Is WordPress a threat to Drupal?

History of Drupal

In 2001, drupal emerged as one of the primary CMS systems.

With the release of Drupal version 4 in 2004, the project began its modern form in backend.

Major enterprise level sites began to migrate to Drupal with the release of version 5.0 in 2005.

The software took on a popular MVC approach in 2005, giving it a flexible layout structure and allowing for full scale development on the top of the CMS.

Today hundreds of well known organizations use Drupal.

Drupal Sites:

http://www.lullabot.com/

http://drupalmodules.com/

http://themegarden.org/drupal6/

http://php.opensourcecms.com/

History of WordPress WordPress emerged as a blog template

system in 2001.

In 2004, WordPress moved into a new market, using different techniques it included codes and themes that allowed users to switch between needed applications.

In 2005, a release of version 1.5 introduced themes which were downloaded over 900,000 times.

With each new version, downloads for application grew and eventually it became the largest self hosted blogging tool in the world.

WordPress Sites:http://icondock.com/http://bestwebgallery.com/http://www.45royale.com/http://www.unstructure.org/

Comparison

WordPress Drupal

Ease of hosting and installation Excellent Excellent

Ease of setting up: simple site Excellent Good

Ease of setting up: complex site Excellent Good

Ease of use: content editor Excellent Good

Ease of use: site administrator Excellent Good

Graphical flexibility Excellent Excellent

Comparison (Contd.)

WordPress Drupal

Accessibility and SEO Good Fair

Structural flexibility Good Excellent

User roles and workflow Fair Good

Community/Web 2.0 functionality

Excellent Excellent

Extending and integrating Excellent Excellent

Security Fair Good

Drupal was built as a CMS.

Powerful yet confusing. Requires technical proficiency to configure many aspects of a website.

For development, user needs to learn how it works.

As user becomes familiar with Drupal, adding new features become easy.

Drupal is making stride towards intuitive usability.

WordPress was built as a blogging engine

Less powerful but at the same time is simple and requires less experience and technical knowledge.

A great deal of customization opportunities exist in WordPress’ theme layer.

It becomes very difficult when additional functionality is required to be added.

WordPress is moving towards robust CMS applications

WordPress

WordPress is a great choice for fairly small (a few hundred pages or less), simply arranged websites.

It’s the easiest system to install and understand, and is easy to maintain and update, putting site setup within reach of anyone with a sense of technical adventure.

However, WordPress doesn’t scale as intuitively as Drupal to support complex sites.

There is only limited support for differentiation of user roles, although add-ons are available to support permissions based on section or type of content.

Drupal

Flexible and powerful, Drupal is a great choice for more complex sites.

It supports a wide variety of site

It has particularly strong support for Web 2.0 and community functionality, including user-submit ted content.

It’s also easy for content administrators to find and update content.

But Drupal’s power comes with complexities. Under standing what the system offers and how to configure it is more difficult than WordPress.

The administrative screens for configuring a site have a huge number of options and settings, making them harder to interpret.

Drupal 7.0, includes a new administrative interface that makes content editing and maintenance tasks more intuitive, and adds the ability to create custom content types without an add-on.

Conclusion

Drupal is not exactly a blogging platform per se, as is WordPress, but it is a CMS construction kit.

The user profiles are extensible and allows for easy creation of membership sites and portals.

The categorization of content in Drupal is innovative as well.

Drupal does a great drop of building out dynamic sites, something WordPress falters at.

Drupal can be easier because the backend allows for themeing as well. If you want your backend to look like your front end, you have that option with Drupal. WordPress on the other hand has a set theme for its backend which cannot be changed. This can be a little confusing for the novice webmaster.

References http://idealware.org/reports/2010-os-cms

http://webhostingtop.org/blog/338-drupal-and-wordpress

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9219685/Site_builder_shootout_Drupal_vs._Joomla_vs._WordPress

http://www.chapterthree.com/blog/jennifer-lampton/wordpress-vs-drupal-saga-continues

http://kevindees.cc/2011/10/drupal-vs-wordpress-the-epic-debate/

http://poplarware.com/articles/drupal_vs_wordpress

http://www.goodwebpractices.com/other/wordpress-vs-joomla-vs-drupal.html

All content in this presentation, except where noted otherwise, is Drupal Forest licensed and copyright 2011.

Contact: sanam@drupalforest.com