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It's simple. Let's see what the spectrum of PHP solutions is. It goes from: - WordPress: very simple, you don't need to be a coder, not that powerful. And go

It's simple. Let's see what the spectrum of PHP solutions is. It goes from: - WordPress: very simple, you don't need to be a coder, not that powerful. And goes until: - PHP + libraries: complicated, you need to be a coder, extremely powerful. And here's Drupal: - Drupal: a lot more more complicated than WordPress, not that much less complicated than plain PHP, yet much less powerful than plain PHP. In a nutshell, Drupal and apps like it want to be everything to everyone, and that's how bad apps happen. WordPress may suck, but it has focus, and people with simple needs like the proposition.

camus2 12y ago
With a little discipline and a better data model(cause basically it's using a meta table for everything that dont fit the core,"post meta" values are serialized strings ...lol with bother using a RDBMS at first place?), Wordpress could actually be good(codewise),it has some good business logic. Wordpress maintainers just dont bother...because obsessed with backward compat. Drupal is in my opinion (oddly) easier to maintain for non coders,CCK an Views, no need for any PHP skill to create new content types or write queries in Drupal. With Wordpress,you need to code if you want to extend anything. My problem with both is that the plugins are written in PHP.A good CMS would have at least one plugin layer which would rely on manifests(xml,json...) rather than code(just like angular),or at least have a sandbox system with permissions,some kind of inverted oauth system (eg:"this plugin wants to be able to write to your db,write to your file system,access this or that resource...")
TylerE 12y ago
Honestly, your characterization of Drupal is just plain BS, and I say that as someone who worked on Drupal sites for about 5 years, and am glad to no longer be. To say it's less powerful than "plain PHP" is just wrong, since via custom modules, which you'll be writing at least a half dozen of for a real non-trivial (e.g. the kind of thing you wouldn't just do in WP, just you can essentially just sprinkle in 100% custom "plain PHP" whereever you need it, while still being able to leverage things Drupal does right, like form handling and batch operations.
- AdrianRossouw 12y ago
  i wrote drupal's form handling layer (and theme system, and big parts of drush and much more) I ultimately found that I was happier writing stuff closer to the way wordpress does it. It really comes down to two things 1. depending on what tools you have available, what you are familiar with or what you are capable of understanding .. drupal or wordpress might be easier for you than the other. That's relative. 2. is the fact that the wordpress model is objectively simpler than the drupal model (at least last time I looked, around 4 years ago). So I'm not saying one is better than the other at all, just that this is how they are different. If you know, or are willing to learn, a bit of code, wordpress is most likely subjectively easier than drupal would be.
  - TylerE 12y ago
    I'm probably a bit biased because I spent most of that 5 years pouring my heart and soul into a site that was, basically, right up Drupal's alley, a regional news portal that was very content heavy. We did use lots of various modules, some core, and some community - such as polls, forums, captcha stuff, comments, we had almost a terabyte of stuff served via ImageCache... We actually didn't use Drupal forms for much on the front end (The occasional webform for user submissions, etc, but very few actual drupal api forms), but on the admin backend we had lots of little things I threw together that worked well but were not used all the frequently (and then only by power users). Our frontend was primarily done through a system I called the Page module (Because it was the module that made...the pages - for instance http://www.reflector.com/news http://www.reflector.com/news). That was actually a really cool hack. It worked a lot like views - but could actually run on a high traffic site without bringing the whole thing to it's knees. The trick was that the really nasty join across about 8 tables (node, the content type data, related image data, story body (for teasers), and a couple others) was done only on node save and that was stored in an index table (not everything on the node, but just what I needed to build a page). So to generate each news block was a really super simple query of basically: select * from page_index where page_blockid = 12345 order by updated desc limit 5 instead of something like, and this is the super simplfied version select * from node left join content_type_story cts on cts.nid = node.nid left join taxonomy_data td on td.nid = node.nid left join uploads on uploads.nid = node.nid left join upload_files uf on uf.uid = uploads.uid left join node_content nc on nc.vid = node.vid where (td.termid = 1231 or td.termid = 1256) and node.published = 1 order by updated desc limit 5 (Field names ommitted because that query is way too long as it is). Of course, we were running multidomain so a lot of those tables where domain alises etc, again, all precomputed in my module. No, I don't miss it. But it was powerful, and I did develop, deploy, and serve 3 daily newspapers with 20k+ circ each with a dev and sysadmin staff of 1. There is no way I could have done that if I'd had to write everything from scratch.
mortenjorck 12y ago
I would suggest that it's not quite so linear anymore with the rise of ProcessWire. I'd compare ProcessWire to WordPress for ease of use and Drupal in terms of flexibility and scalability – I didn't think it was possible, but it is.
zhte415 12y ago
I'd argue that Drupal has been quite successful. It lost the war of platforms for blogs and, to some extent, forums, but has one a foothold for large projects which require a CMS. I'm not sure it was ever competing. 4.7 and 5.x (the first versions I used) didn't have many nice themes or a particularly friendly interface for content creators, which Wordpress had and won. But the Drupal community weren't much into making simple sites (though they could be made). Drupal has always struck me as a CMS for non-coders to create something quite complex, and when scaling something for a coder to pick up and adapt as they need, with a lot of stuff built-in. And it has definitely won on that front, with perhaps the most comparable system being Django, but even then Drupal is more Swiss Army Knife like: It can't open a tin of beans perfectly, but it can do it quickly, and a few hours in the tool-shop improve it a lot. Likewise it can cut down a tree (if painfully), cut your fabric and has a neat nose-pick built-in. Numerous media, government and commerce sites use it. It is quite adaptable, gets the 90% done quickly (yes, the learning curve is greater than Wordpress, but a lot more is happening), and allows anyone with some PHP and CSS expertise get the remaining 10% done reasonably well.
Ecio78 12y ago
I don't agree. I realized a intranet content /document management system with Drupal 6 a couple of years ago in just few months. It was used then by 500 users with great results and I used available modules except for one that I hacked together for integrating authentication with lob webapp. I'm not a developer (sysadmin) even though I know some coding and I could not have deployed it with all those features in the same time developing it from scratch with php (or any other languages). The most of the time I spent was trying to "port" the designer's photoshop draft in a Drupal theme (it would have been better to have an external guy/company do it). Rest of the time was finding the right modules (there are too many on the site) and then understanding the pain point of the previous system can thinking something better (but that analysis part should happen with any technology involved )

