My friend Daniel Gibbons is shopping for a CMS for his new project. He’s posted interesting and in my view fairly accurate comments regarding Drupal and WordPress. I’m quite the fan of WordPress, have spent a little bit of time with Matt and the Automattic crew and think quite highly of them.. and of course I use it for a bunch of sites, both corporate and personal.
Still, a couple of years ago I recommended that we deploy a Drupal site for EQO, where I was the VP Marketing. As seems to be common with a lot of Drupal projects, there was much forking of code and a great deal of customization required to make the thing feel like a true web interface. As a result it’s been a challenge for EQO to keep their site up-to-date with the latest versions and to reconverge with the growing Drupal codebase.
Daniel’s most salient point is this:
The belief in the Drupal community is clearly that it’s all about the… community. That is, the power of a disparate community will be harnessed to deliver the features and usability desired by end users. But the fatal flaw in the Drupal community model seems to be that its community consists entirely of developers and not publishers. Or worse still development shops who make money by customizing Drupal.
… whereas WordPress is guided by the steady hand of Matt Mullenweg and supported by a company which just raised $29M to further the cause. Not to mention a vast community of artists, designers, publishers, and software geeks who contribute widgets and extra features via a powerful API and a stable code tree.
I think that there will always be a place for Drupal and for the customization shops that support and enhance the platform (a number of whom are Vancouver-based). But it must be assumed to be true that while WordPress is more of a mass-market, easily-accessible platform, Drupal is its antithesis: a platform created by geeks for use by other geeks, and not something indulged in lightly.
In much the same way that The 250 are very good at promoting themselves within, well, the 250 the Drupal community has done a good job of promoting itself within the the Drupal community. Meanwhile, WordPress has even managed to reach out to and impress My Dad (definitely not one of the 250). While there is much possibility for grift in the Drupal market, selling a lot of stuff to a few people, I’m a guy who tends to bet long on selling a little bit to a lot of people.
Talk to a Drupal user (who is likely also a Drupal developer) and you’ll get a lot of detail about why Drupal is more powerful. Talk to a WordPress user (which is just as likely to be your mom) and you’ll get a lot of detail about how easy it is to use, extend, and modify.
While Gersham and I are playing with his Rails-based blogging engine, Orangutan, I still find myself constantly comparing it to WordPress.
Is this the new Apple-Windows debate? Does the rabidly defensive marginal community of Drupaliers verbally assault anyone who questions their imaginary hegemony?
I never claimed that WP and Drupal are equivalent platforms, though for the record I do think that with $29M it’s quite conceivable that WP will grow into Drupal’s world.
I’m talking about how the platforms are architected, positioned, and how they ultimately find a market (which is the true lifeblood of a platform).
-Ian.
I must comment again, sorry for that: It’s not about which is better, less geekier or whatever. People, you are comparing apples with oranges as Gerhard already said and what’s the point in THAT?
People that prefer WordPress, well, need something simple and straight to start with. They don’t need all the stuff that Drupal offers. So WordPress is quicker, leaner, more straight forward for simple projects, with straight and linear content.
Drupal is for web application designers and programmers who don’t want or need to use languages or frameworks like Ruby on Rails and others. It can do things WordPress was not designed to do: like build an online shop that has a voting mechanism for users where users with the most given votes on products will get a price deduction on products with the least votes, all combined with a “forgot the milk” shopping list application and an integration into an e-learning system… would you do THAT with WordPress? The hell NO! But perfectly fine and out of the box using only existing Drupal modules, no extra coding required. THAT’s the big difference. And of course such as system is more complicated then WordPress. And the reasons the Drupal geeks start talking geek-speak is because, YES! it is so fantastic that so absurd and strange online applications can be build using Drupal without actually coding one single line of PHP. 😉
Gee, it will never stop… Drupal and WordPress CANNOT be compared. Totally different usage scenarios. Both a great in their own ways. It depends on what you want to DO with it, not which of the two is easier or geekier or whatever.
