Comments on: WordPress to Drupal?

By: Debra

Debra — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 12:14:26 +0000

I’m quite concerned about your comment that women are marginalised in the wordpress community. I think it’s true in most open source communities I’ve come across if you don’t speak geek you’re likely to get ignored.

Anyway, I just switched from self hosted wordpress to wordpress.com because it now does everything I need it to. Self hosted wordpress was improving immensely too – didn’t automatic upgrade come in with 2.5? I have to admit it did take some searching to find out how to get it to work, in the end it was to do with read/write permissions. But I was really happy to be able to automatically upgrade wordpress, and any plugins I’d installed. 2.6 even puts a message on your dash to alert you that a plugin needs updating. From there it’s a couple of clicks to install the new version.

I tried a Drupal install, and though I got a basic site installed without problems, I couldn’t get any plugins to install without a fatal exception error. No documentation to help out either. So I uninstalled it and went back to wordpress.

By: Stéphane

Stéphane — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 21:18:41 +0000

Wordpress and Drupal are both free Open Source and use PHP: they can therefore run on any cheap shared hosting. ExpressionEngine is non-free (proprietary) and Movable Type requires Perl.

By: Pete

Pete — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 12:50:00 +0000

I really, really tried to get Drupal working on some sites that I was running. And I ended up frustrated and angry, because it was just too fiddly, awkward, and biased towards PHP developers. So if you are thinking about moving away from Wordpress, I’d say avoid Drupal. There are other CMS’s around, like ExpressionEngine and Moveable Type, which might work better for you. I’ve not tried them, so I won’t go on about them.

As for releases, if you can get the hang of doing upgrades via the command line then I understand it’s very, very quick to upgrade your system. Supporting old versions of software releases doesn’t always make sense for a number of different reasons, and I think the post 2.5 Wordpress versions are all building towards something that is a lot more interesting in terms of free website software.

There seems to me to be a huge leap between the older versions of Wordpress and the current version. It’s not just the ‘group upload’ feature, and the pastel-coloured admin pages… it’s the way that the system holds together. And still remains absolutely usable.

By: TPP

TPP — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 10:32:51 +0000

An annual update where the previous versions wouldn’t be dropped from the support and codex, yes that would be a big improvement.

I don’t want exif on my photos, but agree the option would be good for some people. If 2.6 is a minor upgrade why have they stopped supporting 2.5? Seems crazy.

Yes, I remember that feature of Drupal. I’d check by logging out, and there were no front-facing admin features logged out. The admin side didn’t have a different theme though.

Good points.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 08:12:45 +0000

I agree that the releases are coming too fast. Security aside it would be nice for all the changes to be rolled up into one annual update or, as I wrote about recently, for WordPress to be modularised so that features could be individually rolled back, replaced, or even removed.

As for what is better in 2.5:

I think the admin interface is vastly improved as far as ease of use is concerned. The people I introduce to 2.5 seem to pick it up quicker than they did previous versions.

I really like the fact that it pulls the EXIF data (some of it anyway) out of uploaded photos, but I think they should have included a shortcode to display it without me having to write a plugin to do that.

I think the shortcode API is an improvent as it really points plugin authors towards a standardised way of doing things which should make things more consistent for users in the long term.

2.6 was a fairly minor update really. There were some nice touches in there, the plugin page is better organised and the post revision feature is useful for selling sites based on WordPress, but I think they could have waited longer and put more things in before releasing it. Another six months perhaps.

The major problem I had with drupal when I tried it was that there wasn’t a clear enough division between the admin areas and customer facing areas. I want them clearly distinct using different themes and I do not want editing capability on customer facing pages. This may have been resolved by now.