camus2 12y ago

With a little discipline and a better data model(cause basically it's using a meta table for everything that dont fit the core,"post meta" values are serialized strings ...lol with bother using a RDBMS at first place?), Wordpress could actually be good(codewise),it has some good business logic. Wordpress maintainers just dont bother...because obsessed with backward compat. Drupal is in my opinion (oddly) easier to maintain for non coders,CCK an Views, no need for any PHP skill to create new content types or write queries in Drupal. With Wordpress,you need to code if you want to extend anything. My problem with both is that the plugins are written in PHP.A good CMS would have at least one plugin layer which would rely on manifests(xml,json...) rather than code(just like angular),or at least have a sandbox system with permissions,some kind of inverted oauth system (eg:"this plugin wants to be able to write to your db,write to your file system,access this or that resource...")

TylerE 12y ago

Honestly, your characterization of Drupal is just plain BS, and I say that as someone who worked on Drupal sites for about 5 years, and am glad to no longer be. To say it's less powerful than "plain PHP" is just wrong, since via custom modules, which you'll be writing at least a half dozen of for a real non-trivial (e.g. the kind of thing you wouldn't just do in WP, just you can essentially just sprinkle in 100% custom "plain PHP" whereever you need it, while still being able to leverage things Drupal does right, like form handling and batch operations.

