite) which will help us perform similar tests remotely, so we can gather user feedback *before* confusing options are made part of Drupal.
Ongoing work in this area is being coordinated at http://groups.drupal.org/usability. We’d welcome your input on how to make Drupal easier to use for content publishers!
Posted 05 May 2008 at 12:36 am ¶@webchick: Thanks for the comments, but my point isn’t necessarily that WordPress is more flexible; rather that its community has grown around what the publisher wants. If I look at the modules you reference, in every case they have an added 25% of complexity vs. WordPress that is simply a dealbreaker for mainstream users.
And the answer from the Drupal community always seems to be that I should spend more time with it before moving on. My biggest issue is that my time is not valuably used by learning arcane attributes of a system rather than simply running my business.
Posted 05 May 2008 at 7:23 am ¶Point well made by Mr. Gibbons. The case is closed. Only choice for Drupal to be the WP of CMS framework, they can do it if the leave idea-fixes behind. change the discourse Drupal… listen the ‘market’ and reason
Posted 05 May 2008 at 11:07 am ¶If WordPress can do what you need, then use it. When it can’t, then it’s time for Drupal. You might find that your business does not need the power of Drupal, fine.
Posted 05 May 2008 at 12:28 pm ¶This issue really is at the heart, I think. For quite a few years, the evolutionary pressure in the Drupal community pushed things towards exposing more and more and more (and more! and then more!) options for each feature. The idea is always to avoid the need for custom code on most sites, but in many cases the end result is an administrative UI that looks like the Death Star’s dashboard.
Slowly but surely, the Drupal community has been waking up to the idea that streamlining the user experience means removing options and providing sensible defaults. In the latest version (Drupal 6), there are a few small examples of this in action. One is the elimination of unecessary options from the Cateories/tagging management interface. The API tools to do things like complex multi-parent topic hierarchies are still there, but the default UI doesn’t expose these confusing and little-used options. The result is a much, much better experience.
Obviously, reworking one administrative screen doesn’t solve the underlying problem you’re discussing. But it is an encouraging move: the past couple of years have pushed Drupal towards greater flexibility, and hopefully the next few will result in streamlined UI for the most common use cases.
In any case, thanks for your thoughts. Even if you never use Drupal, the input offered about how the experience can be improved is extremely helpful for the project.
Posted 05 May 2008 at 1:43 pm ¶@Jeff: Thanks for the thoughtful response. I’d love to see Drupal evolve as you’re describing.
Posted 05 May 2008 at 1:56 pm ¶I’m no CMS expert, but I am a web publisher and WP doesn’t do what I want - and I don’t think I am alone. The idea that WP, more than Drupal, has grown up around ‘what the publisher wants’ depends a lot on what you want as a publisher.
If WP does what you ‘want’, then you should, by all means, use it. But it isn’t too hard to stretch WP to limits it can’t go.
My impression is that it is harder to get Drupal to do the easy stuff, but it is easier to get Drupal to do the hard stuff.
Posted 05 May 2008 at 3:19 pm ¶I can’t help but jump in on this as I think you’ve probably done what most newbies do with Drupal and that is flounder a little. Worse that an actual “drupal-company” helped reinforce that impression, as every day I show the simplicity of a Drupal-based system to new customers and frankly, they get it. That’s not to say that as a publisher you don’t have a learning curve, but obviously you seem to be describing a scenario where you’re obviously doing it yourself, and in any case you’re definitely on the “suck” end of the learning curve for Drupal at that point. Today I can build amazingly simple and amazingly complex sites both in very short amounts of time and virtually all that work is done within the afore mentioned CCK/Views recipe. Those two products together are what truly give Drupal the “fabled” flexibility, and may be a large portion of the reason you feel it doesn’t perform as advertised.
Ultimately the question has to be “is this a web-publisher’s tool?” and the answer is simply “not yet”. But what can be constructed by a knowledgeable Drupal developer can certainly be used as a publishing tool very easily. The next objective would be to make that process easier, and as Eaton mentioned, a product isn’t perfect when there’s nothing left to add, but rather when there’s nothing left to subtract.
Eclipse
Posted 05 May 2008 at 5:06 pm ¶@EclipseGe: I appreciate your points, but you’re not really addressing my main issues with Drupal. On the one hand it royally does suck as an elegant, intuitive CMS; on the other why would I use it to build an ambitious web application? Virtually no-one I know in the start-up tech community would even consider using Drupal as the basis for their business, so I’m left wondering who it really is for? Perhaps a very specific kind of publisher prepared to invest large amounts to get what would essentially be a completely customized publishing framework?
Posted 05 May 2008 at 5:17 pm ¶Daniel,
That seems a little premature as some of the largest media companies in the world are making great use of Drupal. Fox uses it for the Fox Searchlight, Popular Science magazine’s website is done is Drupal, Warner Brother’s Records puts a huge number of their artists on Drupal… and the list goes on and on and on… so obviously, your argument doesn’t work for everyone because while you might be able to make the argument that thousands of developers (almost as many as work on the Linux kernel) are all wrong, arguing that some of the largest media companies in the world are ALSO wrong seems a little short sited (and I say all of this in the nicest way possible, I’m just trying to make as pertinent a point as possible).
With all that said, no one has claimed Drupal doesn’t have a significant learning curve, but I think it’s important to keep in mind a couple of things… Primarily, calling Drupal a “CMS” might also be a little premature. My pitch to most customers is that Drupal is a rapid development framework that happens to do content management. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t some setup involved, and again, that’s best done with an experience Drupal Developer.
We (the Drupal community) recognize that Drupal has some more work to perhaps cut out that middle man… that’s the purpose of the system, to cut out all the middle men, and perhaps in the interim we’ve created a new middle man, but if that’s what it takes today to get to where we want to be tomorrow, then I think most of us are willing to accept that trade off.
As previously mentioned Drupal has been undergoing usability testing, as it is a goal of the community at large to improve this usability not only for us, but for everyone. Drupal recognizes it’s not “there” yet. But we have a lot of “flexibility”… far more so than any other system out there… if we aren’t as “simple” to use yet, then some more people with your view point who’re willing to help us improve in the areas would be super appreciated.
