Wordpress vs Drupal; what's in a reputation?

I'm always slighly amazed when people say the lingo is hard to pick up. I found taxanomy really intuitive and picked it up straight away. It's just like a filing system - like 'My Documents' is split into different folders like 'My music' and 'My Videos' and 'My Pictures' which are further split up into sub-folders. People categorise their 'My Documents' folder (or whatever it's called in your chosen OS) every day yet seem to find taxonomy really difficult for some reason.

::puzzled::

Hi, I'm the blogger that made the second statement in the post. Just for some background. I am a database programmer in my day job and I have done Java programming in the past. I run an e-commerce business and use osCommerce for that (I would not recommend that for a novice either).

Drupal, in my opinion, is an extremely robust application. As I said, if I were a Fortune 500 company and I had the staff to navigate it's modules, path aliases, taxonomy, vocabulary, and host of other lingo that is used it would be great. However, as an independent attempting to crank out several sites in several months, it is not the tool of choice.

For example, I, installed the software for my dad's site. He wanted to do all the things that Drupal offers: have a forum, a blog, write a book. We thought it would be the perfect solution for him, except he is not a techie. He didn't even know how to enter an entry. That's what I mean by lingo.

For Joe consumer, the current vocabulary that is needed even after you have a theme that you like, to put in your content is way to difficult to understand.

Even for a programmer, theming the system is not easy either. Just changing the layout to a 3-column instead of 2-column is a nightmare. Also with the addition of the special Drupal theming engine, things got more complicated, not easier.

I think the choice depends on your target market. If you want to target mid to large size companies that have the staff to make the application more user friendly for the end-user, and the expertise to navigate the backend, then it's great. If not, it's an uphill battle.

Wordpress allows me the speed and ease of MT with some of the functionality of Drupal. That's why it's my CMS of choice.

I especially like that they have easy to install and use plugins that are well documented by other seeming half-coders. This extends the functionality without being cumbersome.

I am happy to provide more feedback and give Drupal another shot if needed.

Respectfully,
Nikki

PS. Even posting in the stream of discussion is difficult.

I have worked at a webhost and have studied the open source options. I have had clients that have chosen MT, wordpress, typo3, etc. and I have had to support them all. When I moved jobs and was asked to find a CMS for our site, I looked hard. We decided to test plone, mambo, MDpro and drupal. It was no contest. Drupal is easy to understand, configure and customize. It is amazing powerful, while maintaining a straight-forward approach. It has an amazing community of individuals behind it. I don't understand the people here who have said that the forums or documentation are unclear. They obviously don't use many open source tools or they would know what unclear was all about. I commend the drupal community for maintaining such an organized repository of modules, themes, and support.

That said, I can see how people might find Drupal complex. It is not a blogging tool like MT or wordpress. It is a CMS. As such, it has certain vocabulary and structure. Anyone who is looking for a blogging tool and finds Drupal complex, ok, I can see that. Anyone who is looking for a CMS and finds Drupal complex or cumbersome, you must be crazy. I have tested & tried more than 15 CMS tools all the way through the install and use stage for my companies & clients. I find the simplicity of Drupal, compared to many of the others, refreshing.

Just my 2 cents

I have just setup my first test Drupal site and I am considering moving from WordPress. I think the problem lies at the theme level. With WordPress it is pretty clear what each part of the theme does. It is not hard to figure out that if I change X then I get Y output. Drupal themes on the other hand call a number of function, auto create files in directories outside the theme folder, and a bunch of other stuff that confuses people who are not professional programmers.

This is a big problem, because most webdevelopers are not professional programmers. They are graphic designers or just people with something to say and the will to persevere through technical hurdles. I'd say the majority of people creating websites fall into the later camp. Given this fact, Drupal should really try to make the theme level a lot easier for US, the majority of internet publishers.

For example, in order to change the size of the slogan font in Garland, I had to add the following code to page.tpl.php

$site_html = implode('<span style="font-size:60%; font-weight:normal;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;', $site_fields) .'</span>';

WTF! This should just require a quick change to the style sheet. Significant design changes should be possible with custom stylesheets, but currently it feels like I have to write code to change anything about the layout and design.

