GORGES does not have any intrinsic preference between, Drupal and WordPress. We can and will provide either. Several recent clients have posed this choice. We think this choice needs to be based in the technology.
Wanting to be as unbiased as possible, I have researched online several times and offer these two third-party views:
http://www.bivingsreport.com/2007/wordpress-vs-drupal/
http://www.quis.com/2009/06/01/drupal-vs-wordpress
Both articles try to be unbiased, and I think they succeed. Neither writes that WordPress and Drupal are on the same plane. They both assign WordPress to the simplest of websites and Drupal to the next echelon. This matches our considerable experience. WordPress provides an elegantly ease-to-use CMS. It is the appropriate choice for lightly featured blogs and very simple websites.
Here’s the experience of someone who “loves” WordPress (the language needs editing):
http://kevinjohngallagher.com/2012/01/wordpress-has-left-the-building/
The Drupal community is on a different track. Drupal is a machine for making interactive websites – newspapers, magazines, large corporate websites, online stores. In the spectrum of technology, Drupal picks up where WordPress leaves off, and takes us toward standard web applications. When the project no longer fits “standard things you do on a website,” it is a web application that requires a web application framework. GORGES will in that case recommend the appropriate framework, maybe Ruby on Rails, Yii, or .NET.
It should also be noted, that when a client is engaging GORGES to perform setup, to propose designs, to guide the process and provide training, the distinctions having to do with ease of setup, theme decisions, and ease of use become inconsequential. GORGES shoulders those.
The differences between WordPress and Drupal are finally differences in capability. What interactive features does your website need now and how likely are you to want significant visitor interaction in the future? Is the site to be a one-time undertaking, or is it likely to grow thought time? If these are not issues, WordPress might be just right.
Tags: drupal, frameworks, wordpress, yii
Thanks for the info, I’ve been interested in trying Drupal for a while so im doing some research on it.
Drupal and WordPress are both for content management, and as such should be used for sites that are content-centric (i.e. not for applications, I think we can all agree on that much.)
Personally, I would choose between Drupal and WordPress based on the following.
WordPress has (more or less) a fixed content architecture, based on blog posts, tags, pages and links. If that’s a fit for the content of the site you’re building, WP is by far the simplest and most-effective way to go.
Drupal on the other hand has a highly flexible content architecture, based on “nodes”, an extremely “bendable” concept – you can shape, model and mold the content architecture, more or less (and at varying cost), to your heart’s content. For highly structured content, with a very specific structure, you can most likely make Drupal fit.
So in my opinion, where Drupal and WP differ, is conceptually, in terms of information architecture; WP has a chosen set of common concepts that are relatively easy to understand – whereas Drupal has a very open-ended concept (a “node”) that you can specialize into custom concepts, tailored to the information-domain you’re dealing with.
I would not tout Drupal as a “machine for making interactive web applications” – it may give you more ways to interact with content than most other CMS, but at heart, it’s still a CMS.
And as my colleague David Furber pointed out, if you’re building a content-heavy website that also offers application-grade functionality, you can integrate a framework and a CMS – for example, there’s nothing in the way of deploying Drupal or WordPress together with Yii, or even as David has done, Drupal with an entirely different platform such as Ruby/Rails.