Wordpress 2.5 could teach us a lot

Does WP2.5 admin page still say "Howdy..." at the top?

The WYSIWYG should only be an add on module. And there are a few to choose from.

I don't think that having a nicer 'dashboard' is important. Drupal's works fine now. And there are also a couple modules to alter the admin section.

Eye candy is, after all, just eye candy.

~silverwing -

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MisguidedThoughts | showcaseCMS

there are many sites where it's just overkill, so it's an option, not sure it should be core BUT i do think that abuse modules should be core (flag content) as well as notifications/subscriptions to content - those are no-brainers for me and many others

as for wordpress, it is what it is. in my opinion, what makes it so very appealing to many nontechie installs is the incredible range of themes available and the utility achieved by widget-ready themes (for at least the past year)

drupal blocks are the analogy, but they're not the same, and themes for drupal are light compared to the wordpress design community - picking out a wordpress theme is like shopping in a home depot, and finding a theme for drupal sometimes feels like poking around in a used local hardware store...

packaging baby, it's all packaging, and yes, eye candy moves apps, drupal isn't there yet when it comes to the UI for non tech types, seems like an afterthought sometimes (it's gotten way better, but it's still a crowded screen experience for most users, just look at the types of questions that come up in the forums!)

one big thing that drupal could learn from wordpress: use of basic language. for example, the reason quickbooks rules basic accounting is because consumer versions don't use terms like debit, they say things like 'add money' or 'write a check' - drupal would be well served by rethinking the entire vocabularly for admin interface with plain english, common sense expressions just like wordpress ('manage posts' 'design' etc) and not drupal's "taxonomy" or endless system babble expressions for all core functions...

there's some work already going in this area with admin interface themes, admin interface icons (e.g. iconify) and others, so don't worry - people are thinking about it already.

personally, i've used string overrides module to change tons of text all over my install...

If it didn't, Apple would have gone out of business a decade ago. This isn't just an issue of "eye candy" for "technophobes," either. I'm not wowed by eye candy, and don't hesitate to hack both hardware and software when necessary. So why have I paid substantial price premiums to buy Steve Jobs's computers over the years? It certainly isn't for their field maintainability. No, it's because I'm more productive with a properly-designed interface than with a clunky one.

I've built a couple of sites with Drupal, but I wouldn't say I like it. In fact, it's never been my first choice. However, it has specific features that have given it a unique edge for my purposes: dead-easy multisite configuration and W3C compliance out of the box. Now that Joomla 1.5 is stable, I'm leaning toward migrating at least one of my sites to it. Why? Because any content-management system that makes me jump through hoops to upload images, to pick just one glaring problem, is not a product I want to stick with. I suspect there are many other Drupal admins who are in the same boat.

So yes, Drupal could learn a lot from Wordpress. Rather than getting defensive about it, why not start reverse-engineering the Wordpress interface and co-opting some of its better ideas. The source code is out there.

As a wordpress user for 3+ years and Drupal user for 6+ months I'll add my 2 cents here.

I do agree on the editor part, Wordpress har the most elegant implementation of TinyMCE I've ever worked with, and it's not merely eye candy. I specially like how easy it is to switch between WYSIWYG mode and HTML mode, and how it always produces valid XHTML output.

However, they only have that editor and their standard input filters, and Drupals ability to customize the look and feel of the editor, as well as which roles that can use it and on which content is great! It takes a while to understand, and that probably drives some new users away from Drupal, but it is also very flexible when you do understand it (I'm not sure I'm there yet myself though..)

The editor is further improved in WP 2.5, but what seems to be really new, and what I personally believe Drupal lack the most, is proper media and file handling. As of now I haven't found any *good* way to simply upload images and use it in my content. I use the image attach module now, but I don't like how that creates a new node for each image, and that you have to provide meta information like titles to the images. Also, it's not included directly in the TinyMCE interface. And if you chose a different editor, you would probably (?) need to use different plugins for that editor to have image uploading work.

So, when looking at the recent WP 2.5 screencast, I do get a bit jealus, and I would love if Drupal had a proper file / media handling module that the different editors could tap into!

