WordPress is better than Drupal

WordPress is better than Drupal. At least for this blog.

Back in May I made the switch to Drupal. It has a lot of power, I felt more comfortable developing for it, and I was just sure I could leverage this power to huge benefit.

Instead I ended up with a very feature laden site that was hard to maintain. Drupal does have a ton of power and flexibility, but it comes at a price.

Drupal will tempt you. At first you’ll be giddy with the possibilities. However once you’ve started building things you’ll find you have a mountain of modules. Updates have gone from a quaintly archaic process of copying a few files to spending more than an hour documenting, disabling, checking, copying, enabling, and checking again. Even updating a module requires downloading, copying, taking the site offline to run database updates. After appropriate backups of course.

If you don’t mind learning some more shell commands, you can automate things with DRUSH, and it’s various add-ons. At this point you’ve nearly learned a new profession however.

My advice is if you’re a blogger who doesn’t want site maintenance as a hobby, there’s no choice. Use WordPress.

Switched to Drupal

It’s done! This morning before I left for work I put the new swduncan.com online. Of course there are many theme tweaks (if not a whole new theme) that need to be taken care of, and a few other oddities. For the most part it went quite smoothly. the WordPress Import module worked well and took care of the vast majority of the work. I copied the directories containing images and other files over, and they seem to be working ok.

So far life under Drupal is good!
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Moving to Drupal

I’ve been experimenting with a WordPress import module for Drupal, and I think I’ve got the move worked out. All the same, it’s possible that over the next day or so you may see some strange things come through.

Switching to Drupal, I think.

I think I’m going to switch this blog from WordPress to Drupal.

I’ve got nothing against WordPress. It’s been a solid product since I first started using and really it’s only gotten better. In fact, if WP wasn’t so good, the title wouldn’t be “Swtiching to Drupal” it would be “Switched to Drupal.”

The reason I’m thinking about moving to Drupal is because I’ve done some other projects in it – a product development management system, and a market intelligence database – that got me into using it, and I enjoy it. It’s more versatile and flexible than WP, albeit at the expense of some learning curve. Last, with several sites to maintain, it would be nice to manage groups of them under a single code base, and that’s a bit easier under Drupal.

One thing in WP’s favor though is the ease of upgrading. In WP I basically push a button after doing some backups. In Drupal I have to make backups, take sites off-line, deactivate modules, copy the new files over, recopy any custom files I’ve created, reactivate modules, test, test, test and then put the sites back online again. Some of this can be automated, but some can’t and I’m trying to decide how crazy it’s going to make me to live with the system like this. Everything I’ve done previously was either very closed or behind a firewall, so spammers weren’t really an issue. Not so for a typical blog, so upgrades will be pretty mandatory.

Anyone have any experience to share?