Which is best WordPress or Drupal ?

Aug 1, 2013

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As an open-source PHP developer who uses both WordPress and Drupal (although, currently, I use Drupal significantly more), I always assumed we were all on the same team. So I was a little taken aback at the level of vitriol leveled toward Drupal from the WordPress community in various blog comment threads

1) Expectations

I encounter many WordPress users who have a story something like this: “I am a WordPress developer. I used Drupal once or twice and it was horrible! It took lots of time to do simple things/was not usable/used lots of server memory/had horrible themes.” OK. Yes. There’s a kernel of truth in most critiques, and this one is no different. However, it’s mostly a matter of expectations. If you are used to installing WordPress and being quickly ready-to-go out-of-the-box, you’ll be disappointed. But the fact that Drupal takes some configuration, and, for instance, doesn’t come pre-packaged with a WYSIWYG editor, doesn’t mean Drupal “sucks” (in fact, there are reasons for no pre-packaged WYSIWYG) any more than WordPress’s lack of content- and entity-type flexibility means WordPress “sucks”. Both have reasons for why they are the way they are, and it is up to you, as an intelligent developer, to pick the best tool for the job.

WordPress: blogging (obviously!), relatively simple publishing and content management. It is best in situations where they are fairly straightforward relationships between people and the content they are producing.

Drupal: a good hybrid solution in which, say, your client needs to manage public content in a “traditional” CMS setup, in addition to non-run-of-the-mill e-Commerce, membership management, Contact Relation Management (CRM) capabilities, human resources, asset management, e-mail marketing, and/or complex access control. This niche is admittedly smaller than the previous one, which goes a long way to explain the smaller Drupal market share—not (and I realize I am a broken record here) because WordPress is “better” or Drupal “sucks” in some absolute sense.

2) Ease of development

WordPress sucker punches Drupal on theme simplicity. Seriously! When I develop a site in WordPress, I have never started from a pre-built theme. I start with beautiful, clean HTML/CSS markup and then add in WordPress theme API calls.

Drupal needs this simplicity in theming. With Drupal, I start from a base theme like Zen and bend the base theme to my design. This is fine, but on more than one occasion I have found myself spending too much time looking for a style class in the theme — if the code had all been mine to begin with, I would have been faster.

The learning curve for Drupal is steeper — I hear this a lot. I disagree! Every platform requires a developer to check the API documentation. I have used WordPress navigation countless times, but I still have to check the syntax of the specific api call from time to time. In Drupal, I do the same thing. The documentation for both platforms is rubust. If you know PHP I think they are the same.

3) Lets focus on some facts

Some Interesting WordPress Facts: