A little more on Drupal vs WordPress

Here’s a link to an interesting question on Quora about WordPress vs Drupal that got a thoughtful answer from Dries Buytaert, the guy who created Drupal. A number of the other answers are pretty interesting too. It’s actually an older question, but it rose to the top of my Quora feed today, for some reason. Quora is sometimes very good at surfacing useful answers to questions, and avoiding the flame wars and trolling that would normally clutter up any “X vs Y” discussion on the internet.

And, hey, here’s an article on migrating from Drupal to WordPress. I’m curious as to why anyone would want to do that though. If you already had a site up & running in Drupal, what would you get by migrating to WordPress? I could see cases where you’d want to go in the other direction, since Drupal has some functionality that doesn’t exist in (base) WordPress. I guess I could think of a few cases where you’d want to go from Drupal to WordPress, if you were dealing with a simple site and didn’t need all the overhead of Drupal, and/or wanted the WP admin interface, which (for some things) is nicer looking & friendlier than Drupal’s.

2 thoughts on “A little more on Drupal vs WordPress”

  1. Hey Andrew,

    I wrote the article you linked to on migrating from Drupal to WordPress. You’re spot on with your guess as to why people want to move. Most of my clients who migrated had simple sites and wanted something more user-friendly. Drupal has a steeper learning curve and requires more maintenance time.

    Although WordPress started out as blogging software, it’s now a proper CMS with the advantage of being incredibly easy to use. Those who simply want a basic CMS seem to be abandoning Drupal and moving to WordPress because it suits their needs better. Of course, the people who use Drupal as more of a framework for heavily customised sites are sticking with it and upgrading to Drupal 7.

    We do a lot of site maintenance and I must say, WordPress updates are effortless. Drupal updates always makes me anxious as they’ve resulted in too many post-update ‘white screen of deaths’ for comfort. These can take time to resolve. Because of this, our Drupal update process is quite long-winded:

    * Download all the update packages
    * Backup the database
    * Install all the update packages on a dev server
    * Run the update on a dev server
    * Test the update
    * Set the live server to maintenance mode
    * Repeat the process for the live server
    * Turn off maintenance mode
    * Do more checking

    To date, I’ve had zero problems updating a WordPress site. I just click the update button and everything is done. Of course, we have automated backups in case anything goes wrong but so far (knock on wood) they’ve been unnecessary.

    Hope this helps!

    1. Wow, thanks for the thoughtful comment!
      Yeah, I too get a little worried with Drupal updates. They’re usually no problem, but I always do them on a test server first. (Though I haven’t actually done any Drupal work in a little more than a year.)

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