Comments on: Developing Themes: Drupal Compared With WordPress, First Impressions

By: Eve Aruguete

Eve Aruguete — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 04:41:26 +0000

I’m more of a front end designer type who has used both drupal and wp along with my coder/programmer friend to build sites. I can do a wordpress site almost entirely on my own, I definitely need his help when I’m using Drupal.
Thanks for discussing the two commonly used open source cms’s – it opened my eyes for sure.

By: Rob

Rob — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 21:40:50 +0000

I have to admit that the relative complexity of Drupal has pushed me toward Wordpress.
But the other important reason to go with WP is continuity.

Drupal is a coder’s experiment — each new version is created anew in pursuit of some Platonic ideal of the database — core tables change from version to version. Therefore, upgrading your Drupal site to the latest version becomes a major data-migration project. WordPress builds upon a core of 10 database tables. This makes upgrading to newer versions of WordPress relatively painless.

Perhaps someone in the Drupal community has built a module that alleviates the pain of upgrading, but I am unaware of it.

By: Chris Buttery

Chris Buttery — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 05:02:26 +0000

Hey Ian,
Thanks for the tip.

I recently moved from only developing in Joomla, to using WP for small sites and Drupal for anything else. I think it’s important for developers to be flexible in a few different CMS’s , so I can totally related to your ‘feelings’ towards both WP and Drupal.

Cheers
Chris

By: Alex Vasquez

Alex Vasquez — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 19:20:14 +0000

I really like this post. Great write up for both! I’m still learning a lot with Wordpress, having cut my teeth on Joomla and, to a lesser degree Drupal, I can say that Wordpress is a very elegant blogging solution and, yeah, I can see its use as a cms, but it’s certainly not meant to address that solution space.

By: Alex Peterson

Alex Peterson — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 18:27:52 +0000

Great article! I use both a lot and have always favoured Drupal but have learned a lot just reading your great post.

By: Holling

Holling — Sun, 31 May 2009 19:41:25 +0000

Ian –

Interesting post. I’ve built a couple of sites in Drupal (5.xx) and a couple in Wordpress, and would be interested to hear a followup on your experiences with the two projects. I’m a designer and have found WP to be much easier to work with given my coding skill level, and much much easier for my clients to work with the Admin side of things.

Thanks for the great contribution of Thematic!

Best – Bob

By: Ridgely

Ridgely — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 13:28:41 +0000

Ian,
Saw your tweet the other day re: drupal requiring a different mindset for theming – glad to see some elaboration because it got me curious. I’m kind of hoping I can stay with Wordpress to build my painting site (studio, not house), but wondering whether I need a straight-up CMS. Absolute props for ThemeShaper, btw. Strongly considering ditching Thesis for Theseus. Or maybe just Thematic. Anyway, I’m with you on Death to get_sidebar.

By: Nick

Nick — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 19:31:29 +0000

“I think it’s the quantum uncertainty around draft vs. published that really hangs everyone up there.”

LOL! I love it.

By: Ian Stewart

Ian Stewart — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 15:52:04 +0000

No doubt there. WordPress, as is, is incredibly easy to use (and I can’t wait to see what Happy Cog has done to make it easier). Once it’s installed, it’s not hard at all to figure out how to get going.

By: Ptah Dunbar

Ptah Dunbar — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 15:41:19 +0000

I remember back in the day making a theme for Drupal, it was retarded easy. I love the fact that all you have to do is upload a .zip to install a theme. So great.

Aside from that, I tried using drupal for my main CMS, but my only problem was the back-end isn’t user friendly. There’s a butt load of options and menus and submenus I had to explain basic task to my clients.

Working with wordpress is a lot easier, since it’s sort of a baby project. It’s not as developed as an entire CMS so the learning curve isn’t as hard.

By: Ian Stewart

Ian Stewart — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 14:38:43 +0000

I am looking to use UberCart in the one project. In fact, I was just showing the project to someone yesterday (when I mistakenly told them it was Google Checkout-ready—just a matter of time for that, I'm sure). If you're looking for a guide to Drupal 6 Theming, David, check this out.

By: David Yeiser

David Yeiser — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 14:23:23 +0000

Thanks for the write-up, Ian. We're getting ready to use Drupal at work for some things and this has been helpful. If you're looking for e-commerce to go along with Drupal I would check out Ubercart. I'm friends with one of the developers, and they have a lot of momentum right now.