It is safe to say that I spend more time with WordPress than I do with my wife :(
And even though WordPress and I have known each other for years, my wife has no real understanding what it is that I do, what WordPress is, or even what blogs really are.
With the election season heating up and the Iowa Caucuses happening in less than 48 hours, I thought it might be fun to take a look at the open source CMS platforms behind a few of the biggest names in American politics. Of course, the CMS has probably doesn’t have much relevance to the success of a candidate, but I thought it would be interesting to see who’s using which platform.
WordPress appears to be the favored CMS, with 4 out of 8 major Republican contenders using it for their campaigns. Drupal accounts for three of the major campaign websites.
Is Drupal, in many respects the main ‘competitor’ to WordPress, in crisis?
According to Daniel F. Kudwien, it most certainly is, and it makes interesting reading when comparing and contrasting with the current status of WordPress.
Kudwien outlines the development of Drupal over the last couple of years, specifically pointing out that:
in January 2011, Drupal 7 was released with some 300 unresolved major bugs
200 previously critical and major bugs were then demoted to normal
as of August 2011 Drupal has 4153 unresolved bugs (22,181 total)
a vast number of users are stuck on Drupal 6, with no progress on Drupal 8
Last night I saw a curious tweet from Dries Buytaert, creator of Drupal:
His tweet links to How Hard is Drupal to Use?, an article which actually tells you nothing at all about the learning curve required for using Drupal but rather everything you need to know about WordPress.com!
I dunno about you, but it seems a week doesn’t go past where I don’t hear someone spruking the growth and importance of open source in the enterprise – or how OS principles are going to revolutionize how we work etc. etc.
And yet, check out this latest data from compete – comparing the homepages of WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Concrete5 and TextPattern
Not looking too great, huh!
And then take a look at the yearly changes:
Ouch!
When choosing an open source CMS for the backbone of a new social network, WordPress and Drupal offer two solid options. While both platforms offer numerous options for adding social networking aspects to your website, the packages available in BuddyPress and Drupal Commons are some of the most polished. We’re going to take a look at both and offer a heads up comparison based on four major factors:
Ease of Installation and Setup
Built-in Features
Interface and Design
Community / Support
When you first enable WordPress Multisite you may be surprised to find that the network management tools are fairly minimal. The purpose is to provide the basics and let networks add more management capabilities depending on your site’s needs.
If you’re a Multisite super admin, you’re sure to find a few new tools for your toolbox among these plugins. All of them have been newly added to the WordPress repository this month.
Dashboard Switcher
I’ve noticed an alarming trend in the WordPress community concerning the treatment of commercial plugin developers and this has prompted me to weigh in on the topic. Keep in mind that this is an opinion piece. I welcome friendly discussion from differing viewpoints.
WordPress: A Prejudiced Commercial Ecosystem
The process of installing WordPress and then adding all of the plugins you need, one by one, can be a time consuming task, especially if you’re doing it several times per week. What if you could customize your own installation with all the extras in one bundled download? Check out the Free Custom WordPress Package Builder service from Tim Trice. It’s very similar to Drupal’s distribution profiles. The idea is to save you time if you frequently create WordPress sites that use similar plugins. It is designed to deliver most of the common themes and plugins that WordPress users end up having to download separately each time.
Yesterday I came across some recent slides titled “Why Drupal Should Be More Like WordPress”. As a longtime user of both platforms, I found this comparison to be very informative about why the WordPress community has grown to be much larger than the Drupal community.
Because WordPress 3.0 vastly expands WordPress’ CMS capabilities, the gap between what Drupal can do and what WordPress can do is growing ever smaller. Both are fantastic enterprise-class content management systems. If you’re having a difficult time selecting between the two, have a look at these slides:
Why Drupal Should Be More Like WordPress
The Popularity Contest
