Drupal or WP for a blog?

Hi,

I also did quite a bit of research on Drupal, Joomla, and WP, and this is where I came out on the issues:

1) Wordpress is relatively compact. And by being very focused on blogging, is able to fulfill almost all blogging requirements with a minimum amount of effort and cost. However, this comes at a cost, since by being very focused and compact, it cannot really be extended beyond the basic blogging capabilities, particularly in the area of presentation management. Static pages give some flexibility, but there is a limit that can be done with the CSS presentation layer, the php processing layer, and the limits to what you can do with the database management layer. Because there are frequent updates to the core modules, I pretty much stay away from modifying any underlying code, for fear of introducing instabilities. Some of the plugins are excellent, most cause too many problems (including security issues), and are not very well maintained. But I do not think there is any better way to get a stable blog going without paying a arm and a leg. Just stay relatively vanilla using the popular plugins like Akismet.

2) I was totally confused by the Joomla and Drupal environments. I get the feeling that the developers and development framework for the products is very loosely controlled leading to unpredictable problems and very little backward compatibility. These products may be great for developers who are getting paid to develop, but I get the feeling that I would be endlessly throwing money down a deep hole if I adopted either of these products. No Drupal or Joomla developer has ever been able to give me concrete answers regarding the specific benefits of their products as well as questions regarding backward compatibility. My overall feel when looking at these products was a sense of chaos.

3) The one CMS product that I felt relatively comfortable with was ExpressionEngine. The developers seem to be sharp, able to come up with succinct answers to my questions, knew what they were aiming for in their product architecture, and provided excellent support (Joomla and Drupal again seemed chaotic in this respect). The forums were also well run, and the products seem to be very stable, secure, and had a good design path. However, in order to use the product effectively, you do need to have a fairly good understanding of CSS, HTML, PHP, and SQL, as you would be Joomla and Drupal.

Should I ever need to have a more extensible platform beyond what WP has to offer, I would probably go with ExpressionEngine. I might look at Joomla, but their lack of concern with backward compatibility (it seems), scares me. Possibly Movable Type would be another product I would consider before I looked at Joomla. I just prefer order to chaos. These are just impressions and no doubt my impressions will change over time as I gain more knowledge. Mileage will vary depending upon where you are coming from.

Rich

 

drupal/joomla are more CMS oriented.. while Wordpress is just a blog.

But wordpress wipes drupal out completely... regardless

 

Yet another unfair impression of Drupal. I don't know about Joomla, but Drupal works smoothly for me.
I'm not an expert in programming, I'm learning it. But I can see that Drupal provides a perfect framework for developers. Everything works in a modular way. You don't have to mess too much with the code to inject a plug-in or theme into your system. And the way it controls the modules (or plug-ins or addons) is outstanding. Although it may look intimidating at first (because it's not mainly orientated to bloggers), when properly installed and configured, it's the easiest and most powerful blog system you can have.

I myself had a terrible experience with Wordpress. I was using Drupal at the time. Then decided to switch to Wordpress for a change, just to see why people were so crazy about Wordpress. But I was totally disappointed. I must admit I only had the patient to try it for a few hours. What's good about Wordpress is that it's marketed as a blog system, with a clear aim at bloggers. So people flock in to use it and develop cool theme and plugins for it. But as I tried Drupal before Wordpress, and it worked much better than Wordpress, I was rather disappointed. For Drupal, it's so easy to install a module. You don't have to chmod anything, don't have to hack any kind of code. Just plug it in and enable it. While with some Wordpress plugins, I didn't even bother to download them to try. Just looking at the documentation which says "you need to chmod this and that" or "you need to tweak blah blah" discourages me totally. I know that not all plugins are like that, but if you see Wordpress as a system, it is not as powerful as Drupal.

And as I looked at the source code of some themes in Wordpress, my eyes became completely blurred after a few minutes. Wordpress doesn't use any template engine, and it makes theming a very difficult and time-consuming process. While with Drupal, it has PHPTemplate, it can handle Smarty and Xtemplate (or something like that, I don't remember). It's a pie to convert an XHTML/CSS template to use with Drupal.

Also some thing I hate about Wordpress, is that to add a block to your sidebar, you have to mess with codes. For Drupal, it only takes a few clicks and then a block is configured to be added to the sidebar of any theme. For Wordpress (sorry I didn't have the patience to try all the feature of it, so I'm not sure about this), it seems like whenever you want to add a new block to the sidebar, you have to struggle with a bunch of codes and it doesn't guarantee to work smoothly right away. And maybe you even have to repeat that same process every time you change your theme.

I believe if Drupal is originally targeted to bloggers, it will be far more popular than Wordpress. I'm trying to learn how to put together modules and stuffs to release a Drupal Blog system for bloggers out there who want to try this cool CMS.
I think you guys should give it a try some time, and I bet 9 out of 10 people will have the same opinion as mine.

PS: I'm not a user of Wordpress, only experiment with it for a few hours to have a brief idea how it works. So please feel free to comment on any wrong point I made.
Thank you.

 

Wordpress for a blog hands down.

 

my vote goes for WP