Wordpress vs Drupal

I’ve been building websites since I was in college (early 90’s) and so much has changed since then. The web used to be a very static place, people were happy just to treat their websites as extensions of their business cards. Obviously in the last 20 years the Internet has grown to be a much more living, breathing, beast. (I don’t use this term lightly). Your content becomes dated the moment you post it. Nothing is static. Software is leveraged to update content automatically when a blog is posted or when some other content changes. The software that is used to do this is referred to a Content Management System (CMS) and and a lot of clients are now asking for a CMS.

Currently we are mostly using Wordpress and Drupal when the need for a CMS arises. These are two of the bigger open source players and are very, very different. Wordpress is easy to install and maintain, but it has a ton of limitations. Drupal seems to be able to handle everything we can throw at it, but it becomes increasingly complicated the more you try to do with it. Both have their strengths and weaknesses, I'll try to highlight those in the rest of this blog :)

The biggest problem we have had with Wordpress is the menu system. It is fairly difficult to customize, and even harder to setup in such away that your client can manipulate the menus. We have used a variety of menu plugins over the years, but none of them can match the flexibility and simplicity of the Drupal menu system. We usually eliminate Wordpress from the equation if we know the client will want to adding to or rearranging their menu system on a regular basis.

When it comes to creating a theme Wordpress is more limiting, but much easier to manage. A basic theme can be created in just a few hours, and for the most part can be done by changing just a single CSS file, and maybe a line or two of php code. With Drupal there are usually numerous CSS files, depending on how many modules you need to use, and often times a lot of extraneous titles, headers, etc that are added by the modules that you have to turn-off or create a hack to hide. The first time through this process can be quite horrible; if it wasn’t for Firebug I don’t think it would even be worth the effort, but with this great Firefox plugin everything becomes so much easier. Don’t even attempt to create a theme without having at least a basic understanding of how Firebug works.

I also recommend Ubercart for Drupal vs WP E-commerce if you need a shopping cart, but it really depends on the size of the project. If you are selling an individual product or a single line of products Wordpress works fine. But if you really want to create a full-fledged shopping experience, Ubercart is a much better choice. While it still has plenty of limitations, for the most part it can be made to do just about anything you need it to (integrate with FedEx, UPS, USPS, most of the major credit card processing systems, and manage a variety of taxes).

Here are a couple of examples of sites we’ve created with each.
Wordpress: University of Wisconsin International Studies, Garden Expo, Quilt Expo
Drupal: Big Bay Brewing, Company, Hoards Dairymen