Back to the Future: Moving My Stuff to Wordpress

[The Gorn]

For several years my freelance web site has been based upon Drupal, the content management system (CMS.)

Recently I have become interested in blogging more often - if I say that I write for clients, then I need to have a body of public, visible work that can be browsed. The client samples are OK but I believe that I also need to do more blogging in order to improve my odds of my business site being indexed for keywords.

Drupal has, among many other capabilities, a blogging module. I had one posting to it from last summer. Recently I added a new post to it. And I got interested in the "communication" capabilities of the blog software. I was reading that most blog software in common use (IE, Wordpress) provides RSS feeds, communicates with sites like Technorati to be indexed for content, and provides hooks to places like Twitter and Facebook to partially automate the process of posting pointers to your content on social media.

I've been "against" social media stuff up to now, and I still think it's not all it's cracked up to be. But if I find easy ways to do these things and improve my SEO across the board, then why not?

Upon looking into these things, I found that Drupal is incredibly backward in terms of external interface support: their blog module does exactly one thing: it just lets you post chronologically. You cannot even schedule a post to made visible at a future time. It has no Technorati support, no pingback support, no RSS feed, no social networking support, no post categories or tag support... inherently.

Instead, in Drupal, you must add third party "modules" (plugins) to your Drupal installation in order to, for instance, support ping backs. So for every quoted feature you must add another third party module. And a lot of Drupal modules (most, actually) don't install easily and have installation bugs. An added constraint is that my web host does not support "PHP safe mode" - the omission of which is a security measure that they implemented. This creates (on my web host) open_basedir() restrictions and PHP file permissions issues. It means that my web host is quite fussy about some PHP stuff that I'd like to run on it, and many common things break.

Also, I took an objective look at what a user has to go through in order to post a comment to a Drupal hosted blog. Drupal has a "captcha" field, which is really annoying to users. And the UI for commenting is QUITE confusing. So I could expect my blog to get few or no comments. I could see that it wasn't really obvious where to comment, and they make you enter lots of fields.

Lastly, working with Drupal hosted blog articles was getting to be quite irritating. If you're logged in as an author-user, then part of the screen layout is taken up by an administrative menu, which messes up the appearance of whatever you're writing. So you can't see what it really looks like unless you log out. Then log back in to author some more.

To cut to the chase, Drupal had gotten unwieldly, and it has bare bones functionality in blogging terms.

It drove me NUTS.

I wound up installing Wordpress 3.3.1.

Simply put, Wordpress looks exactly like how the world expects to see a blog look. Everything is integrated already: RSS syndication feed, Technorati support, pingback support, tagging and categories.

The comment posting (for an anonymous user) is simplicity itself. NO CAPTCHA. Instead, Wordpress has had (for years) an integrated spam detection and filtering system called Akismet. (I think it works by seeing known spam authors or content and automatically filtering it.)

Drupal is an incredibly flexible system, but in real life use, it adds a huge weight of bullshit to a simply act of creating new content.

And in terms of challenging my web hosts's PHP security setup, Wordpress has been much friendlier in this regard than Drupal. I have not yet had any WP plugins fail due to lack of PHP safe mode support.

Wordpress is pretty much optimal for the purpose of internet "pamphleteering". Most important, besides the technical features and its closeness to being a self contained solution is this: it looks exactly like what most people expect a blog to look like.

This fact alone - my blog now looks like everyone else's in terms of "what to expect" - is worth moving my blog to Wordpress.

FYI.

[datagirl]

Hi, Gorn.

I think you will be happy with WordPress.  I have a hobby blog on the "free" side that is incredibly easy to maintain.  By comparing the stats and comment feedback mechanisms, I gather that the spam filtering flags items added to the comment queue without using the on-screen forms.  I can have a post that has not had any reader hits accumulate massive comments overnight, and they all land in the spam bucket.

Keep us "posted."
-DG

[Richardk]

Thanks for the update. I've helped people with their WP sites and have been mostly happy with it. Finding a "good" plug-in has been the biggest challenge but not anything like what you describe with Drupal. For blogging, WP just works and I've seen people with little technical know how build their own sites.

I always figured that Drupal was the "next step" but now I'm having second thoughts, at least for blogging. It's been my impression that Drupal is "sold as" more of a framework but it seems to be too piecemeal for quick site development. Maybe if you get to know it, it's not too bad? Perhaps just the blogging part is weak?

Your comments remind me of a client project gone wrong. It was written in Java and they wanted to "do it right". It was so over engineered  that it barely ran but it conformed to all the best practices and standards. A great example of how not to build an application.

[The Gorn]

I always figured that Drupal was the "next step" but now I'm having second thoughts, at least for blogging. It's been my impression that Drupal is "sold as" more of a framework but it seems to be too piecemeal for quick site development. Maybe if you get to know it, it's not too bad? Perhaps just the blogging part is weak?

Your comments remind me of a client project gone wrong. It was written in Java and they wanted to "do it right". It was so over engineered  that it barely ran but it conformed to all the best practices and standards. A great example of how not to build an application.

Drupal's modules seem to be littered with immature "proof of concept" garbage that nobody is maintaining and which have lots of caveats about using. Also, many modules are designed to require other modules that have to be installed separately.

I know Drupal very well - I developed my first client site for it in 2007. It is still a pain in the ass. And I would not exactly call the Drupal blog system "weak" - really it's more overengineered and ponderous than anything. It can do what you need if you have the patience, and I don't.

