Why I Chose Drupal Instead of Wordpress
Making good decisions before a project starts can be difficult. Here I discuss why one publishing platform was chosen over another.
Wordpress is the top blogging platform. So, when I decided to build this blog I fully expected to use Wordpress and was really looking forward to it. As a full time Drupal developer it's inspiring to use a different tool. This gives me a chance to use a different and refreshing user interface, see under the hood of a different source code, and be inspired in my daily developing.
But, when I looked over my resources and requirements it turns out Wordpress was not the best fit for this site. Since a big part of engineering web applications is starting with the best tools for your task (or at least the best as far as you can tell) here is why I chose Drupal instead of Wordpress.
Performance
One of my initial requirements was to run this site with as little of a performance burden as possible. Performance is one of my big interests (most on this is later posts) and I am running this blog on a server with other sites that use a lot more resources. After doing a little testing I found that I got better performance from Drupal than Wordpress (with caching of course).
Customizations
Few sites are complete without customizations and I like to tinker... a lot. When I got under the hood of Wordpress to make some of those changes it felt icky. Basically, you need to do some ugly hacking.
Drupal, on the other hand, breaks out it's layers (Presentation-Abstraction-Control) quite well and provides a robust system to tinker without hacking anything in the core download. Being able to make changes without altering the core download makes updates easier, smoother, and cleaner.
Future Plans
Once I started to think about what I might do with this site and reflecting on what the original inspiration for this site talked about, I came up with a few future plans for the site. A roadmap if you will. I then started looking into how to build out those features in Wordpress. At this point I still wanted to use Wordpress to learn and use a different tool.
This was the straw that broke the camels back. It would have been a bit of work (not the fun kind) to build out the additional features in Wordpress. This is what pushed me back to what I know I can build them in.
Wordpress Is Still No. 1
This isn't meant to be a Wordpress vs. Drupal post (though I'm sure my bias hasn't escaped). Wordpress is the top blogging platform and for good reason. If you want to install it and have a blog up and running quick that just works Wordpress is your choice.
This is about looking at your requirements, resources, and maybe a roadmap for where you are going and trying to choose the right platform based on these instead of what's shiny and at the top of the charts.
I appreciate you touching on the performance perspective and you hit the nail on the head with the roadmap, for me. I'm always trying to think (and sometimes over think) what I might want to do in the future. This helps ground me to what should be done now.
Anyway, Drupal requires more of an investment in time, but I would say it's definitely been worth it (since 4.5). I've been able to take on web projects I never would have dreamed of being able to build let alone construct from scratch.
I think Wordpress it a great blogging platform, but even then, I can roll out a Drupal blog very quickly including my own customizations.
THe site you're talking about is this one, right?
Just out of curiosity, what sort of customizations and future plans were you looking at that weren't implemented in WordPress?
I'm just saying, I don't see anything on this site that couldn't be easily done with a WordPress template.
Yes, this is the site I'm talking about here.
You are right that I could have done everything you see here quite quickly in Wordpress. For the time being I'm keeping quiet on the features I'll be adding here. I'll just say that not everything I want to do is simple content management.
Please note, I don't want this to be a comparison between Drupal and Wordpress. My point is to know your requirements and plans. Then look for a tool based on those. The reason I chose Drupal was for details that aren't in this post.
Yeah, I agree with your point about knowing your tools. Not planning ahead and beginning a project with a tool that would eventually not meet all the requirements would be tragic.
I would, however, probably argue that Wordpress could do just about anything you want, even without knowing what those things are. ;-)
I completely disagree with you. Let me explain why.
Wordpress is a fantastic blog and simple publishing platform. When you get into some more complex publishing solutions Wordpress is not what you want to use. For example, take a publishing site (like an online magazine) with multiple sections each with it's own editor. An editor can manage content in his or her section and nowhere else. Each section has it's own list of authors who can contribute. And, there is a workflow that has to go through an editor before it's published. Plus, you have a site admin who can edit common areas.
This should not be built Wordpress.
Or, take a site like Stack Overflow. That shouldn't be built in Wordpress.
There is a lot Wordpress shouldn't be used for. Wordpress is great at what it does and I hope it doesn't change it's target. One tool can't service all use cases. If you try to make a tool too general you loose what makes it great.