WordPress and Drupal have long been solid contenders for the top spot in the major leagues of open source PHP-drive CMS. Both boast outstanding, active communities that are constantly improving the projects. When comparing WordPress and Drupal features the gap between the two is not as large as it once was.

The recent 3.0 release has positioned WordPress as more than just a first class blogging platform, mostly due to the ease of creating custom post types and taxonomies. These are very similar to the idea of CCK, Drupal’s Content Construction Kit, which has been added into the core of Drupal 7.

If you’re a big Drupal fan who’s recently been working with WordPress, there are probably a few features you miss having at your fingertips for managing content. It’s easy to get comfortable with your CMS of choice. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could mix and match some of the features that you enjoy the most from each platform? Here are just a few ways you can add some Drupal-flavor to your WordPress site. I’ve hunted down a few WordPress plugins that have been inspired by the best Drupal core features and some of the more commonly-used modules.

Virtual Pages

This experimental plugin is a first stab at a WordPress equivalent to Drupal’s powerful Views module. It lets site creators choose from query_posts parameters (category, tag, author, etc.) as well as a date range to display posts on a “virtual page” at a given permalink.

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Query Posts Widget

This plugin is similar to virtual pages but gives you the same flexibility within a widget. It allows you to list posts by category, tag, custom taxonomies, author, date, time, name, or anything you can imagine. You can choose to show the full content, excerpts, or even a simple list. All of this is done without having to touch any code.

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Next Page

The Next Page plugin provides shortcodes and template tags for next/previous navigation in pages. It includes a code and tag for the parent page, allowing for Drupal-like book navigation.

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Hikari Title Comments

This plugin allows you to set titles for comments. The idea is that with a title, the user can identify the comment subject, and comments become more similar to articles and aggregate more value.

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WordPress Menu Creator

This plugin provides blog website owners with a truly easy to manage and easy to configure menu solution for WordPress or WordPress CMS sites. You can assign menus to pages, posts, categories, tags and tag slugs, similar to popular CMS solutions like Joomla or Drupal. With this Menu Manager you can configure your menus with images, position, rank, level and literally any number of a dozen different baseline formats of common menu design today.

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