Eclipse
Posted 05 May 2008 at 7:30 pm ¶@Eclipse: That seems to be the standard refrain in the Drupal community (lots of giant companies are using it, ergo it must be great). But what’s really happening is Drupal dev shops are having some success in selling their services to these companies, in much the same way that the big dot-com era web shops sold Interwoven, Vignette, WebLogic and other platforms from the proprietary world.
Lots of shops selling hours for Drupal implementation seems to me to be quite the opposite of any of the empowering effects of something like WordPress.
And don’t get me wrong, there is entirely nothing wrong with selling services for Drupal implementation. But that’s completely different from the kind of rapid application development demanded by tech. startups.
I do find it interesting that this kind of response is very consistent in the Drupal community. For example, I write that none of the tech. startups I know would ever consider using Drupal, and your response is that I must be saying Fox and Warners are in the wrong because they’re using it. How are these things remotely related? Where did discussion of large media companies suddenly spring from? These are great customers for $500k web dev contracts, but not at all relevant to the discussion here.
By the way, for 99.99% of the startups I talk to (who use everything from Cake to Rails to Django, and more), it doesn’t even cross their minds to think of Drupal as a framework. They’re the people at the leading edge of web development and they see it as a CMS. Grabbing on to the framework label just seems like bandwagon jumping.
And I go back to this: On the homepage of drupal.org there’s a bold pronouncement that Drupal is an open source content management system. Yet you and others constantly say that it’s not really a CMS so we should forgive its failings here. Sounds to me like a community with an identity crisis, or simply reinforcement of my point that it’s a community unable to do one thing really well, as has happened with WordPress.
Posted 05 May 2008 at 8:21 pm ¶Daniel,
Respectfully, I would submit to you that your comments are again a little bit off the mark. This is sort of Lullabot’s field, but they spend quite a bit of time educating the field… this includes the big companies as well the smaller firms (in many cases, single developers). Sony BMG has one of the best drupal developers on the planet as an employee, and there are others on staff there who do drupal work as well.
I do find it so odd that you seem so focussed on startups. Businesses with a history seem a better litmus test to me, however, I’m sure there are others far more qualified that I am to comment on this particular dynamic.
As to Drupal being billed as a “CMS”… who can say? What I CAN tell you is that Drupal IS a rapid development framework… a huge portion of that is learning curve, and to discount it before experiencing it, is to mislabel Drupal before actually learning what it’s about. I can’t help you with that misconception because, even for an experienced programmer, the learning curve is pretty steep.
Finally, I think the reason it looks like we’re all drinking the same coolaid is because… largely, we are. The Drupal community communicates a lot, and largely I think we’re all on the same page as to where we’re heading and what we want to be doing. If you don’t like Drupal today… try it again next year about this time.
Eclipse
Posted 05 May 2008 at 9:42 pm ¶Daniel, I have to say that I think your are just opposed to Drupal and anything I say will make no difference. But I work with Drupal on a daily basis building complex, large scale websites. When I go home, for personal publishing I will use Wordpress.
Is one better than the other? No, they are two different applications in my opinion. They both have their appeal to different markets. For my personal blog or website, at least to me, Drupal is a little overkill. I just want to post some articles and have some photos for my flickr page. But on large scale sites, I couldn’t imaging creating it in wordpress. I am sure you can, but I feel Wordpress is more like Dreamweaver where Drupal is more like Textmate (sorry for the Mac comparison).
But again, I am sorry that you do not like Drupal, but to say that it is completely irrelevant is irresponsible of you. It obviously is a relevant force on the web. Instead of ranting against Drupal, write an article that is a little more positive in saying “I didn’t like Drupal, this is why because of X, Y, and Z”.
Steven
Posted 06 May 2008 at 6:02 am ¶@Steven: Your comment more than anyone else’s reinforces my doubts about the viability of the Drupal community. Why be so defensive in the face of rational, real-world criticism from those outside of the community? And to say that my post is “irresponsible” is frankly laughable.
If you read my piece you’ll see that it isn’t about saying WordPress and Drupal are interchangeable; rather that WordPress’s model has built a strong community of end users, while Drupal’s has created an inward-looking community of developers and dev shops.
Oh, and as for your suggestion that I be more positive and “balanced”… I’m not writing a term paper for a community college. If you want Drupal to succeed you’ll have to accept that it’s about responding to, not arguing with, the market’s reaction and perception.
Posted 06 May 2008 at 6:59 am ¶@Eclipse. I think we’re going around in circles here, but the reason I’m so focused on startups is because that’s where innovation in technology originates. It certainly doesn’t live in the web development team for a large company, or in a community built around servicing these companies.
Posted 06 May 2008 at 7:05 am ¶Well, again Daniel, I think that must be a difference of opinion on who is developing what, but I think we can probably agree to disagree.
Eclipse
Posted 06 May 2008 at 9:15 am ¶Here, here, Daniel
Posted 06 May 2008 at 12:54 pm ¶Except for marketing your entire argument is hollow. You title your post that Wordpress will make Drupal irrelevant but you don’t make a clear case for how. You only argue that Drupal does nothing well and you state this is “obvious”. There are plenty examples of large-scale websites, blogs, startups, social-networking, and brochure-ware site etc. being built on Drupal.
Both Drupal and WordPress have functionality extensions in the form of modules and plugins, respectively. WordPress comes with more features built-in to the core download which is good for some people, the people who want those features. And because those features are in the core product the main development team can spend time perfecting the user experience of all that functionality and interfaces. I am certain there are plugins for WordPress that have a horrible user experience just like there are Drupal modules that do.
Posted 07 May 2008 at 11:41 am ¶@Ben: As Ian Bell notes in the comments thread of his response to my post:
Here’s the problem with your comment: you say my argument is hollow. But it’s not an “argument”; it’s a result of real-world experience with the extent to which the Drupal community has built something that works only for the Drupal community.
