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By jetwodru on
Phase2 is 1 of the biggest contributor to Drupal community with some outstanding products namely OpenAtrium, OpenPublic & OpenPublish. Recently they redesigned their company website using Wordpress http://www.phase2technology.com/blog/some-under-the-cover-details-behind... had sparked some debates of why this Drupal-based prominent company adopted Wordpress instead of Drupal. They sold Drupal services but using Wordpress for their own company website.
The reason given was ease of use with a much shorter timeframe in setup. Frankly I totally agree with their points, to be more exact, is nice theming out-of-the-box with Wordpress themes. If you happen to buy a Wordpress theme in themeforest, you'll be amazed that all these themes work like Site Builders by themselves with hundreds of beautiful layout at your will. A theme can be easily transformed into many stunning layouts with various options without low-level custom coding. The beautiful shortcodes of Wordpress themes is what Drupal lacking and why mostly Drupal sites are always ugly, plain, primitive and no styling at all. You just compare the WordPress themes in themeforest against Drupal themes will present you a much better picture.
Also, you see Dries doesn't even make up his site http://buytaert.net/alex-pott nicely. Many Drupal sites are built this way with plain layout. However, most Wordpress themes are built with nice styling shortcodes and therefore they always look more stunning than Drupal yet easier to maintain. Wordpress is no longer a blog platform but becoming more & more flexible since ver 3.0 with custom post type.
Often, I found theming the hardest part in Drupal spending you most of the time making a site presentable. None of the pre-built Drupal themes in the market are at par with Wordpress themes in terms of stylish theming options.
Comments
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TL;DR
And? Seems like much ado about nothing. It should always be about the right tool for the job. Frankly, all the drupal vs whatever posts are getting really old. It's a total false choice-- usually by someone with an agenda (like link spam).
@ jetwong98 - I've said it
@ jetwong98 - I've said it before and I'll say it again, no one is forcing you to use Drupal. I make a full time living as a Drupal freelancer and quite happy with it thank you very much. I'll stop there as I don't want to get into the Drupal vs. Whatever debate, it is getting old.
Danny Englander | Twitter | Instagram
CMS comparison would never get old
No, I'm not a spammer with the wordpress theme links but just surprised of how Wordpress had evolved over the time. This kind of comparisons would never get old because every system evolved and progressed from time to time. You read the comparison of Drupal VS Joomla VS Wordpress 2 years ago was totally different from what you read today. I think Phase2 Technology went to opt for Wordpress because of that reason. Wordpress is no longer simplistic but a big boy suitable for all markets.
Earlier, I also disliked Wordpress for its simplicity with tons of limitation and went for Joomla which was even worse without basic blog functionality and then I came to Drupal which could do almost everything. I treat Drupal as a Visual Studio equivalent. But, it's not ideal for fast market, there are very limited choices of pretty Drupal design. Many Drupal themes tend to be much simpler & primitive than Wordpress with limited styling options.
Going along with the abundance of Wordpress Frameworks, we could assemble multiple attractive sites within a day incorporating CMS+Social Networking (BuddyPress+BBPress) +e-Commerce (Woocommerce) out of the box. The Visual Drap-&-Drop Layout Builder + hundreds of readily available styling shortcodes & effects, perhaps this may be deemed as no-brainer works but I think Drupal 8 is now heading towards the trend.
Currently, Acquia is still working to assemble Drupal Commons + E-Commerce for the Social Engagement Management market segment, however, there are already plenty of such ready solutions in Wordpress theme market. All are built with Custom Post Type for scalability & extensibility like Drupal Fields (CCK) but they look much nicer with a variety of stylish layouts. Wordpress has become a transformer with flexibility of extension and Drupal remains as plain lego blocks. Both are great for different markets except Joomla was totally outshined by Wordpress, I dunno where Joomla should position itself and going to replace all my existing Joomla sites to Wordpress.
I've done some WordPress
I've done some WordPress development myself, and enlisted the assistance of an experienced (and die-hard) WordPress developer. I knew that WP had a much easier to use interface, and it appears it still does, however, I also learned that it was sorely lacking in cooperation of the various available plugins, and that the lack of a well supported "Views-like" module made it a distant 2nd place tool. Granted, the use of "shortcodes" is nice, but there is really very little difference those and a standard function that can render html and take in parameters for dynamic results. All of this is possible via a combination of preprocessors, custom template files and possibly even calling the custom functions directly in the template (which no one should do, if at all avoidable).
The least likeable thing about WP is that you must purchase so many of the nice templates and plugins, the very market of which seems to produce more competitive products, each with strengths and weaknesses. Drupal's community appears to produce more and better tools that are supported by the community, ideas being added from many minds, and always for the betterment of the community.
WordPress has definitely come a very long way, and as a simple web design tool, it excels, but as a development platform, it leans too heavily on raw development, and I don't see why one needs a CMS for that when a standard MVC framework will to the job, perhaps better.
Once again, I'm not bashing WP, simply suggesting that it serves it's purpose, and it's different than Drupal's purpose. One offers a nice, end-user friendly tool, the other is a science lab where complex inventions can be created—within the confines of the framework's rules. That, I'm sure, is one of the "shortcomings" of Drupal, at least to some. However, each tool has their value, as WorldFallz stated.
WorldFallz was spot on with
WorldFallz was spot on with her comment - the right tool for the job. I often turn away clients who are looking for a site that does not need something with the power of Drupal, as building it in Drupal would
1) Cost more (development)
2) Cost more (maintenance)
3) Be overkill for what they need
Wordpress is a great system - for sites that are best served by a wordpress installation. And Drupal is a great system - for building sites that are best served by a Drupal installation.
Wordpress sites may often or even usually look better than Drupal, but there is nothing stopping Drupal sites from looking... well from looking like anything. It just depends on the person building it - we (Jaypan) try to build sites that are not only functional, but also beautiful, getting the best of both worlds.
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Absolutely. HTML is html and css is css... whether output from drupal, wordpress, or manually.
The one serious gap that still exists though, and I think is primarily responsible for the 'but drupal is ugly' mentality, is the lack of beautiful commercial off-the-shelf themes available for drupal. When rockettheme entered the drupal market I was hopeful that would change-- but their approach was to have joomla developers shoehorn their joomla themes onto drupal rather than building beautiful drupal optimized themes correctly. Not surprisingly, they failed and left the market not long after.
Supposedly the d8 conversion to twig for theming is going to address this. Let's hope...
IMO building wordpress
IMO building wordpress premium theme is much more work and more complex than building its equivalent in drupal. small example is the super confusing "The Loop", weird pagination, tons of HTML parsing and filtering.
But people much more people is willing to spend hundred of hours in building premium themes for wordpress rather than touching drupal mainly in my opinion is because there is a "market" for wp themes, decent themer can easily earned thousand of dollars monthly by just releasing couple of WP premium themes, heck they can even earn millions if their theme got popular.
So again IMO the lack of good premium theme for drupal is not the direct result of how easy the coding would be for themer, but more a direct result of the lack of commercial value in it.
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if you can use drupal why use others?
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