Will apples kill oranges? Discuss!
@Jeff: I wouldn’t say I’m a non-technical site builder (well on my personal blog, yes). Rather I’m an entrepreneur building a well funded business and suffering immense frustration with Drupal’s limitations, and the “have our cake and eat it, too” insistence by the Drupal community that it is both a framework and a CMS, when it appears to perform neither role well.
Frankly most of the comment thread on my post is pretty defensive stuff that refuses to engage with the real limitations that anyone who tries to build a business around Drupal will encounter.
What Drupal seems to have done a great job of is creating an economy whereby dev shops can build solid businesses doing Drupal implementation with a lot of services wrapped around the gig. That’s fine, but its effect is to create a community that’s all about enabling those services businesses rather than the publisher / site owner. The entire point of my post was not to say that WordPress and Drupal are interchangeable, but rather that Drupal has built a largely inward-looking and self-serving community.
Acquia’s mission sounds like it could be the solution, but to say my post is off target is simply to deny the reality of Drupal’s limitations as they exist today.
Hi there. I think your post is largely on target. Daniel’s post is a little off target, but the comment thread pretty much sets things aright.
Drupal now has an Automattic-style company behind it called Acquia. That’s where I work. We’re working with the community to make Drupal easier to deploy, use, and maintain.
Part of our mission is to help catalyze the community make the product better in the areas you mention. There’s just no substitute for a consistent focus on aesthetics and ease of use. It’s hard, especially when you’re trying to deal with the functional richness of Drupal, but I have perfect faith in the community to do anything it sets its mind to do.
We’re also working on a packaged distribution of Drupal and network services that will make it easier to et up and running and ease maintenance headaches. Just packaging and productizing a little better to require less customization out of the box can go a long way to making people like Dan happy.
Another related part of our work is to expand the community to welcome end users and non-technical site builders (like Dan) in addition to the programmers who build Drupal and extend it with custom modules. This latter group is a incredible strength of Drupal that shouldn’t be ignored. The fact that there are so many eyes on the Drupal code and so many Drupal solution providers around the world is real leverage. It is essential for taking Drupal into complex environments.
We’re also working to more effectively market and position Drupal and raise it’s overall profile. This is already having an impact, and we’re just getting started. Check out page 14 of this week’s Business Week magazine.
Keep an eye on us and keep us honest. We’re making progress.
@ Ben Wong: But don’t you think it’s amazingly ironic that Drupal isn’t a very good CMS, when the first thing you read at drupal.org is:
“Drupal.org is the official website of Drupal, an open source content management platform.”
WordPress, by contrast, makes no claim to be a true CMS, instead preferring to do a fantastic job of enabling online publishing for regular users.
Similarly, my experience has been that the ease of use issues are often revealed to the clients of Drupal dev shops when it’s too late to change course. It gets back to my point in my post where I note that Drupal is all about making excuses for what it doesn’t do well, which is of precisely zero comfort to anyone who’s made an investment in the platform.
Each one has its place in the sun, WordPress is good for easy site deployment by non techies, drupal is very flexible and a developer’s gift ….
Answer: Maybe if WordPress becomes a CMS. 🙂
As a blogging platform I prefer WordPress. It’s rudimentary Page handling is pretty good if you have only a few pages. If you have hundreds it could get daunting to manage.
Mind you Drupal isn’t particularly good at managing content either but it is much better. In this regard it is more mature. I actually prefer to use Drupal as a development environment. However, I’ve found most of the modules to require enough tweaking that building a slimmer, more custom module is just as fast. At least it is for us now.
Maintain the source code: well haven’t done any WordPress development but keeping up with Drupal dev isn’t easy. We’ve given up trying to stay current and starting upgrading the site (sutton.com) every year or so. The last upgrade we did from the Drupal 4.5.x tree to the 5.x or something tree required my programer to essentially rewrite most of the modules. *ugh*.
Both are good platforms. Neither is a very good CMS IMHO.