DISQUS

nadavoid · 4 months ago

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!

Nicholas Perkins · 4 months ago

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 · 4 months ago

As a drupal consultant I would say use wordpress for blogs

tim · 4 months ago

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.

Nicholas Perkins · 4 months ago

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.