I used Wordpress a while back & didn't really learn much & ended up letting it go.
The WYSIWYG stuff is more of an annoyance to me as I'm possibly one of the rare few who knows jack crib about word processing the format most WYSIWYG editors seem to use.
(been using a pc since 1998 & never got the hang of things like word & finally stopped installing it about 5 or 6 years back)
Only stuff I ever used before was BBCode & a bit of css & html on static sites.
The
I did look for some sort of editor for Drupal & tried quite few, including exterior apps like Scribefire or wbloggar, but was never satisfied with them.
Ended up spending too much time working out how to format content so it'd look like I wished it, placing images so the sat where I wanted & in the end not one of them did the real job.
Someone suggested that I get into writing full code for content & it's the best step I've made.
Had WYSIWYG been part of the core I'd have ended up using it & posting crippled content, so I'm happy to see it as an add on & not in the core.
Whilst WYSIWYG can be useful I've found it counter-productive, like in dreamweaver, I made loads of sites via the WYSIWYG interface but rarely looked at the code. It's today, working with Drupal that I see the necessity of learning the code.

About the administration section, I agree that a certain amount of style is good for the user (not necessarily 'eye candy' but 'style') so I styled my admin section to be comfortable to work in & added on a couple of useful mods, notably dhtml menus which is a great time saver as it does what it says - makes the menus roll out dhtml style.

Images aren't a problem either, easiest way to do it via the browser is just to upload as an attachment, copy the link & wrap it arounfd an image tag in a post & then turn of the 'view attachment' option.

But I'm coming from the angle of a running 2 Drupal sites, 1 with no users, just myself & the other with 2 users + myself, so obviously my needs are different than those of someone wishing to create community based sites.

So Drupal learn from Wordpress ? I don't even think they're worth comparing, they are so different from each other.
Each suit certain people & I think a lot of Drupal users are quite happy with the direction Drupal travels.
(today I'm in a good mood as I finally took a tiny step into php & made a modification of a snippet for a recent content block & it works !)

Personally I like both Wordpress and Drupal. I suppose the argument could go on for a while just like the OS arguments (windows/linux or windows/mac or linux/mac) as there is probably not a suitable answer to which is better.

I use wordpress for my blog (www.espresso-online.info) and have never really had any issues with it. I like using Wordpress because the installation is simple (Drupal 6's install is reall simple too) and the control panel is easy to use. I wouldn't use Wordpress for a proper website environment as I do not really think that it was created for that purpose and also I dont think that it is powerful enough as well as not being easily modified.

I like drupal for its powerfulness and the way that you can do anything with it. The possibilities are endless. One of the things that I find irriatatting is that there is not a standard, seperate control panel like Wordpress has. I think this would be a good selling point (or using point ;P). I usually use garland for my admin panel and my own them for the website as i find this simpler.

As for media i havnt really gotten into this so far. I tried Joomla a while back but hate the templating system as each time u make a core update to the theme u have to reinstall it.

I quite like the fact that drupal has granular user permissions so that you can lock down each user specific to their task. Wordpress does not offer this and i hope they do in the future.

Having a wysiwyg as the core would be a good idea even if it is disabled by default. I installed FCKeditor from a module that i downloaded but it broke my site so i threw it away.

~J

It really depends on your background. I am a technologist, but I do that at work all day and didn't bargain on having to become a drupal developer to make Drupal accomplish the most basic of tasks for a professional looking blog. Wordpress just works, works well, and more importantly, is used by nearly everyone in the blogging community. So the plugins and widgets are there. Drupal...is a development platform for programmers. The difference is that when a new cool thing comes out, like www.sharethis.com, it instantly has a copy and paste widget for Wordpress, whereas on Drupal...somebody has to develop it and share it with the Drupal community. Eventaully, things probably catch up, but there is a lag time.

Drupal is so powerful and flexible, it is a real challenge to make it usable, but I am glad to see people looking at Wordpress as a model of usability. I am mostly a UI designer/information architect with some PHP knowledge. In addition to the Wordpress administrator being more usable (as pointed out in this thread re the implementation of TinyMce and organization of the Admin UI), hands on editing of the themes is so intuitive. With Wordpress with my basic PHP knowledge the code made sense right away and I became proficient at editing themes within a day or two.

With Drupal I have been going at it for a few months now and am humbled at every step, and am constantly making compromises in design. In Wordpress, the public UI of the Blog is so good at default and so intuitive to modify. Drupal's blog tool has a very rudimentary UI by default and takes a lot of work to to make it something that still falls a little short of the Wordpress blog UI.

It is hard to achieve good usability with an open source tool as diverse as Drupal. And Drupal is far from the worst example. I admire what I am able to accomplish with Drupal, but if it were more usable, I could do so much more with less pain.

I don't think you can compare wordpress with drupal. They have completely different species. Wordpress is mainly used for blogs, whereas drupal is used for anything you can imagine. It takes a while to get used it to the drupal UI. But when you do, you will love it. I hope they don't change it. I completely disagree with you about the wysiwyg editor. wysiwyg editors just mess up the code alot of the time and can slow down websites.

"(To be honest, I'm not sure why die-hard drupal user rave on about taxonomy.)"

I LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE taxonomy. It is categories but better. You can do some many things with it.

TinyMCE + iBrowser Image Upload + IMCE File Upload plugin should be part of the default Drupal package. It's invaluable and I install it on every website.

is like comparing a Diesel Truck with a vw bug and a motorcycle.

None are remotely the same. There is no comparison.

And certainly not in the code.

Or the way they operate.

To most, Drupal is considered a Framework.

Within, or from, that Framework, you can build almost anything you want.

Including even a "more WordPress-like" blogging system or lite CMS.

Which, I am sure, call me crazy, that someone Already is working on this right now.

It's not really that hard to do.

Indisputably, "eye-candy," "packaging", GUI, user "friendliness," "language," marketing, simplicity, and how you "present" or "promote" something is invaluable with "software."

It's great if the person who wrote the software can understand everything, but not so great for "end users" or a average computer user can't.

Drupal is awesome.

The simple solution to make a more "user friendly" answer to Drupal is by simply having the same core -
but like the Educational Version - a prepacked version of Drupal - which has
an Advanced Mode and a Standard Mode built in. Advanced is just simply the core. Standard or "basic" mode is simply a more User-Friendly / cotter-pinned / filtered version that only shows the "basic" things like Post, Add Photo, Add Category, Add Menu, Move Content, Etc and is very intuitive. This is like other examples of "software" that have beginner and Advanced Mode.

Building a user friendly "back-end" for beginner mode with nice understandable language and buttons and even Front-End would be fairly simple. It's just the "add-on" functionality and where Beginner and Advanced code handles/splits itself, such as Views, CCK and access control, and how they meet, that's were it gets interesting. Really though, coming up with great "ideas" of how this should all work/look is the important part.

By the way, both WordPress and especially Drupal, have excellent API's, so regarding a client or an "end-user" doing basic things (which is what mostly all they want to do anyway,) such as posting / editing an article and uploading an image --
With a third-party solution like ScribeFire http://www.scribefire.com/, which is the best thing since sliced bread, besides Drupal, it makes it so simple to upload, cut/paste and write away... that if they can work with that, chances are, they could use a little "brushing" up on their computer skills. Set up for ScribeFire takes like 5 minutes and it works like a charm. Just another great reason, among many others to like Drupal, for the great Framework that it is.

I like Drupal and our company already finished several websites in Drupal. My only problem with drupal is that there is a general repulsion form this community to make Drupal user friendly. It is important for most users that are using the final product (Admin GUI etc) to have accessible ways of uploading multiple images files editing categories and so on.

Without support from the core Drupal developers nobody will ever implement this functionality in Drupal. I always have the impression that most of the stuff developed for drupal is done having in mind other technical geeks that will use it and not the final user that is less technical oriented.
It is sad to see CMS as Joomla taking the lead and becoming the standard specially when Drupal had a good jump start.

I think the question is not what can Wordpress do better and more in the way of what can Drupal do better and improve. As a designer I find Drupal's interface one of the worst and messy admin interface ever. We build most of the websites on Drupal but the admin interfaces is very hard to sell to our clients.

Most of the developers must understand that this applications are made for normal users this is the hole point of using a CMS. You should not look at Drupal only from the developer standpoint, look also form the user standpoint.

I agree that Drupal is more an workframe than anything else but an work-frame should have a lot of extension possibilities. If you take a simple example as a SEO module. On wordpress you can find 20 and more extensions, and one of them cand help you bay default or it can be easily modified. On Drupal we have one or 2 that normally suck and have lots of problems with Ubercart and other modules.

If we want for Drupal to become a great platform we need first to realize the week parts of this platform and try to improve them.

We don't need to reverse engineer, or copy we need to innovate and learn from the others and Wordpress is one of them.