It’s that time of the year again and for many Drupal fans this gathering is a very important one: DrupalCon, 2010.
One of the most interesting articles and discussions of note though is how many attendees are talking about WordPress and how Drupal has a lot to learn and perhaps fear:
WordPress is quickly transforming from a blog engine to a content management system.
Drupal may be stronger, more secure, more flexible, more mature, more stable, and more technically awesome. But the Drupal community needs to recognize that these things won’t guarantee our survival.
WordPress has the brand, and the market. WordPress serves as the perfect introduction to web publishing, and once people are hooked it’s hard to break their loyalty.
I love how their open to the discussion of other platforms and willing to learn from best-practices and changing conditions within the ecosystem.
Right on.
Personally I’m not sure that Drupal has much to fear unless they stop innovating.
Dewaine Cooper says
I love WordPress, but Drupal is seriously awesome. I’d highly recommend it to a group needing a CMS.
Jim Gray says
there are some pretty amazing drupal developers out there, and a lot of joomla as well.
Dan King says
I know that in my work with HighCallingBlogs.com we are working through a migration right now from a WPMU platform to a Drupal platform. I haven’t worked in Drupal much yet, but I hear good things about it.
And I also applaud Drupal’s openness to what they can learn from WP’s popularity. Grow or die….
Nathaniel says
Honestly, Drupal needs to work on their brand awareness and their user interface. They have a great platform, but it’s not END user friendly. Sure, designers and developers can find their way around it, but if the end user has no idea what they’re doing, then it’s worthless. WordPress make it super easy to use.
It’s going to be interesting to see what happens =]
John Saddington says
brand is very important, definitely agree!
Del says
Good point. I think Drupal leadership recognizes this and over the last year or so considerable effort has been made to attract designers and to make Drupal more beautiful & user friendly.
David Knapp says
I have not heard of Drupal. I use WordPress and probably will until I am convinced otherwise.
Trevor Taylor says
I have not been that impressed with Drupal. In my experience, WordPress fits my context so much better. One website that I am involved with is setup with Drupal and I get a headache when I need to go make changes. I am NOT a programmer. That is probably most of my problem. After building a couple websites with WordPress, the choice is easy for me. I am starting to build the Drupal website in WordPress. I did give Drupal try. Not for me, but maybe for you.
Andrew says
I’ve tried both, and find that WordPress is just so much easier. I’ve found designing for Drupal more difficult, and there is a much steeper learning curve for Drupal than WordPress.
Ben Cotten says
I’ve used Drupal some and had the same experience as you guys: powerful but not user friendly. I think where Drupal needs to innovate (and fear WP) is the ease of use department. The big revolution with CMS is that it takes website development more out of the hands of expert programmers and moves it more into the hands of tech savvy amateurs. Much of WP success is due to the fact that they seem to get that. WP never rolls out a new feature without first making it dead easy to use for even the most unlearned user.
Drupal still feels like a CMS for code jockey’s and experts. I think if they don’t change that, then they should worry about WP eating up their market share. The average user doesn’t care about how powerful or robust their CMS is. They just want it to work with as little hassle as possible. WordPress is a dream in that respect.
Andy Darnell says
Just another reminder that I need to someday get my hands dirty with drupal. I’d like to. I’ve heard that the community of drupal users is as great as the wordpress community, and honestly, that has been the coolest thing about learning how to break wordpress 🙂
Bill Seybolt says
I work in both platforms. Drupal still has an edge on taxonomy/role-based content and security. I have a number of clients and markets that see content based their credentials. The UI is not as pretty and functional as WordPress. But, if someone wants a site to handle a ton of different users and functions, I’m going to lean toward Drupal. (If you’re curious about who’s using Drupal, check out Dries Buytaert’s site on who’s using it. http://is.gd/eNyMy)
That being said, I love WordPress. The design, inside and out is beautiful. If someone were to ask me to setup a site, I would default to WP.
The two are both CMS’s. But, there are significant differences between two.