And as is clear from the piece, I’m not suggesting that WordPress and Drupal are interchangeable; instead that successful products, platforms, frameworks will always emerge from the kinds of community that WordPress is building vs. the kind that Drupal has built.
Posted 07 May 2008 at 11:53 am ¶“But on large scale sites, I couldn’t imaging creating it in wordpress.”
Not sure what you mean by large scale, but if you’re referring to traffic or # of users, WordPress.com is a good counter-example to both, with over 3,000,000 users and serving 600+ million dynamic pageviews a month. If you’re below that size there’s a beaten path for how to scale.
Posted 08 May 2008 at 12:07 am ¶@Matt: Thanks for stopping by. Just watched a video of your presentation at the web 2 summit; sounds like there are a lot of interesting developments coming to WordPress.
Posted 08 May 2008 at 6:49 am ¶Very interesting this Post .
Marcelo
Posted 24 May 2008 at 10:40 am ¶Having recently attempted to publish a tech business website using Drupal I’ll say that I was astonished to discover that:
Posted 27 May 2008 at 3:21 pm ¶A drupal CMS system doesn’t feature image management out of the box. WTF! - how many image free websites do you find out there.
A drupal CMS system doesn’t support WYSIWYG editing out of the box. WTF! if I wanted to edit HTML I’d use an html editor
A drupal CMS system doesn’t come with a fully populated sample website I can use to start what I’m doing, see examples of actual implementation and read useful documentation on how it is built.
People that are in charge of actual content find drupal indecipherable. Isn’t that who it is supposed to help?
Vancouver = Drupal Land according to Matt Mullenweg
Posted 28 May 2008 at 9:16 am ¶http://blog.ubertor.com/2008/05/28/wordpress-5th-birthday-recap-san-francisco-ca/
So funny this arguement. I am currently trying to set up my 2nd portfolio website on drupal. I have just finished rewriting a module so that I can embed swf´s with swfobject as the swftools module cant find swfobject in version 5 (Ive read 10 posts that say its possible with some work arounds but I dont know how to implement them) - 3 hours later its working through what is probably a licence infringement. OK now how do I make a teaser….. 2 hours later its working whar whoooo!!!! OK how do I embed images in a teaser….. 2 hours later ah its actually quite easy but how do I add an image to that? …. hmmmn is drupal the right solution for this site? Google to check… find this page - maybe it aint. Thanks Daniel for highlighting to me my strange need to waste time doing stuff a designer like me is not built for.
Posted 06 Jul 2008 at 8:32 pm ¶I tried using Drupal, but their use of obscure terms like Taxonomy hurt my brain and most Drupal Websites look horribly random in the way their Home Page content was organized. So I tried hiring ‘experts’ to give me a hand, but it would have cost thousands of dollars to use this FREE CMS because it’s built for developers, not authors. Here’s a suggestion from the video game world. Pick 10 random High School Students and have them use your software to create a website and LEARN from where they struggle and what causes them grief.
Posted 09 Jul 2008 at 3:39 am ¶I think somewhat of a different perspective might be useful …
Nov 07 I knew zero about building web sites. One of the primary reasons I ended up choosing Drupal was the “well architected” comments I found about it. It took me 2 months to learn enough in order to build my 1st test site. I knew what I wanted it to be able to do.
- It is pretty clear what the primary purpose (do) of WordPress is.
- Drupal, on the other hand is clearly a “Lego set”.
What I am definitely missing for Drupal, is recommendations (Solution Patterns) for different types of Site. I have not found any extensive reference on this important topic.
It’s nice to have good descriptions of building blocks. But a couple of “puzzler box” pictures are sorely needed.
PS: I know two people that have been using Joomla for 2+ years that are raving about the usability of Drupal… (The one is complaining about the myriad settings, though.)
Good luck with your website.
Posted 20 Jul 2008 at 5:46 am ¶I fully agree - If it works for you- use that.
I applaud your efforts but I don’t agree. And I think this line is where you probably start to get off track about Drupal:
“But surely the primary function of a CMS is to make content management simple and idiot proof for non-technical users”
This is simply not the right definition of a content management system. The correct definition at the heart of it all is that a CMS is a system to manage content.
Posted 02 Sep 2008 at 9:33 am ¶There’s a large hidden POV piece here… From the point of view OF a developer, Drupal is great - it gives you all the power (and more!) of a commercial CMS/web platform, and it does it for free!
Wordpress, on the other hand, seems to have evolved from the opposite end of the telescope - the end user trying to put up their own blog. Which, back in the day definitely meant knowing something about php, apache configs, etc… But, the evolution since has definitely aimed at minimizing the barriers to entry, and getting a site up that works “the way you want it”.
Drupal simply IS about Developers having a nice and powerful tool that they can get PAID for developing on - it’s almost useless to compare Drupal and Wordpress by built in or modular functionalities… It’s more like comparing a VB developer and a Java/Python/Ruby developer. If you know even a little teeny bit, then you instantly suspect that the VB programmer is probably a moron who writes extremely ugly incomprehensible code… But if the Python developer is driving a nice car and wearing socks that match, well maybe she knows a thing or two about algorithms.
Still, there are more people paying the bills who want “this thing in my head to work, YESTERDAY”, who have 0 developers in front of them, and can at least read through the first chapter of the “VB for Dummies” without their heads exploding… And they wind up creating the incredibly sucky thing that will eventually be replaced down the road by something slick in a “real” language. Happens every day.
But, yeah, if the goal is “get the message out about how cool I am”, then the path for a non-developer is going to be WP->adsense cha-ching->hire drupal developer.
And that doesn’t need to be a big messy “let’s fight about it” thing. It just is that way today. But it’s an interesting chicken-and-egg: If Drupal can somehow get non-devs to inject themselves into the community in droves, then the community balance will naturally steer itself back toward accessibility, which would in turn attract lots of non-devs into the community. Which would still make for more paid Drupal work (smaller, more plentiful jobs, maybe)… But by keeping the community so dev-centric, drupal misses out on all that extra (and different) energy - kind of like Linux in the pre-commercial days.
