Drupal vs. Wordpress - An extensive look: Which blogging platform is better (for me)?

When I started "blogging", I hand-wrote code. I quickly discovered that having to FTP new code to the server was tiresome, not to mention difficult to edit while at work, and not at home with my FTP info. The hunt for some sort of software was on. I settled upon good ol' PHP-Nuke back in the day, and got pretty good with it. I ended up ditching PHP-Nuke after getting repeatedly hacked, and losing the hosting I had. When starting a new site back up, I decided to look for another CMS, one with more security, and more up to date standards and features. Behold, the nectar of the blog-gods, Wordpress was found. I don't even want to think about how early of a version it was. Bleh. But swear to god, it was AMAZING at the time.

A good while later, a few sites in the future, I decided I wanted more power than Wordpress for a few projects at my day job involving communities, and started playing with Joomla, and despite it's power, I couldn't get past the quirks, such as incredibly poor SEO, nevermind the lack thereof out of the box. Went back to Wordpress for all other projects. See a trend here?

After looking at competition for Joomla, I put some serious thought into Drupal, and as you can see, that's what this site (and a few others I'm working on) is running. Drupal is fast, powerful (REALLY powerful!), looks gorgeous, has a lot of great features, but that being said, it really takes a developer mindset to get everything out of it that the CMS can provide. Add to that the fact that as far as third party developer support goes, it doesn't have as much as other platforms, and what it does have isn't usually too recent.

A few days ago, I ended up re-registering a domain I had a year or two ago, wanting to bring the project back up. I have a backup of the site on an old drive, and brought the Wordpress install up without any effort (unfortunately it was a backup from before I had pumped much content into it, but still, it was quick!). So here I am, in 2009, fully enamored with Drupal 6, and I find myself with an old install of Wordpress 2.1 and barely any content. How bizarre. So I follow through with what every self-respecting geek does: Upgrade that shit!

Here's where things start to get a bit odd, however. As I mentioned, I really do like Drupal. It does a LOT. However, it's not without it's short-comings. Just the other day I went on a rant about how ridiculously difficult and tedious it is to upgrade Drupal, and posted a comment on the forums at Drupal.org (link coming when their site's not off-line--how ironic!). Drupal SERIOUSLY lets me down in this aspect. For how advanced it claims to be--and is in many respects--it just fails epically at some things.

So back to Wordpress. I bring up the other site, and go to upgrade Wordpress. Upgrading Wordpress is still as easy as I remembered: copy the files, run the upgrade script, and you're done! So within three minutes I had upgraded both site, code, and database from WP2.1 to WP2.7. This definitely makes me happy.

Then I go look at the modules that were installed. Some I didn't need. Some I knew I'd replace, others I wanted to update. News to me, but WP2.7 allows for updating from a single link in the Plugins page! And installs the same way! Drupal can't even TOUCH this, I'm thinking to myself. This could get ugly.

WP2.7 has a new dashboard and admin interface, so it was a bit of a change, but I picked up on it pretty quickly. It's fast. And with Google Gears functionality, it's even faster. Very ajaxy and slick, it does as much as possible without having to refresh the page. This saves MONSTROUS amounts of time. And the new plugins I had installed for Adsense, Analytics, etc, just blew my mind. Everything is so... Nice...

So here I am, sitting with a handful of Drupal 6 installs, struggling to get certain components the way I want/need them, and then end up with a fully-operational Wordpress 2.7 install with most everything I need popped in within a day. What the hell am I supposed to do? While it doesn't have the advanced taxonomy that Drupal has, nor it's powerful plugins and community possibilities, Wordpress is just too easy to deny for most projects. Yeah, Wordpress won't work too well for a dating site, but then again, even Drupal doesn't have a great add-on set for a dating site. Community sites aren't much better either, all of the options I've seen done consisting of a crap-ton of modules all working together, feeling like they're being held together by duct tape, bailing wire, and pantyhose--just like most Volkswagons I've seen.

At this point, I think I'm really considering switching my efforts back over to Wordpress, at least for this site and one other, until I can come up with a better plan of attack on Drupal, at least for now. This site will remain on Drupal, as it did take a good amount of time and tweaking, and I do honestly like this CMS. And yes, there are things I don't like about Wordpress as well. Last I remember, putting in Javascript and other code in widgets/sidebar elements was a complete pain in the neck. So we'll see what happens.

As for this other site that I'm running my shiny new Wordpress 2.7 code on? Well, that's a bit of a secret for now. You'll see soon enough. ;)