Difference between Drupal and Wordpress

I haven't used Wordpress very much from an administrator / developer point of view, but as I understand it, Wordpress is a blogging platform or content publishing system, and by content I mean articles, text and images.

Drupal is more of a web application development platform. Using CCK and a few other contributed modules you can create any kind of site. Wordpress is not designed to do this. You wouldn't attempt to recreate Flickr using Wordpress (link).

Neither can you build an entire social networking site with Wordpress, at least, not without significant effort. Drupal is designed from the ground to handle many different situations besides just publishing text and images. Have a look through the contributed module section and you will see what I mean.

So ultimately, you must decide really what you want your site to do. Then, if both Drupal and Wordpress can do it, you will need to start thinking of other factors, like community, security, theming, etc.

Hope that helps!

Cheers
Mark

http://codebaboon.com
Drupal based services

Every couple weeks Wordpress releases another updated version.

The problem associated with constant updating of Wordpres... All the addins/plugings, themes,etc. seem to be version dependent.

You'll get stuck waiting for 3rd party guys to follow up with a newer version of their addin or theme that works with the latest Wordpress.

If you've got one site, and plenty of time Wordpress may fill your bill. If you just ignore the upgrades and "let it ride" you'll eventually get hacked or cracked. It's imperative to upgrade with Wordpress, as it is with Drupal.

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Drupal team makes plenty of updates as well , but the way the application is developed there is no interdependency like with Wordpress The modules that I used in 5.1 Drupal are working fine in 5.7.

MO, of course. Good luck

Something I hear quite often is, if you can think it Drupal can do it!

Drupal can do this: www.popsugar.com and this www.observer.com

Can wordpress do the same?

My point is Drupal is more flexible and more powerful than any other CMS I have come across - yes it does have a learning curve (although this aims to be fixed in coming versions) but in terms of power it has pretty much everything you want.

I'm still a Drupal newbie myself - but the above is what attracts me to Drupal, and away from the other 'lessor' systems.

In my opinion its very easy :)

Wordpress is just a blogging CMS. Its one of the best blogging solutions I know, but if you want to do more than a blog, you reach the limit very fast.

Drupal is more flexible.You can use the blogging feature and build a powerfull blog, but within a "second", you add a forum, user blogs, flexible field definitons (CCK) and so on. Drupal gives you more possibilites to develop you website.

WordPress is specifically targeted at blogging. It's probably superior at that task.

Drupal is targeted at larger-scale content management. Things like content types with different fields and datasets are difficult to add into WordPress (speaking as someone who's developed on both).

I have one!

Your Drupal site won't crash if it gets dugg like a wordpress one will.

I have implemented several Wordpress sites and a few Drupal sites. My experience so far tells me that Drupal is a much more robust platform from which to launch any number of different website types.

Here are some high-level differences I see btw the two:
1. Drupal has a much better permissions scheme than Wordpress does. Anything is possible with Drupal permissions.
2. The concept of "blocks" in Drupal makes it much easier to add meaningful bits of content to your site without having to monkey around with template files. Wordpress has this to a very small degree.
3. The Drupal community seems to me to be much more active and organized than Wordpress.

Those are my thoughts for starters. For what it's worth, I've decided to migrate all my Wordpress sites to Drupal as soon as I can.

Does a project and a community meet your end goals? If yes then decide on that basis. I am not going to tell you Drupal is better for your project, I use Drupal. I do not use WordPress. You will need to make your decision based on your needs.

Drupal has a different founding mission and principles

By building on relevant standards and open source technologies, Drupal supports and enhances the potential of the Internet as a medium where diverse and geographically-separated individuals and groups can collectively produce, discuss, and share information and ideas. With a central interest in and focus on communities and collaboration, Drupal's flexibility allows the collaborative production of online information systems and communities.

WordPress has as their origins

WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPL.

Based on these statements alone you will have an idea which direction you may want/need to go.

Your other comments/questions later indicate some interesting considerations.
Your post here seems to indicate that already your needs are beyond WordPress. So your contender would be Joomla or Drupal. Drupal already wins for you because all the data is in one database. All your user accounts, posts, are all there for you to manipulate and sort as you need for your sites. You may/probably have to do some work on that area to achieve your desired results, but remember, all your data and user accounts are in one location for you to play with and it's just php with a documented and published api.

In regards to forums. Out of the box, no. There are a number of contributed modules and theming you can do to bring it up to where you probably want to be. You have to decide if that integration of content and user accounts with your entire site is worth having to assemble the bits and pieces of a forum to your site or not. There are people doing some additional work in this area and Drupal 6 has a lot of improvements already in it.

Upgrades..... Drupal api's are not compatible between full releases. The api is frozen for each major release however which means that 5.0 is compatible with 5.1 and 5.2 etc but not 6.0. There is ALWAYS an upgrade path for Drupal core data. Virtually every contributed module I have ever used has also had an update path for each module.

In general, Drupal doesn't play with third party forums. There are occasional bridge modules, but well, umm... I have no clue how well they work or how well supported they are.

Drupal has a ton of methods and approaches to override behavior. In general, it is very very rare to hack core. If you are doing that level of work, then it really is in your own best interest to get involved contributing and reviewing patches to the next version of Drupal. So you learn approaches and methodologies in the community and things you contribute back end up being things you are not worried about when upgrading a clients site.

Last answer to above....
The New York Observer implementation info is here. They mention having to do customization in one area. They also mention discussion about how to deal with this in Drupal 6. So, knowing that some of the folks that worked on it are big code contributors, then my suspicion is that there was a lot of contributed code to deal with this for the next version of Drupal. They mention other challenges, but this is a separate deal from hacking core. End result, the next version (just released) probably benefits from this contribution back, customer site will be easier to update... etc. So the rest of us benefit from those that implement these sites.

-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
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