One of Dan’s other points, about startups using Drupal as an “apps” platform (I think that’s what he’s saying) kinda dovetails off this as well - The fact that Drupal doesn’t save competent developers who don’t know Drupal any time over building the first cut of a site/app from scratch (or is at least perceived not to provide such savings) is telling… Maybe, more than Summer of Code, Drupal needs some “Summer of Apps” money - or to sponsor its own incubator for websites/apps developed (and monetized) on Drupal.
Rarr.
Posted 01 Oct 2008 at 11:04 pm ¶Dan
Posted 27 Oct 2008 at 9:56 pm ¶I am the user everyone is talking about who wants to take my blog into another platform. After looking at WordPress verses Drupal … I agree with you. I don’t have the luxury of the kind of time Drupal would ask of me to get something done in a few minutes so I can help my son with homework. I love your arguments and am going with Wordpress.
By the way, I used to believe I was a fairly smart girl until I tried to figure Drupal out … it left me feeling stupid and extremely frustrated. Who needs that in their life…?
Catherine
Interesting discussion. I am ready to start a customized website for my org and I am pretty close to choosing Drupal. Why? Flexibility.
Wordpress, being simple, has architectural limitations, you can only stretch it so far; like how tract housing is simple, cheap, and looks pretty much the same. For my organization, I do not want simple, cheap, and “cookie-cutter” appearance.
Drupal gives me the surveyor, architect, and engineer in a box. Drupal just expects me to speak their language (html, css, and PHP) or find people that already do (themes and modules).
Posted 07 Nov 2008 at 9:00 am ¶I am heavy user of these both cms and I can say there are two kind of people and two cms. One is for total dummies WP or people who know only bigmack’s (food) and can eat only ready packed food. yep its delicious and easy, of course they can add little extra stuff in there too but they will die hungry if burger store close even if there kitchen is full with beef bread pickles etc. on the other side is Drupal or people who can eat it as ready and packed food and even a newbie with very little effort can be ready to make it look or taste as he likes. what you learn you never loose, so i don’t mind putting in little effort to learning a bit if it can help me either at McDonald or my kitchen. All drupal need is a well organized kitchen with proper labels and a burger for dummies with matching label and look. If some can not start a basic drupal site he/she can not fix even smallest or simplest problem with wp. I use both based on where and what for am using them, how long am going to use them and what I want to add into site in the feature.
Posted 10 Nov 2008 at 8:20 pm ¶Joomla… easier backend UI for non-technical users. Can even put the content creation functions on the front end.
Posted 17 Nov 2008 at 5:52 am ¶Drupal needs a team to implement and a major time commitment. No one person could possibly put up a Drupal site that looks high end. A programmer can deliver but his site will look like crap and be user un-friendly without a front end designer.
Drupal is not a solution for home based operations on a budget - which is really the biggest market these days. Then again Drupal is not a solution for companies with money, as they tend to build custom solutions. It caters to developers only. They don’t market to end users.
One thing I have discovered is that Drupal generally ignores content structure and layout when it comes to the admin. There are very few options to structure content on the page (node) (basically the front-end side of things). You have to go to the back-end to do all this. Drupals flexibility and features are only available to programmers.
Drupal uses VIEWS module which is required for structuring and presenting content. Yet it is designed for a programmers mindset using terms like “arguments”. This tells me they don’t care about non-technical users, or are arrogant enough to think that non-technical people shouldn’t be building websites. I believe VIEWS could easily be adapted for non-coders. But if site creators didn’t need programming to get functionality, then those that are developing Drupal will loose work. The inherit complexity of Drupal benefits those that code.
Drupal seems to be so developer centric that they totally ignore aspects outside the realm of function. There is no form, no inclusion of design. I can see that Drupal has likely never consulted with front-end designers or even non-technical users in the process. This has left Drupal with a gaping hole is it’s ability to service the mass market.
Like the article says, a CMS’s core function should be to bypass complexity in site content creation and management. To streamline website creation. Drupal doesn’t. It only helps programmers build a back-end of a website faster. Out of the box Drupal is weak. Drupal is not turnkey.
Taxonomy and freetagging are good ideas, but Drupal offers very few ways to manipulate these from the admin. Try using VOCAB for navigation and you will find there are so many holes in manipulating the way vocabs work that php coding becomes necessary.
Drupal is basically Microsoft (catering to developers) and Joomla and Wordpress are Google (catering to the Noob). Sure wp and Joomla are not as advanced in the back-end, but as Google proves it, the front-end is VERY important when it comes to market share.
Try Expression Engine, the cost of that commercial CMS is worth it for the user interface and superb front end friendly control. EE 2.0 admin is a super model compared to drupal’s janitor admin.
Also now that there is a commercial version of drupal (disguised as a support plan) that will profit of coders free work. That company got 7mil in financing so they have every intention of profiting off of Drupal. Coders hard work building modules and functionality will then be integrated into the “paid ” version.
I am personally looking forward to modx revolution. It is very front-end friendly but also offers a framework for easy coding.
Either way, Drupal’s cool features and functionality can be emulated. Once they are then it’s all about who makes building websites easier, faster and more enjoyable for the masses.
Posted 27 Nov 2008 at 10:20 pm ¶I couldn’t agree more! I am no stranger to content management, development, … etc. I find Drupal to be mind numbingly impossible to use. Nothing works the way I expect, nothing works period, darn it. I’m tired of these darn /node links what the he!! is that supposed to mean. How come when I make something sub navigation it doesn’t show up? Why do I get this error message about the cron tab? Who the he!! asked them to touch my cron tab. No worries the answer to all of these questions lies in one simple command: rm -rf drupal-6.6.
After reading your post it hit me, WordPress is the answer, it does everything I need it to do, and it works right away. I could kick myself!
Posted 21 Dec 2008 at 10:55 pm ¶Ah, the old Linux/Windows, no wait, the Gnome/KDE, no wait, the Gentoo/Debian debate. These never get old.
