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.

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. 😉

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.

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.

“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.

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.