Words — Jonathan Cheyer

I’ve finally revamped my site and installed some content management system (CMS) software. I’m currently trying out drupal-4.7.3 and wordpress-2.0.4. As with most choices with software, there are clearly advantages and disadvantages to both. ¶

Drupal is a more full-featured CMS, and it includes support for creating standard pages, forums, and blogging. It uses a module approach to allow any number of different content modules to be dropped into the CMS as a whole. Like other CMS software, the presentation layer is abstracted out into themes. Simply by choosing a new theme, you can have an entirely new look and feel to your site. Drupal does have support for blogging, of course. But compared with WordPress, it is definitely more limited from a user interface standpoint. ¶

WordPress is more of a blogging tool, although it has some limited support for creating standard pages. It has a nice administrative UI, and the writing of a new blog entry is done in a JavaScript-enabled web form. The additional JavaScript allows you to specify bold, italic, bullets, paragraph, and links for the entry. I must admit this is definitely nicer than the basic web form, although the JavaScript is slightly slow to when deleting text or selecting text. It also takes about a half second when you first enter a new text entry before you start typing. The main downside is that it is not meant to be a full CMS, so you don’t get the modular aspect for new types of content that Drupal gives you. ¶

As usual with software, people are forced to choose between Drupal and WordPress instead of being able to use both in an integrated fashion. I’m not looking for even strong integration, although that would be nice (for example WordPress could dropped in as a Drupal module, as suggested by others). It would be great if Drupal would allow me to transclude my WordPress blog information into Drupal content. ¶

At a minimum, it would be ok if there were some way a single theme to be used in both Drupal and WordPress. Unfortunately, there is no general way for this to occur. It requires hand-porting, so only some of the very popular themes have been ported to both. I decided that I liked the look of the spreadfirefox theme in Drupal, but there was no corresponding theme for WordPress. The closest that I could find in style and color (and it’s really not close at all) is k2-beta-two for WordPress. But at least with a one line modification to the header.php file, I could add a “Main” link back to my Drupal instance. ¶

The lack of integration is definitely disappointing, considering that there are strong communities around both. However, I’m going to use both anyway for now. This gives me a chance to evaluate both and get a better feel for the community around each. ¶