User: Your program sucks cause I don’t understand it. It will therefore die cause I don’t get it in the first 2 days of halfway pisssing around with it.
Dev: You sir, are too simple minded to understand the raw power and Flexibility of the system. I shall not address the issue that simpeltons cannot run the system because everyone should be a developer. You and your kind will die off like dodos and be replaced by a race of superprogrammers, so these simple userinterface issue will resolve themselves.
User: Na, ahhh,
Dev: Uh huh.
User: No way.
Dev: You betcha.
Posted 07 Jan 2009 at 10:56 am ¶I have tried Drupal, Wordpress, and Joomla. Joomla was really hard to learn so I just stopped using it. The first site I built using drupal looked good but I didn’t know any php so I couldn’t get all of the functionality that I wanted. Wordpress was a match because it offered everything I wanted through plugins
Posted 18 Jan 2009 at 1:00 pm ¶The funniest thing about this argument is this the same argument that is been going on since ver 1.0 LOL -
I started my first CMS geared site in 05 with drupal because I read all the Drupal bias reviews. After a month of trying to figure it out and going rounds with the “developers” on the site. I moved to WP and started turning a profit in a month - LOL
now 4 years latter I stumble on people WITH THE SAME EXACT COMPLAINTS THAT I WAS HAVING IN 05
Drupal is the Greatest thing since sliced bread.
Yeah but I have been going in circles for the last 3 weeks trying to figure out how do to xyz.
Not to mention I am a pretty savy programmer.
The response is always - we Drupaler’s understand and we are going in the right the derection to be more this or that.
But WTH - I have a business to run - I can’t wait YEARS for you “community of cats” as one drupaler put it to figure out that a Hammer is not the best tool for EVERY job.
(cats meaning they ALL kinda walk to their own tune rather than being like dogs who can be taught to do something consistantly the way that you want it done)
I will be doing an IPO by the times you guys figure it out - and then it won’t matter
I’ll hire you “cats” to do something worth while with your time.
ROTFLMBO
Posted 25 Jan 2009 at 10:25 am ¶I agree that WP will beat Drupal in some time the way its growing while drupal is just getting more and more confusing. It looks great but to developers and on top of it everybody touts as an Open source CMS where developers ask for a minimum of USD 50,000 to do a site ( corresponding cost in WP is USD 200 or free) and themeing is impossible.
Main think is drupal community think that they are god and have utter lack of respect for a normal publisher or user and think that having beautiful and easy thing is an insult to their intellect.
Posted 31 Jan 2009 at 9:07 am ¶I have to side with the author of this post, he’s dead on right about everything.
This is why Wordpress is more widely used and will continue to rank #1.
Drupal is fine for programmers who are into tweaking ever fraken piece of code and bloating their site to no end.
The majority of site owners don’t have the time, they want to write and publish, point and click. Drupal fails big time at this.
Power is in simplicity, Drupal has bloat not power, Wordpress is light years above Drupal. It takes you 10 extra steps in Drupal to do one simple task in Wordpress. Drupal sites are a nightmare to maintain as well over Wordpress.
I agree with the original post, finally someone who gets it.
Posted 01 Feb 2009 at 5:32 am ¶I chose Drupal simply because it had an e-commerce system that did everything I needed. Joomla was hopeless, I believe they wanted $ for some things, and Wordpress did not have anything I needed for e-commerce. Ubercart and Drupal were simply the most flexible combinations I could find.
I would use Wordpress in a minute for anything simple or for a website that I was certain would need functionality out of the modules offered. If you even suspect that a customer will want something more from, Wordpress would be a bad choice.
This is no Microsoft/Mac debate! Their both free. Many people reading this may be trying to figure out which one suits their purpose. What caught my eye was the “Drupal Irrelevant”. If you keep up with the CMS scene at all, you may notice that the developers of both work together occasionally. You have access to the code for both. If either were found irrelevent, it would hurt both of them.
I’ve noticed many posts here where people gave up on Drupal about the point that I was going to give up. I simply had to dig and learn, then I reaped the rewards. I’m confident that I could put together almost any website with Drupal. It’s simply a matter of learning.
Drupal is an excellent way to learn PHP, MySQL, and CSS. You have a working platform to learn from and and army of developers that will help where they can.
Drupal is a horrible platform for any quick website design from an inexperienced Drupal developer. I would agree with any comment about this. I would disagree that it is not good for a startup business, at least one that’s going to succeed. Drupal will be flexible enough to meet new requirements, Wordpress will not. Flexibility is not the Wordpress goal, ease of use is.
Drupal is very much like Linux, except with a better community to help you. Yes, their geeks, but a geek is what you want for complex problem solving.
Posted 01 Feb 2009 at 11:27 pm ¶Drupal and Wordpress are two very different products. The first is more of an open framework for site development, the other a more of traditional web application.
You’re right–what Wordpress does right out of the box it does very well. The interface is is beautiful. The themes are really well designed. For non-technical people looking to put up a blog, there is no question that it’s the way to go. Depending on a publisher’s aspirations, it can even serve as the basis for a magazine.
On the other hand, Drupal is a more technical product aimed at installations where requirements can change rapidly.
It’s more of a site framework than a blogging platform, so while you can use it to blog and publish magazine content, you can also extend it in the direction of more advanced web applications.
The keyword here is ‘extend.’ Drupal doesn’t assume many requirements right out of the box. At installation time, it’s more like a blank canvass. (I think this is why new users are surprised –and often frustrated–that it doesn’t include some features –like a WYSIWYG–right out of the box. ) On the other hand, this is exactly why developers like it: It’s a great way to get projects running quickly and securely.
I’m not quite sure why you say that start ups would never consider it. I personally haven’t run into this, but I’ll take your word for it. I will say, thought that if that’s the case, I’d be rather surprised if that mindset didn’t change over time. Drupal’s foundation is quite strong.
Finally, I really don’t understand your comment about not being able to find good in-house drupal people. They seem to be crawling out of the woodwork where I’m at.