AdrianRossouw 12y ago
i wrote drupal's form handling layer (and theme system, and big parts of drush and much more) I ultimately found that I was happier writing stuff closer to the way wordpress does it. It really comes down to two things 1. depending on what tools you have available, what you are familiar with or what you are capable of understanding .. drupal or wordpress might be easier for you than the other. That's relative. 2. is the fact that the wordpress model is objectively simpler than the drupal model (at least last time I looked, around 4 years ago). So I'm not saying one is better than the other at all, just that this is how they are different. If you know, or are willing to learn, a bit of code, wordpress is most likely subjectively easier than drupal would be.
- TylerE 12y ago
  I'm probably a bit biased because I spent most of that 5 years pouring my heart and soul into a site that was, basically, right up Drupal's alley, a regional news portal that was very content heavy. We did use lots of various modules, some core, and some community - such as polls, forums, captcha stuff, comments, we had almost a terabyte of stuff served via ImageCache... We actually didn't use Drupal forms for much on the front end (The occasional webform for user submissions, etc, but very few actual drupal api forms), but on the admin backend we had lots of little things I threw together that worked well but were not used all the frequently (and then only by power users). Our frontend was primarily done through a system I called the Page module (Because it was the module that made...the pages - for instance http://www.reflector.com/news http://www.reflector.com/news). That was actually a really cool hack. It worked a lot like views - but could actually run on a high traffic site without bringing the whole thing to it's knees. The trick was that the really nasty join across about 8 tables (node, the content type data, related image data, story body (for teasers), and a couple others) was done only on node save and that was stored in an index table (not everything on the node, but just what I needed to build a page). So to generate each news block was a really super simple query of basically: select * from page_index where page_blockid = 12345 order by updated desc limit 5 instead of something like, and this is the super simplfied version select * from node left join content_type_story cts on cts.nid = node.nid left join taxonomy_data td on td.nid = node.nid left join uploads on uploads.nid = node.nid left join upload_files uf on uf.uid = uploads.uid left join node_content nc on nc.vid = node.vid where (td.termid = 1231 or td.termid = 1256) and node.published = 1 order by updated desc limit 5 (Field names ommitted because that query is way too long as it is). Of course, we were running multidomain so a lot of those tables where domain alises etc, again, all precomputed in my module. No, I don't miss it. But it was powerful, and I did develop, deploy, and serve 3 daily newspapers with 20k+ circ each with a dev and sysadmin staff of 1. There is no way I could have done that if I'd had to write everything from scratch.

mortenjorck 12y ago

I would suggest that it's not quite so linear anymore with the rise of ProcessWire. I'd compare ProcessWire to WordPress for ease of use and Drupal in terms of flexibility and scalability – I didn't think it was possible, but it is.

zhte415 12y ago

I'd argue that Drupal has been quite successful. It lost the war of platforms for blogs and, to some extent, forums, but has one a foothold for large projects which require a CMS. I'm not sure it was ever competing. 4.7 and 5.x (the first versions I used) didn't have many nice themes or a particularly friendly interface for content creators, which Wordpress had and won. But the Drupal community weren't much into making simple sites (though they could be made). Drupal has always struck me as a CMS for non-coders to create something quite complex, and when scaling something for a coder to pick up and adapt as they need, with a lot of stuff built-in. And it has definitely won on that front, with perhaps the most comparable system being Django, but even then Drupal is more Swiss Army Knife like: It can't open a tin of beans perfectly, but it can do it quickly, and a few hours in the tool-shop improve it a lot. Likewise it can cut down a tree (if painfully), cut your fabric and has a neat nose-pick built-in. Numerous media, government and commerce sites use it. It is quite adaptable, gets the 90% done quickly (yes, the learning curve is greater than Wordpress, but a lot more is happening), and allows anyone with some PHP and CSS expertise get the remaining 10% done reasonably well.

Ecio78 12y ago

I don't agree. I realized a intranet content /document management system with Drupal 6 a couple of years ago in just few months. It was used then by 500 users with great results and I used available modules except for one that I hacked together for integrating authentication with lob webapp. I'm not a developer (sysadmin) even though I know some coding and I could not have deployed it with all those features in the same time developing it from scratch with php (or any other languages). The most of the time I spent was trying to "port" the designer's photoshop draft in a Drupal theme (it would have been better to have an external guy/company do it). Rest of the time was finding the right modules (there are too many on the site) and then understanding the pain point of the previous system can thinking something better (but that analysis part should happen with any technology involved )