So you think one major improvement would be to include more styles (themes that are nothing but a stylesheet) in the default distro? That'd be a great idea. Imagine if bluemarine had that many style options in the default distro --- people would be far more inspired to do style only themes. Agree?

- Robert Douglass

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Rate the value of this post: http://rate.affero.net/robertDouglass/
I recommend CivicSpace: www.civicspacelabs.org
My sites: www.hornroller.com, www.robshouse.net

WP theme and its styles converted to drupal

its not hard to get drupal look like a wordpress installation, but its a real task to get only some of the drupal core functions to wordpress

drupal has an big advantage, its flexibility, it masters ALL you want to, but its a disadvantage too.... with this much flexibility you just cant design the "one rules them all" style/theme (which looks good too...in every situation)

back to the topic, make up a project and get your theme started ;-)

-micha
work in progress with Drupal 4.6: langmi.de

True (though Wordpress is a multi-user single blog). I think Robert is considering eating Wordpress' lunch. I think all that would take is a distribution put together for that purpose. Call it Drupal Jr.

I use WordPress for my personal blog since I don't need all of Drupal's features. If you want only a single blog, WP is probably more appropriate. For my other sites, which have discussion forums, news submission, multiple user blogs, etc. I use Drupal.

--
Mike Cohen, http://www.mcdevzone.com/

Again, this is why I love the CivicSpace theme. It has a great looking admin section and I personally think that we should adopt it as our standard default theme.

The good thing about 4.7 is that there have been some improvements in the admin area; the example you mentioned is better now:
administer->settings->content types->configure (for specific type)

Additionally, some modules have been ingested into core, like menus-on-the-fly.

- Robert Douglass

-----
Rate the value of this post: http://rate.affero.net/robertDouglass/
I recommend CivicSpace: www.civicspacelabs.org
My sites: www.hornroller.com, www.robshouse.net

I apologize for some "content noise" in this comment, but it also helps to demonstrate a point later on.

=== Introduction ===

I've been using both platforms, among others, mostly in Intranet space. I use WordPress for Blog SiteProfiles and Drupal for Portal SiteProfiles. They both:

• Are **OpenSource**.
• Are **PHP Based**.
• Require **MySQL**. In fact Drupal is more portable, since it also runs with PostgreSQL, although I've not tested this yet.
• Have **Big Community**, with excellent support.
• Pluggable **Add-Ons**. Requires no coding tasks to integrate a module/hack/contribution in the default plataform.
• **Cache** the pages.
• Have **Friendly URL**. In fact, Drupal is very good at this (path alias), with WordPress being a bit more complex than it should.

=== WordPress ===

In this section, I detail what are the main advantages for me while using WordPress as a Blog Engine:

1. **Focus on ContentTasks** - the administration interface, besides "living" outside the "front-side", requires usually no more than 2-clicks for any operation. Examples are: Write Post (click: Write -> Post), Write Page (click: Write -> Page), Change Theme (click: Presentation).
2. **Quick and Easy Install**. Although any tech-savvy person can install a platform through configuration files, and usually techies prefer to tweak the platform settings through configuration files (rather than browser-database dependant operation) the installation process of WordPress is simple and quick. So much that really makes a point against other systems without such an Installer Process and even compares fine with Installers like Mambo or Zen-Cart, which are probably the best out there.
3. **Blog Ready** - requires less than 5min for a fully operational Blog Site.
4. **Easily Themeable** - the platform allows for quick and easy changes to the styles and themes, without requiring any Template Engine besides its own code.

=== Drupal ===

In this section, I detail what are the main advantages for me while using Drupal as a Portal Engine:

1. **ContentRevision** - this is a must in "professional" portals, with several content editors and many pages. Sometimes, people edit and later on realize that the content was better before. How to revert without content revision mechanism?
2. **Light** - for such a powerful and flexible portal platform, why is Drupal so "code-light"? Takes more or less the same space as WordPress and way less than Mambo, XOOPS, phpWebSite, LIMB and Xaraya.
3. **Categorization** - for people used to link a page to several categories, view list of pages in a category, and so on, then Drupal is a bless. Although complex or hard to master, after some trials with it, the advantages and flexbility makes it all worth while.

=== ToDo ===

In this section, I describe what I think is missing in both platforms:

• **Easy Linking** - WikiMarkup makes this specially easy, since each page is called by the name and not the id. The markup usually looks like [[page_name pagetitle]].
• **LowContentNoise** - again, WikiMarkup is very friendly in this, since instead of alot of tags and "content noise" the markup takes little "space" among the content. Sometimes, as in tables or sections, it even helps differentiate the content for the editor. This is such a common task, I still don't understand why so many platforms choose to have either Filtered HTML or even Full HTML without any editing "assistance". Sure, WordPress for instance has Quicktags on the Editor and Drupal has a module (CVS version) for it. Sure, they both have add-ons for Textile and Markdown. But these add-ons aren't set as default, which is why so many people fallback to WYSIWYG TextArea editors, such as TinyMCE. But again, these are add-ons, not the default.
• **Image Integration**. None have a mechanism that integrates an image into a page, which is quick and pratical. They both require a 2-step process and even then there's not much control on how to "pin" the image. But which platform excells at this?

=== ContentNoise ===

In HTML:

In WikiMarkup:

After being rendered:

• Item 1, in bold.
• Item 2, in italic.
• Item 3, as link.

Which one makes it easy to edit existing content? I assume nearly everyone will pick the WikiMarkup. Or Textile or Markdown. So why still use HTML or WYSIWYG?

About six months ago i read a comment on the forum (can´t find the exact quote unfortunately) from somebody who had both very positive as also frustrating experiences with Drupal, and to me this comment nailed the problem. It vaguely goes like: "the strange thing with Drupal is, that it seems to make really complicated tasks very easy to solve but at the same time it makes really easy tasks way more complicated than necessary".

We are using Drupal and Wordpress for some internal test-sites and are evaluating to migrate our complete online presence from a flash-based to a Drupal-based site in the near future. We are also considering Drupal as a long-term development-platform for some client- and community-projects, which would eventually enable us to contribute some of that work back to the general Drupal development. However, after six months of experience with Drupal and some feedback from other people we work with, I have to agree with the above statement. We had some very fundamental discussions about the different systems, about what appealed to us or what we would like to have changed conceptually or designwise. So this is the right time for me to share my thoughts in this discussion.

What appealed to us looking at Drupal, was the way, the core concept is built around the idea of nodes and taxonomies, which opened up endless possibilities to model content, structure and behavior of a site.
On the other hand we experienced some serious usability and presentation issues, using the admin structure of Drupal, especially while comparing that to other platforms like Wordpress.

If you look at the main audiences for both products, it is obvious, that the success of Wordpress is mainly based on the fact, that it can be a simple yet well designed entry point to the world of blogging, while Drupal has definitely more appeals to the advanced developer community or feature demanding user. But there are obviously just way more people looking for an easily accessable platform, that helps them to simplify their basic needs and tasks, than there are people that are willing or able to dive into a powerful but complex framework like Drupal right from the start. There´s basically nothing wrong with that except that I´m sure Drupal could steal way more of Wordpress´s "user friendly" reputation, if it manages to evolve to that point, that easy tasks could also be administrated easily.

So IMHO one direction for Drupal to gain ground in comparison to Wordpress (or Movable Type, Mambo and others) will be to reduce complexity without losing its flexibility. There are quite some promising signs towards that with the upcoming release of Drupal 4.7 and the much appreciated efforts at civicspacelabs.org, but to me the main problem to gain usability is still unsolved:

the more complex the given options in a framework like Drupal get, the clearer the structure has to be for administration of the framework, because otherwise one easily gets lost with all the options, features, relationships and dependencies it has.

As a simple example to describe what i mean just think of another familiarly complex platform - like Adobe Photoshop. Now imagine all menu items to work on your images would be sorted alphabetically as it basically happens to be with Drupal by default. It would drive you nuts because there´s no logic behind the position of the menu item beside the starting letter - and it would get worse if you would have gotten familiar with one language version and then had to switch to another language because you would have to lookup the position of each function from scratch again. And it doesn´t stop there. Looking at the module section of Drupal.org, every available module for the actual Drupal-versions is also listed in alphabetical order. Not easy to digest, no obvious information about category, popularity or quality of the respective module. If you are looking for something particular, you have to do quite some testing and research or ask one of the experts. Both can be pretty time consuming for anyone who is not deeply familiar with the ongoing module development. I think the approach at http://www.wp-plugins.net/ or http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins is at least a bit more helpful in the regards of categorization.

This describes my problems with the administration concept of Drupal. It´s not just about the missing separation of admin and public theme as already solved with CivicSpace´s distribution, it´s more about the missing fundamental structure or clustering logic of functions. This is one point where Wordpress really shines - the structure of its Admin-Section is quite easy to understand even for newbies. Now, why is it that while everybody joining the Drupal movement is delighted about the unbloated, well formed and structured code, as many are also complaining about the lack of usability and structure on the administration side? I guess it has a lot to do with the "problem of currency", which is perfectly described by Rashmi Sinha in the on-the-spot article "open source usability: the birth of a movement" http://www.rashmisinha.com/archives/05_04/open-source.html.

How could this dilemma be solved? I think, the recent progress of reorganising the Drupal.org handbook pages was a pretty good start to show how to collaboratively optimize the given structure of needs and contents in a defined context. With that success in mind it shouldn´t be impossible to target the admin-structure of Drupal as the next step. The card-sorting survey provides a perfect distributable tool as an entry point for that. Next steps?

- "Indian Summer of Design" or "Spring of Usability" anyone? At least community plumbing is not just about code and cash.
- Why not start a student collaboration project with an information/multimedia design class to work on usability and interface issues? There are several universities, which come to my mind, that could be interesting partners.
- the upcoming implementation of CCK is definitely the right timeframe to get the described issues targeted!
- I would happily pay a membership fee to a forthcoming Drupal foundation, if it could help to make the Drupal.org site more transparent and usable (module section!)

I´m pretty convinced, that Drupal has the most promising architecture of all open-source (and some commercial) CMS´s and I´m even more confident, that Drupal will play a mayor role in the evolution of the Web 2.0 paradigma. If it will get it´s acts together by strengthening its usability and streamlining its structural concept, it certainly will be unstoppable!

Yes, and no;

Admin themes aer there for lazy themeers, but they really do not help a lot. I userd to be ni the cam that wanted an admin theme, but my users and clients have proven me wrong.

Yes, all of them go like: "why is there no administration place" when they first encouter Drupal as administrator but after a few weeks they love it! I recently changed to admin themes fro a lot of clients. They begged me to get the integrated thing back. Its just much freindlier provided the themer took time to develop for the admin area too (the ported themes are absolutely horrible n this!)

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if you dont like the choices being made for you, you should start making your own.
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[Bèr Kessels | Drupal services www.webschuur.com]

Great point, and made me wonder if it would make sense to have a unified installer for the whole Drupal ecoology. Ie Civicspace, DrupalEd Drupal Blog, and all the others that will eventually come along with their own tweaked distribution. So the options would point to the specific installer for each distro. This would allow all the different variants to collaborate on a standard core install system and just plugin their specific parts for their option. Now theres not so many so isnt a big deal, but if there were many, it may become quite handy. Would also encourage others to build new variations for specific needs, which enhances the options for new users.

Just a thought, triggered by your post..

Besides (if possible) providing a "Smart" Installer that allows the user to pick which SiteProfile is the target of a specific deployment, I also suggest that a Handbook with best-pratices and quick-guide should be added to the platform.

Just like the "empty-node" content is shown to the user after a successful installation, and just like CivicSpace and Bryght have start doing it, if the user picks Corporate SiteProfile the handbook (which will require "localization" - translations) will guide in the process of creating a SiteMenu, how some modules should be configured, how to add a page (node) for services, another for products, another for contact_us, and so on.

So far, opinions about Drupal are mostly about how great and flexible it is but also how "techie" it is. Drupal must start moving towards "commoditization": by allowing nearly any type of user to deploy it, configure it and use it, for several well known SiteProfiles.