BTW: Drupal 6 is terrific. You should also read this article about the technical considerations in switching from WordPress to Drupal, and why someone would choose to do so. Here’s a case study of a big site that made the switch, and it sounds like it worked out pretty well. http://drupal.org/node/341231
Posted 06 Feb 2009 at 1:53 pm ¶That’s just it, no sane end user wants to learn those things, code is for geeks not everyday users.
Drupal doesn’t have a clue about the end user, it’s for programmers and geek monkey’s.
The time it takes to maintain a drupal site compared to a wordpress site boggles the mind.
Everything is faster in wordpress and more simple, this is what end users want not how to spend hours tweaking code to get it to work.
Posted 12 Feb 2009 at 3:01 pm ¶I don’t think you read the post completely. There are plenty of sane users that want alot of flexibility and need more in their websites functionality than the “gadget” style of add-ons that Wordpress has.
For example, if you need a highly complex e-commerce system, Wordpress alone is not going to cut it and you will waste time trying. I was trying to inform users of this.
Wordpress no longer becomes faster or even functional once your needs reach this level and the user is now in a severe time deficit with all the time the could have used learning a system that meets their needs.
Do you think Wordpress developers just throw this together with magic? Programmers code and tweak quite a bit to create Wordpress, and I would bet most of them are sane.
If you have a Project Manager that can’t understand this, then they are in severe jeopardy once they find out they’ve reached the limits of Wordpress.
The title of this post would lead someone to think that Wordpress actual could put Drupal out of business, and anyone that truly understands what these 2 systems are about would know that it’s a baseless comment. This misunderstanding could lead to a very bad decision. I would suspect that Drupal is irrelevant to a non-technical person because they’re never going to get it off the ground to begin with. However, I would pity the developer stuck in Wordpress limitations because his powers that be think that Drupal’s existence is going to disappear.
Posted 12 Feb 2009 at 11:12 pm ¶As with all these debates we will have to agree to disagree. Those who are on the drupal bandwagon will continue to support their cart and the same goes for the wordpress followers. These type of debates usually only add to the confusion and frustration of the people who need some good advice.
So instead here is a simple summary and features will not be discussed because someone will always point out that the same can be done with the other system.
Wordpress:
Light framework, small learning curve, easier for non-developers, can be expanded.
Drupal
Heavier framework, steeper learning curve, requires development skills, can be expanded.
Most people that are usually looking at these posts are trying to get a sense of what system they should invest their time in. They are either on their own, or part of a small startup. They want to blog, discuss, post some pics and vids and displays some ads. They also want some more control and ownership than what is offered by blogger.com, wordpress.com or other alternatives. If that is you go with wordpress. If your needs grow and wordpress no longer meets them, and I’m not saying that it won’t, take a look at another product.
Lastly take a look at http://onepresscommunity.com/ to see a polished community based wordpress/phpBB product. It is really something special and we have recently begun our own startup and we are using onepress/wordpress/phpBB.
I hope this helps some of you out there.
Posted 16 Feb 2009 at 2:03 am ¶I feel like I have to jump in here, after several months of comments… Is it so hard to understand that this article isn’t about suggesting WordPress and Drupal are equivalent and interchangeable? The point is simply that WordPress demonstrates the power of what a real, vibrant community can create; Drupal on the other hand shows what happens when an insular group of developers build something for themselves.
WordPress makes Drupal irrelevant not because I expect people would pick one over the other, so much as the kind of model WordPress represents is the future whereas Drupal is not.
Posted 16 Feb 2009 at 6:23 am ¶I cannot help but disagree with you.
First of all, the number of ready-to-go Drupal modules is enormous, comparable if not more than Wordpress.
Second of all, Drupal’s flexibility with CCK and Views for new content types (and both will be in core in the next release, Drupal 7) blows away anything Wordpress has in this aspect. You complained about needing to write modules; these two modules reduce that need significantly. Until WP gets that, I will never leave Drupal as my primary website dev platform.
Thirdly, Drupal themes are much better today than ever before, which makes up for one of its former largest deficiencies compared to WP for small users (imo).
At the moment, the only thing I can think of WP being better than Drupal in (again from my perspective, I do this for a hobby, not for a living though I do contract jobs) is that WP has a WYSIWYG that’s awesome and Drupal has nothing of that kind (and Drupal’s modules for that are either crappy or difficult to install and still inferior to WP’s).
But compared to the power of things like CCK and Views, I would never go back to WP.
JMO. I would recommend you try Drupal again. Once you get the hang of it, it’s beautiful.
Posted 18 Feb 2009 at 8:20 pm ¶Nice article… wrong title
Posted 19 Feb 2009 at 10:09 am ¶Thank you. I am getting ready to set up my second blog site and was wondering about wordpress alternatives. Looks like I will be sticking to wordpress.
Posted 22 Feb 2009 at 7:31 pm ¶I have to agree.
Now for some background, I was a software developer in a past life, did custom content management systems, got a degree, yadda yadda.
I found WordPress quicker to install and get running and more intuitive. And this is the WordPress of 2 or 3 years ago versus the Drupal of today.
I was asked by my sister to set up a website for her, and she didn’t want a blog, she wanted to post resources for her class. I couldn’t get Drupal to work. Finally using some auto install feature on my host, which also didn’t work, and having my host set up drupal for me, I still didn’t find it very intuitive, so now I’m supposed to hand this over to my sister, who actually does know HTML…
Na… I live in Drupal land too. Just today someone said they would have a website done for 3000 dollars that was database driven, professional, interacted with Google Maps, had an events calendar, was community updateable etc. etc. Of course it will be done in Drupal. I know how much a website really costs, and the biggest cost is often time, especially after the site is up, when people want changes. Maybe this is where Drupal shines, but custom solutions are by their very nature easy to customize…
How much time to set up the website, and how much time to train people to use it, and how much time to maintain it, keep it secure, spam free etc. etc. There are lots of hidden costs, I remember reading how great Django wasthis has to be over 5 years ago…
The funniest thing about the Wordpress/Drupal debate is they are both PHP/MySQL for the most part. I’m not the biggest fan of PHP… I think having it mixed in with the HTML is not the elegant solution, the UI should be seperated from the logic more, and it is interpreted, etc. etc.
