There are a ton of posts on the internet on the CMS wars, i.e. why X is better than Y, why WordPress is superior to Drupal, why Joomla is so bad and Drupal is the best, etc. I’m not really interested in pointing out why Drupal is better than other CMSs, because quite frankly different tools server different needs and to compare them doesn’t really explain much of the dynamics of a tool for its situation.

In my opinion, “superiority” is a pretty loaded term when it comes to the question of the best CMS of today. The expression “best CMS” should be qualified by modifiers, including the Best CMS for YOU or the best CMS for this or that need. WordPress is without a doubt the best CMS for basic blogs and content exchange. Amongst Wordpress and Joomla, Drupal is largely the best in terms of most flexiblity and as such, depending on your experience level, Drupal can be viewed as either the WORST or BEST CMS out there. (Disclosure: For me, Drupal is the best!)

I’d like to briefly go over some of the reasons where why some recent clients have come to me seeking advice on migrating from WordPress to Drupal. I’ll focus on a main argument, namely that while Drupal may take more work initially, it’s the best CMS when you expect to have a changing gameplan of needs in the years to come. Choose Drupal when you aren’t quite sure what kind of site you need or will need.

Where WordPress Shines and Where It eventually flounders: Blogging

WordPress is the king of content and blogging. Since that’s one of the most useful things to do on the Net, it’s no surprise that WordPress (a blogging-centric CMS) shines in this domain. WordPress installs relatively easily and presents end-users (=bloggers) with a clear and familiar sense on how to create and manage blogs and blogging media.

If you were anything like me several years ago and trying to set up a blog for yourself or a friend, WordPress gave you one of the best first impressions of any CMS out there. Whether you had CPanel or had to do it manually via SQL and FTP, the initial installation of WordPress was straightforward and after about 10-15 minutes you were done: you had a blog. After that it didn’t take more than a few minutes to create your first blog post with images and tags. And, bam! From then on, you were rocking.

Even the next steps with a WordPress blog were pretty damn snappy: adding plugins and themes were breeze with the in-site installation stuff. Updates were also thoughtlessly easy. You could make your blog and site have a few extra features to round out a presentational blog or content site. Let’s be honest here: WordPress is so easy that even the most technically limited folks can do it since WordPress made bloggng as easy as emailing.

If you were also like me, then eventually the “glow and glory” of blogging wears off and you want or need something else. Unfortunately, you are stuck with WordPress. It’s like you decided to buy a “smartcar” to drive around town and you were really happy for the first few months but eventually with age or wealth or procreation, you find that the full width of your needs are no longer being met by WordPress.

It’s a blog but now you also want a web store and a forum and X or Y or a whatever. You bought a smartcar but now you need to it to pull a boat. This isn’t going to work.

WordPress Loses Its Shine: Drupal Assumes Very Little Except Your Need to Change

It’s obvious that WordPress can and has been adapted to do much more than blogging. Unfortunately, it’s not going to be super easy without hiring someone to help you. There are tons of posts explaining how to do extra feature with WordPRess and sure there is plenty of code out there to use WordPress WITH X but it’s awkward and not really ideal.

Drupal’s superiority, as many client of mine come to see, is that it doesn’t assume you just want a blog. Drupal assumes very little except that you want to organize a bunch of different content and users and you want to add extra features (=extensions, plugins, modules, etc.).

Historically Drupal has not presented that greatest first impression like WordPress. If you were like me and you were installing various CMSs to try, your first imprression of Drupal was WTF? I mena really want is this site for?

If you eventualy got over the learning curve with Drupal (and it’s a big one!), then you’ll eventually see that Drupal’s initial “blank canvas” is a superiority since you can build a Drupal site as a Blog and an Ecommerce store. You can build a Drupal as a Forum and User Profile. You can build Drupal as basically anything and everything since Drupal is a highly flexible CMS built for adding extensions (we call them “modules”)

Conclusion: Why Migrate from WordPress to Drupal

First of all, if you only want a blog and plan to only be and have a blog, then stick with WordPress. As I hope to explain in a later post, migrating to Drupal isn’t super hard but if you expect it to be WordPress but more flexible, then you’ll likely be disappointed.

Typically clients come me desiring to migrate to Drupal, because they want more than a blog. As you can see from the amount of modules on Drupal.org and tons of examples of Drupal sites, there is almost no limit to what you can build with Drupal. So, in my opinion, you end up migrating to Drupal because eventually sites and web businesses eventually need more than just a blog.

That’s when Drupal is ready as your CMS of choice for content, products, groups, images, users, videos and bunch of other stuff that we “glue” and “craft” together into a special community of needs and doings.

Tags: WordPressdrupalDrupal PlanetPlanet DrupalMigrationFlexibilityData Migration

Mark Koester
@markwkoester
Mark has worked on Drupal since the early days of D6. He is passionate about open source as well as entrepreneurship. When he isn't building, he enjoys traveling and speaking one of his many foreign languages.
Chengdu, China

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