LeviaIT^TM

I’ve penned a report about this matter earlier (Should you use WordPress or Drupal?) in January, 2010,  and I am sure you recognize that a year in internet technologies equals an eternity.  At the time of the previous article no one (all right, virtually no one), would dare pronounce that WordPress represents a functional content management system, and only hardcore drupal developers would use Drupal for a basic blog website. Since both systems developed and published major version upgrade releases, the playing fields have changed. And that invites a rewrite about this topic, that all web designers / developers face once in a while; should they select the simpleness and sleekness of WordPress or modularity and ease of development of Drupal?

Allow me to begin by looking at big modifications that were brought out in WordPress:

WordPress 3 introduced changes to make it appear less of a blogging system, where the solel types of objects you could add were blog posts and pages and to look more as though it is a full CMS, where suddenly you are given option to generate Custom Post types. WordPress has made claims that they grew to be a “fully functional CMS” years ago, but i beg to disagree, till the 3.0 release the only way to make it act like a Content Management System was through the custom plugins and themes, and none of it in the core, which made it a very buggy and unreliable pass…
They also created a more sleek admin dashboard, supplied more theming hooks to developers, brought out a new default front end theme called Twenty Ten (Twenty Eleven introduced at a later release), brand-new media drag and drop image uploader button and cooked up many advances in the theme and front end sphere: custom navigation menu’s, header images and background color / images are a few of the obvious ones…

What major modifications were presented in Drupal:

• For the first time there is an official admin theme!
• Adaptable content and custom fields (Content Construction Kit module is now in the core)
• Improved theming through Render API
• Introductory Image functionality was baked into the core out of the box!
• and numerous other minor changes for the better here and there…

To sum up all of the preceding, WordPress UI turned still sleeker, plus it induced some major changes to constitute to a greater extent a formidable challenger to Drupal in the CMS arena. However, in my opinion they did not make it sufficient.  Whenever you wish to create  custom content types it involves creation of some sort of a plugin (kind of CCK in Drupal 6) or a function in your theme, Which is even worse considering it makes you sites business logic depend on a Template! Where they are completely lacking though is having a free plugin ( there’s a views plugin that could be bought) to generate the output of those custom posts, fields and taxonomies. Simply conceive of Drupal not having the Views module!

Considering the changes that Drupal implemented, while it’s still miles away from the sleekness of Admin UI of WordPress, they did a step in the right direction and at last understood that if they would like to draw in anybody without an engineering degree they’ll require to concentrate on admin user interface, to make it easier to employ. An enormous aspect that Drupal is still neglecting is a fully integrated WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) with integrated Image upload and insert functionality like WordPress has had for years. And sure i realize it can be arranged by community modules, but none of them look and feel as a well integrated fully functional solution for Drupal. Solving this, would constitute the greatest step forward in this sphere that could be made.

Drupal User Interface is (still) where WordPress was a long time ago, just as WordPress’s functionality is where Drupal was ages ago… And so, considering all of the preceding details my solution isn’t much distinguishable from what it was when i wrote the previous article on this subject.

If you’re a designer looking for a open source system to create a simple blog or a corporate brochure-like internet site choose WordPress and i doubt you’ll regret it. On the other hand, If you’re a web developer who is building a multifunctional website with shopping components for example, and / or forum and a blog etc. or just a website with a lot of back-end business logic you should probably choose Drupal. Anything in middle – flip a coin!

What is your process for deciding to use WordPress or Drupal?