Drupal could do the job I wanted, but only if I really worked hard at installing modules and tweaking things so that it would do what I needed.

One problem with the community of module developers on Drupal vs. the community of plugin developers for Wordpress is that the Drupal module community is much thinner and smaller than the Wordpress community - when you look for a plugin that supports something like, say, "like" or "share" buttons for different social media, it may be broken or it may not even work or it may be abandoned. Or it may be requiring significant effort to tweak it to what is commonly needed. 

For whatever reason, the culture of Drupal users is like programmers - nobody wants to provide a simple out of the box solution, they would rather give you a raw tool and have you paw through endless blogs and support forums to figure out how to make it work right. It feels very elitist - "applications" are for lightweights, you must exert lots of effort learning the basic operating principles of a module that you can parametrize it for your own use.

Example: last summer, trying to figure out how to implement a scrolling marquee type panel that would display a series of framed messages (testimonial quotes) was absolute murder and was a 2 week long distraction.

The Wordpress culture favors delivering out of the box solutions that don't require much tinkering.

I'd had enough of this high level of effort to do very basic stuff that isn't really that exciting, at least for the purpose of blogging.

As far as Wordpress or Drupal, that is actually a legitimate comparison. Wordpress has four built in security levels for users.  With Drupal, only administrators are defined, and you can endlessly hone the capabilities of login classes.

Drupal is really more enterprise class. Wordpress is for normal businesses. Although I have seen major newspapers running their blogs on Wordpress.

[The Gorn]

My installation of Drupal seemed to start life with a few dozen tables.

Drupal has quite a few internal "abstraction layers" for ultimate flexibility - so, for instance, there are tables for "nodes" (I think these are connection points for content objects), security permission tables, et al.

Wordpress has under 10 tables.

Obviously Wordpress is dedicated for one type of application - blogging. So it can afford to be internally simple.

But I have heard of people using it as a real CMS for web site development, or even as the core of a CRM application.

It makes you really wonder exactly how much "goodness" you are losing, due to reduced complexity, from a general CMS like Drupal, if you hear anecdotal stories about Wordpress being used for things well beyond its core use for blogging.

[Richardk]

It makes you really wonder exactly how much "goodness" you are losing, due to reduced complexity, from a general CMS like Drupal, if you hear anecdotal stories about Wordpress being used for things well beyond its core use for blogging.

Hard to say since WP does one thing really well, while Drupal is more like a toolbox. Sure you have limitations in WP but if you can live within their sandbox, it probably makes life a lot simpler.

I'd really love to hear more comments from someone doing large web site development on the pros and cons of using Drupal. Are some modules better than others and perhaps the blogging one is a bad example? Is there hope for Drupal? It sounds so good yet so complex.

[The Gorn]

I honestly think that Drupal strangles on its complexity. I have checked out Drupal fora for tips and advice and you see unanswered questions on many topics from lots of users. The dead or unsupported modules add to the aggravation. You can waste a lot of time trying to make some modules work in vain.

After running into many dead ends and extremely hard work to do some very simple, mundane things, I started to question if Drupal was really worth it. That's where I am at now.

Let's say you wanted to create a newspaper's portal. You need lots of security features, lots of flexibility. You'd use Drupal or something like it.

Anything lesser in scope - like many corporate sites - I bet Wordpress is a decent choice.

In stark contrast, Wordpress has the feel of something that has been continually simplified and perfected for its mission. A completely different experience. And probably an entirely different philosophy.

[benali72]

Gorn, thanks for the info.  I have far less Drupal experience than you but what I've learned matches what you learned. It's free, but very minimalist, so you have to get into the 10,000 plug-ins to really get antwhere with it. Lots of work and complexity. Yugh!

One question I have concerning WP.  All the blogs I see list older posts simply by date -- which is of no use to the reader whatsoever in terms of describing the content of earlier blog posts. What would be more useful to most people (and certainly what I'd want) would be a list of older blog entries in reverse chronological order with their titles listed.  Is there an easy way to do this with WP?

Thanks!

[datagirl]

Gorn, thanks for the info.  I have far less Drupal experience than you but what I've learned matches what you learned. It's free, but very minimalist, so you have to get into the 10,000 plug-ins to really get antwhere with it. Lots of work and complexity. Yugh!

One question I have concerning WP.  All the blogs I see list older posts simply by date -- which is of no use to the reader whatsoever in terms of describing the content of earlier blog posts. What would be more useful to most people (and certainly what I'd want) would be a list of older blog entries in reverse chronological order with their titles listed.  Is there an easy way to do this with WP?

Thanks!

WP supports multiple pages.  It is very simple to have a Table of Contents or similar page that lists entries organized however you like with links back to the post (which is supported on the editor toolbar).  There is also support for a menu system, if you prefer that to multiple tabbed pages.

-DG

[I D Shukhov]

http://php.opensourcecms.com/scripts/show.php?catid=1&category=CMS%20/%20Portals doesn't show Drupal, at 3.75 stars, anywhere in the best-to-worst rated view.  It used to be somewhere near the top.  It shows up in the alphabetical view.

Joomla is the most popular and WordPress is #4.

[choppedwood]

A lot of that is probably Joomla 1.17.  I've used 1.15 and it did not impress me.  I suspect Drupal may have the same problem in reverse with v6 and v7.  I fought several battles with my host on version 7, gave up, and went back to 6 which I really like.

Also, that category has a ton of entries.  I remember not too many years ago that the amount of CMS options was much, much lower.  I think it took up one page but I might be remembering it incorrectly.