The following question has come up time and time again, especially in the past few years, with the increasing popularity of the Content Management System (CMS):

Which CMS is better? Drupal or WordPress?

Drupal and WordPress are both CMS’s (for lack of a better word) but they are not the same. There are pros and cons to using either of these as options for your next website, and I hope to provide a bit of clarity about each. I think that both have their place in the web-world, but its important to make a smart decision based on your particular needs, of which one makes more sense to use.

Drupal is the “original advanced CMS” providing a user with full control over the development of their website. Different from other CMS using WYSIWYG editors and basic interfaces, Drupal is specially designed for web developers. It is actually more of a development platform rather than a simple CMS . Among the main advantages of Drupal is the huge user community sharing tips and advice on how to efficiently and effectively use Drupal. Upgrades don’t happen nearly as often, and rarely cause sites to break, because they are completely stable. Drupal can create powerful tools that can do some amazing things (unlike the “plugins” that wordpress uses). Properly used, Drupal is able to create the best possible websites online and because of its superior capabilities there are extremely few limitations. But the power of Drupal, comes at a cost. It is definitely more difficult from the end-user perspective because you can control every little piece of your website if you wanted. The core code is very strong, so as a newby developer, it can be quite difficult to use Drupal, because it is not as forgiving.

WordPress is by far the most popular CMS out there. With the thousands upon thousands of different theme options, its very easy-to-use interface and its ability to be more forgiving about code, it has become the mainstream CMS solution. People often confuse the words WordPress with CMS. It was initially designed as a blogging platform, and quickly ventured into full-scale CMS. While WordPress comes with some great features, and tons of plugins to allow for just about any “Customization” there are a few downfalls to this CMS. WordPress has little to no security features built-in. It also falls short on the scalability factor (you won’t see a World Bank using a WordPress CMS for its site). With the extremely fast upgrade cycle, it often creates havoc on a wordpress site and can easily break many of the features of that site, which ultimately make it more of a hassle. WordPress themes can be wonderfully complex, solid and well-coded, but they can also be very shotty, all-over-the-place and not well-written. The problem is that WordPress doesn’t care and many users can’t tell the difference between a well-built theme and a shotty one.

Wordpress is generally considered for small and medium sized websites, brochure-type sites, and of course simple blogging sites. For larger sites that have a lot of content, functionality, or both, Drupal offers superior freedom and control compared to any other CMS. Using proper plugins, WordPress can do a lot, but Drupal can create such superior “powerful” websites that WordPress could not possibly compare. But in the end, it all depends what you want and need to happen with your site.

It is exciting how easy it can be to develop a fully functioning website with high quality standards, without big budget dollars! I am a designer, who has dabbled with the various and ever-changing technologies that encircle “web development” for the last 6 years. Now that the internet is pretty much at the tip of everybody’s fingers, it has become more of a necessity to have a website that is operational on a multitude of platforms. People have very high expectations about the speed, beauty and content-quality of the websites that they visit. It is important to understand, and keep up with, the standards. This can be a challenge for those of us who are not technically “website developers”.

The beauty of the content management system has made website development a much more attainable goal. Individuals can have little to no technical understanding of the web-programming-language, yet can still create, modify and manage their own website. WordPress and Drupal have become pretty standard CMS solutions because they have been tested in an open-source environment by millions of people around the world. WordPress is pretty easy to install, and there are several hundred different visual themes that can serve as a base structure for you, especially if you are lacking the technical understanding of developing a website. From there you can modify the way your site looks and even functions with handy tools like plugins and widgets.

When I started developing websites, I learned the old-fashioned “table and frame” method with some HTML and help from a little program called Dreamweaver. As I advanced in my career, I learned about CSS and how to have more control over all of the visual elements that I wanted to incorporate into a web design. I dabbled in things like ASP, JAVA, JQUERY, and PHP, but really didn’t grasp all the nitty-gritty details to be able to create a site in any one of these languages, without some help. WordPress offers a very quick and easy means to take web code and manipulate it to do what you want. With a little experimentation, you will find that you can create fully customized websites, with much more functionality than you would ever need to implement (but you could if you wanted to!). Truly these spaces have opened the doors to what is capable on the web, and showing me that there is still so much more that can be accomplished.