I also take umbarge to saying Microsoft is developer friendly, compared to who Satan?
Anyway I do agree the Wordpress is good at blogging, and getting a website up quick. Drupal is better at building community oriented sites rather than one man shows. Wordpress doesn’t have a lot of workflow logic, which is what a real publish needs. I remember the elaborate review and approval process that was in one of the custom CMS’s I worked on.
Wasn’t in PHP for the record.
Posted 24 Feb 2009 at 4:59 pm ¶My first experience with drupal was as an employee at a retail store updating the company website. This was before I learned to develop with Drupal or Wordpress. For me, the end user (and not the site developer), it was nowhere near as user friendly as publishing with Wordpress has proven to be.
Overall though, I agree with the “use what works for you” idea. Both drupal and wordpress kick ass for different people. For me, as both a publisher and a website developer, I love wordpress and would only try using drupal again if I were desperate for something that wordpress couldn’t do for me.
Posted 22 Mar 2009 at 11:16 pm ¶Well, I am using Joomla currently for hosting articles of the magazine I publish. I find this limiting because the tagging and subscription features (subscribing to authors) and blogging are not well developed in Joomla. Now I want to evaluate WP and Drupal. I need social network features as well, but have shoe string budgets. What does this group recommend, Lot of content plus social network. Should I go for something like Ning+WP or should I go with Drupal.
Posted 23 Mar 2009 at 1:07 am ¶I had to stop reading half way through.
I am a developer and a business analyst and what I notice in this article/rant is consistent with what I have observed over time, and that is this author wants an app that is very flexible and has no end to what it can do and is also easy of use all for free!
Its a nice dream.
Its not going to happen any time soon. The natural barrier that exist between developers and end users will always exist.
Save yourself the headache and pay a professional or learn to code.
Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 1:33 pm ¶Hi,
We are now a year on. Daniel, do you think that WordPress is making Drupal obselete.
Do you think Drupal has improved at all?
I’m a self-learned web designer. I created my first website 15 years ago. One of the re-ocurring themes is the need of simplicity for non-programmers. However, my view is that the web is becoming more complicated. HTML may have sufficed 15 years ago, but it no longer does. Unless you want to create a static web page, you need to know a darn sight more.
Although there are plenty WYSIWYG programmes are we saying that WordPress is the equivalent to a WYSIWYG editor and Drupal a programmer’s tool? If so, I would agree.
Speed of deployment is not necessarily the best. The Internet is littered with websites no longer maintained. I know this isn’t a popular idea, but it would be better if people learned the required technologies before venturing into the webesphere. If you know what you’re doing then you can use WordPress, Drupal, and just about any other programme to it’s full potential. Really, everyone wants to cuts corners. I think it still applies that you read the instruction manual before you use the item. Having carefully gone through the Drupal 6 manual, I don’t know what the fuss is all about. By the way, I’ve also read the WordPress manual and use that where it fits.
I know these things require time, but doesn’t everything if you want to do a good job? We spend time doing what we believe to be important. If your website is important to you, learn the technology and don’t expect someone’s plugin in to do it for you, and then complain because it doesn’t work how you would like it and don’t know how to configure it.
Posted 21 Apr 2009 at 9:30 am ¶The main point of your analysis is completely true: Drupal is not a CMS, it’s a development platform. Granted it’s one that is insanely powerful and you can build very large, very powerful websites with less time than in virtually anything else.
It is not for individual bloggers, out of the box. That’s what Wordpress is great at. But where’s a problem in that? Why should Drupal “kill” Wordpress to be awesome? They both have their niche and are great at that.
As for Drupal usefuleness. Out-of-the-box Drupal is bare-bones on purpose. As a matter of fact, it should probably be even more minimalistic. If you want more powerful package, you should download one of the customized Installation Profiles. E.g. OpenPublish is a powerful packaged Drupal installation for publishers. There’s an ecommerce one, too etc.
Posted 19 May 2009 at 6:34 am ¶Man this is such an awesome post. The irony of Drupal and it’s community is that they’ve worked to make it so robust and capable of doing almost anything that its now overkill for 90% of the websites that may need to use it. I agree that the community doesn’t have enough marketing and design sense. Drupal is truly made for the hardcore programmer while Wordpress has made it easy for the designer to create something very effective for their clients. Wordpress rocks anything from blogs to simple websites, photo and design galleries, to magazine websites. It’s now my choice for a large majority of my clients because of its fast development time and ease of use for the admin.
Posted 23 May 2009 at 9:33 am ¶90% of the comments here seem to miss the point of view offered by Daniel.
The point of view is about matching the needs and desires of the market you claiming or aiming for.
Rather than using terms such as content management system (CMS), code framework or library - lets cut it to the basics. They are both *software products*.
By looking at them as software products and leaving our biases aside we can read their respective front page descriptions (at the time of this writing - June 8, 2009):
DRUPAL: Drupal, an open source content management platform. Equipped with a powerful blend of features, Drupal supports a variety of websites ranging from personal weblogs to large community-driven websites.
WORDPRESS: WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.
Drupal bills itself as a software product for managing content as indicates that it is used for a variety of websites. — I’d walk away with the impression that this is for people who want to manage content. The part about the variety of websites would be irrelevant to me unless I was curious.
Wordpress bills itself as a web publishing tool that is aesthetically pleasing and usable. — I’d walk away with the impression that this is for people who want to publish stuff to the web.
When we use products we’re not looking to invest a lot of time in understanding what its really for and how we can use. Typically if not immediately apparent and demonstrably useful we move on.
My verdict as a developer:
I’ve worked with Drupal in the past more than I’ve worked with Wordpress. I can say the only reason I’m familiar with it is because I make money by developing sites on it. If I were a business owner I would not select the Drupal software product for much because I wouldn’t like it out of the box - it doesn’t do anything for me immediately. However I would select the Wordpress software product for a company blog.
I agree with the excerpt from Mike Stopforth’s site: Drupal’s problem is that the community behind it - genius’s that they are - simply don’t get marketing - they need more people like the gang at Lullabot, and I daresay you and I to help them ‘humanise’ Drupal.
I’d add that if the Drupal community focused their efforts on being a more specific content management system or redefined themselves based on a verb like publishing it would force them into a better position market wise. Prettying up the admin interface won’t cut it.
Posted 08 Jun 2009 at 1:10 pm ¶The bottom line is, will Drupal last long enough to become what it should be? Wordpress is growing at such great speeds, that I don’t think Drupal has enough time to fix all those issues that all the Drupal fans on this post agree that it has. Wordpress is growing as a community, (Plugins, users etc.) and as a system so fast its insane. I think calling wordpress a blogging system is almost an insult now days. But you know what I hope Drupal can hang in there, honestly competition will only make Wordpress a better system!
I am a designer, with some basic coding skills, enough to make wordpress do whatever I want it to do, and it don’t take much, just have to be a good researcher. But I am by no means a programmer, so how in gods name would I build something using Drupal and offer it to my client, and on top of that, train them on the mess I created? I cant!
Posted 11 Jun 2009 at 1:14 pm ¶90% of commenters missed Dan’s point which he clarified by saying:
‘ WordPress makes Drupal irrelevant not because I expect people would pick one over the other, so much as the kind of model WordPress represents is the future whereas Drupal is not.’
I agree with half of this statement - that the Wordpress model represents the future. But it’s a complex market, where people do pick Drupal over Wordpress, for all the reasons the Drupal fans are making. If Joomla or some other similarly fully-featured, flexible CMS platform did have the marketing and focus that Wordpress has, it would make Drupal irrelevant. But there isn’t one. A model on it’s own, without a real product behind it won’t make anything irrelevant.
Now, if Wordpress gets more flexible and more powerful then maybe it would become such a thing. Or, if Drupal gets more usable and more cool, maybe it would.
I say this whilst, on the whole, I think Dan is right about Drupal and its community. 3 years ago I knew almost nothing about web programming. I wanted to start a community site with forums, newsletters etc etc. I looked at WP but the forums seemed rather weak and I didn’t want to have to learn phpBB as well. Drupal did have a steep learning curve even to a fairly geeky type like me. I learnt CSS quick enough although still struggle with PHP mostly because I don’t have time to study it, or Drupal’s API, properly. But we got a mostly-functional site for a few thousand pounds, probably half or less than it would have cost bespoke (?). But the fact is that if I had been less of a geeky type, or if I had not been around, Wordpress probably would have sufficed, and the main end-user of the site would probably be happier, as there are plenty of little idiosyncracies and weird behaviours that this half-measure has resulted in. If I happen to stop developing the site, there are certainly more people out here (rural England) who could help with WP backend than Drupal backend.
I’ve never actually used WP but I have to develop an image gallery site for a very un-techy user soon. With Drupal I’d know what to do straight off, but I think I’ve just convinced myself to use it as an opportunity to learn WP….
Posted 25 Jun 2009 at 5:55 am ¶Nothing has changed over the years in terms of learning curves, flexibility and functional use. VisiCalc and then Lotus 1-2-3 required training and a learning curve. The 1987 version of Oracle and subsequent MS-Access same thing. FrontPage and Dreamweaver ditto. Network protocols as well. Today’s web2.o and Facebook see a new emerging market for support services to help us get up the learning curve, and company’s like my new nonprofit, and Sony, hire these companies to train us and support us. That Drupal is flexible and complex, easy to use and module-centric, that is OK.
That WordPress does a good jon on pure CMS and blogging, that’s cool. Put whatever you choose, do your homework, and get support.
This thread of opinions, discussion and dialog is what makes shopping for a new web platform so easy these days. In one thread I have a nearly complete discourse on Drupal vs WordPress vs others. I recently completed 3+ months of reviewing my options for the web platform of our brand new nonprofit, with the goal of having a website and social network that helps our company grow in the pursuit of our mission, vision, purpose.
I am a 23 year career IT systems guy, having done everything in the protocol stack, and in previous ventures wrote my own sites. Now it’s time to move on, and spend my time in front of customers and the community, delivering services and effecting the revenue stream away from building the IT platform.
My conclusion is go with Drupal, and hire a good Drupal dev team to provide training to get us up the learning curve. They’ll train me, they’ll train staff, and also provide service level support on contract… all as we become self dependent on Drupal in pursuit of web2.0 functionality.
I do not expect Drupal to be easy or have a short learning curve, and I watch in a mature mindset how Drupal is progressing. What I do expect is Open Source/LAMP maturity in my platform supported by a vast community of private support teams and core developers. With this, I can stake my company’s web-presence success, because I have reasonable expectations, did my homework, played in a few Drupal sandboxes, and have decided on Drupal vs everyone else.
If I only needed blogging on steroids, WordPress wins, but I’d still do my homework, and hire contract services to get the job done right.
Nothing has changed over the years in terms of learning curves, flexibility and functional use. VisiCalc and then Lotus 1-2-3 required training and a learning curve. The 1987 version of Oracle and subsequent MS-Access same thing. FrontPage and Dreamweaver ditto. Network protocols as well. Today’s web2.o and Facebook see a new emerging market for support services to help us get up the learning curve, and company’s like my new nonprofit, and Sony, hire these companies to train us and support us. That Drupal is flexible and complex, easy to use and module-centric, that is OK.
Today, Drupal rules for most company’s in the CMS space. Tomorrow….. ?
Posted 28 Jun 2009 at 6:47 pm ¶Trackbacks & Pingbacks 1
Dan is Down on Drupal…
Dan Gibbons of Carrie and Danielle is down on Drupal. Can't say I blame him, he pretty much nails the reason why I have avoided Drupal for any project I have managed…….
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