I have been a WordPress user for about 5 years I think. I have watched it mature into one of the finest web development platforms and the fact it is an open source application is what makes it all the more powerful and versatile. I would have said that it was the finest until very recently when I took the time to build out a community website using Drupal open source CMS but the sheer scale and power of Drupal are hard to beat when you consider WordPress is a bloggers solution primarily geared to one type of content production and limited in the way of group usage. Building a Community site is somewhat limited with WordPress because of the weak support at the core for discussion forums and community style features like file sharing and communication.
Where WordPress is built for just one user the real strength in Drupal comes in the integration of such a variety of content production and user management features. Wayy back in 2006 I built a community website using WordPress blog as the foundation and I added a SimpleMachines forum and CopperMine gallery to make a single login site but the linkage was unstable at best and the entire site became a resource hog because of the mish mash of scripts it took to make it happen. Drupal offers a very raw and basic suite of easy to mange tools plus a robust and diverse community of followers building out modules and add ons that allow you to build our a better framework for large scale community websites. The core features of integrated blogs, forums, comments and contact information make for a superior application for community website development albeit with a stronger learning curve and more ground work than a one click WordPress site.
Drupal is raw and you have to basically build a site from scratch with lots of time spent on setting up everything from content types and url paths to taxonomy, site navigation, user role types and permissions and just about everything else you can imagine. The core documentation and online forums are great but form someone to just dive into the application with no experience and build a website from it has got to be 100 times more difficult. As an experienced developer I was still a bit confused with all that it does and things like content types and taxonomy hierarchy were a trick to manage even for an old pro. I’m still not sure i completely understand the difference between a Story, a Page or a Book but I was able to find a use for each in two separate websites and when you turn everything on and tweak it to work for you it can be an awesome piece of free software.
Drupal is rich and diverse and a definite all in one tool for web developers but the all in one wonders always have one weak spot and that is the fact that while it may do everything it’s not very good at any one thing. Each of the core features including blogs and forums specifically are almost unusable in the fresh install state and require the use of modules to enhance the user experience and even gain what seem like standard features. As an example the blog tools in Drupal are by far the weakest and you have to add everything from decent WYSIWYG editors to file upload, media capabilities and much more before you come up with anything close to a WordPress blog tool. Exactly the same can be said for the forums capability which seems stuck in as an afterthought at this point. The forums are weak still with the use of even the best available modules but when you look at the site as a whole I think the individual misses get washed over in the coolness of it all. I have a total of about 100 hours building out two community sites that I am mildly impressed with both even in their infancy and I can see that they will turn out to be good strong sites so long as my marketing efforts pan out.
It has not been smooth sailing the whole way and I was forced to complete scrap my first runs of the site because I made a mess of the database one each site trying all the different modules and plugin libraries require. I had issues with file permissions, version incompatibility and a boat load of other issues but I have been able to learn from my mistake and take baby steps when changing things and now I feel I’m capable of building out anything I ever needed for a website with Drupal. The thing is you have to use all the features and functions and shoot for a big site in order to compensate for the short coming if each feature. Big sites are what I am building for now and Drupal is my new software of choice for awhile. I’ll be doing more articles on how I use it and my must have Drupal modules as we progress in the sites and I’ll keep updates on how things go.
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