Is Drupal the best CMS/Framework available?

It’s Sunday morning in the Perkins household. My wife, Natalie, is fast asleep still after having a nightmare (should I be sharing that? Oh well) and I’m pondering the future of my website. As you might remember, I moved my blog to http://www.nicholasperkins.com/blog/ a few week ago, and there was a reason for this.

Recently I’ve been working with Drupal a lot. I worked on getting Natalie’s new portfolio site up and looking awesome (if I do say so myself). Drupal is not really a CMS, although it can be used as one. Drupal is more of  framework that gives web developers the tools to create very complex sites without having to hand code thousands of lines of PHP.

In the case of Natalie’s site, I still needed to hack into some of the modules code, wrote a few lines of customer PHP database lookups to create the dynamic sub-menu and a few other bits and bobs. What I didn’t need to do is create an entire CMS from scratch. When I wanted to have a new content type for her portfolio images, I didn’t need to design the database structure and code the posting and editing and whatever else functions. Drupal just made it happen.

So I’m now considering moving my blog across to Drupal as part of a larger site redesign. I’m currently looking at creating a main website for my Excel and PHP development business, which is why I moved the blog. It will be a few months before I have the design and content ready to go up though, but that gives me plenty of time to get Drupal into shape.

What I am wondering is whether I should transfer my blog into Drupal and away from Wordpress.

Wordpress is probably the best blogging software I have ever used. The interface is clean and easy to use, the plugin and themes are so easy to install, configure and “just work”. When I helped Natalie with http://www.axisoffat.com/ (it’s on Drupal as well) I wondered if it was really the best option. It did work out in the end but it required more fluffing around to get it to work just the way we wanted it to.

I’d be interested in your thoughts on both Drupal and Wordpress, but also any other CMS/Framework solutions you have used. The decision on what I use for my own site is critical. Whatever I choose I will have to work closely with and become and expert at using and modifying as required so that I can offer similar services to my clients.

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Posted by Nicholas Perkins at 10:51 am on August 9th, 2009. Comments
Categories: Web Development. Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

  • nadavoid
    From what I understand and from my limited experience with it, Wordpress is simply and squarely "the blogging platform." If all you need is a blog, and maybe one extra feature added some time down the road, wordpress should do fine for you.

    My preferred system is Drupal. Yes it's definitely more work to make it "user friendly" because Drupal doesn't make any assumptions about what sort of site you're going to build. Its claim to fame is definitely its flexibility and its community. I'm convinced you won't find a friendlier more helpful open source community. And as it seems you've already experienced in your work with Drupal, CCK and Views can make you feel like a powerful superhero without writing a line of code. (well, you'll probably want to do some theming to make it look exactly the way you want.)

    So in my opinion, Drupal gives you the best platform for future growth and development. Adding content types, fields, multiple displays of this content (gallery, calendar, etc.) is where the meat is.

    Good luck with your decision and with your future site development!
  • I think you are spot on with your assessment of what I see as the differences between the two. Drupal is a steep learning curve and I gave up a couple of times but as I was putting together the portfolio site I learned more and more. It allowed me to refine what I was doing over and over, having done some hideous hacks to get things how I wanted since I hadn't found another way until learning about another part.

    The only thing that would have made it easier for me would have been a guide to help me more with the theming and the preprocessor functions, but eventually I got my head (a little) around that too. It's the drawback of a community effort; there isn't enough person power to go around so you have to focus on your core offering, sometimes at the detriment of other things (documentation).

    That's not to say that the documentation available isn't good, and the large and active community helps with that too. I just found some of it undocumented or was confusing at times. A newb's problem I suppose.
  • Frenzy3
    As a drupal consultant I would say use wordpress for blogs
  • tim
    drupal is a cms - in every sense of the word
    if you like wordpress than you will love drupal - when combined with live writer - it is awesome!
    there are certainly some tricks and traps to running drupal - and managing all the modules and security etc - however no worse than wordpress - in fact probably better managed.
  • My experience with Drupal has been up and down so far, but more up than down. It's a learning curve but well worth learning. I can't think of another CMS or Framework where I could have built Natalie's new site in such a short timeframe.
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