With their wide assortment of plugins and compatibility with a number of different servers, both WordPress and Drupal are incredibly popular blogging platforms, both of which count millions of users across the globe. For those hoping to jump into the blogging game, it can be incredibly difficult to narrow down the field of competitors and settle on one product that will be the best best fit. In order to find which of the two products works best in a particular situation, it is important to thoroughly assess each product’s characteristics.
Development Across the Board
Drupal was the first to hit the scene, being released to the general public in 2001. WordPress arrived two years later. Both products count several big name users amongst those that rely on the respective platforms to keep their web destinations working efficiently. While both products are developed constantly by teams of open source designers and programmers, WordPress has garnered a larger following, which has resulted in more updates and plugins developed for the platform. Nevertheless, both offer a stable blogging option.
Compatibility
This is a big factor for many would-be bloggers and webmasters, looking for the right product that will be compatible with a whole host of different themes, plugins, add-ons, and more. WordPress is the undisputed winner in this category, with nearly 15,000 plugins available. Drupal, by contrast, has just over 8,000 available plugins. There are also an estimated 1,400 themes available for WordPress, while Drupal only counts around 900 themes. While this may not be a game changer for many users, it could be important for those sites that need to incorporate content from a wide assortment of different sources. It could also be useful for those that need to use a specific set of plugins to note before choosing one platform over the other.
Installation
Installation of both platforms is rather routine, but Drupal’s is slightly more difficult. Without a thorough understanding of how web server file structures work, Drupal users could find themselves stuck. WordPress can actually be installed on many popular web hosts without any uploading on the user’s part, instead relying on SimpleScripts to install the product remotely to the server. This means that WordPress may be a better fit for amateur bloggers and webmasters who do not have much experience installing and running platforms on web servers.
Advanced Features
While WordPress is easier to install and has more available plugins, Drupal is capable of producing much more advanced sites. In order to do this, however, it is vital to learn the ins and outs of the software and master how to use it effectively. For those who have an assortment of context content to be displayed, Drupal is able to categorize and manage such information in a powerful way. WordPress, on the other hand, is meant to be an intuitive and easy solution for average bloggers looking for a way to quickly launch themselves on the Internet.
While there is no right and wrong, it ultimately boils down to what the user is looking for in a web platform. For the beginning user hoping to start a cool blog quickly and begin using simple tools to moderate the content and make changes to the overall look, WordPress is a great option to consider. Drupal is the more powerful platform of the two, but learning to use it could take some time and effort on the user’s behalf. It will also need to be tweaked extensively for use with certain plugins. Depending on what the user is looking for, one platform may appear may interesting than the other.
Written by Frederick who is interested in wordpress, social networking, mac how, books and music.
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