WordPress emerged as a blogging platform in 2001 while Drupal emerged as a CMS in the same year. While WordPress is easier to use and install, making it well-suited for simpler sites, Drupal is more powerful and flexible and thus better for complex sites. Both systems are open source with strong developer communities and opportunities for customization, though Drupal requires more technical experience. The choice depends on the specific site requirements and skills of the developers.

1. Is WordPress a threat
to Drupal?

2. History of Drupal
 In 2001, drupal emerged as one of the primary CMS
systems.
 With the release of Drupal version 4 in 2004, the
project began its modern form in backend.
 Major enterprise level sites began to migrate to
Drupal with the release of version 5.0 in 2005.
 The software took on a popular MVC approach in
2005, giving it a flexible layout structure and allowing
for full scale development on the top of the CMS.
Drupal Sites:
http://www.lullabot.com/
http://drupalmodules.com/
 Today hundreds of well known organizations use
Drupal.
http://themegarden.org/drupal6/
http://php.opensourcecms.com/

3. History of WordPress
 WordPress emerged as a blog template
system in 2001.
 In 2004, WordPress moved into a new market,
using different techniques it included codes
and themes that allowed users to switch
between needed applications.
 In 2005, a release of version 1.5 introduced
themes which were downloaded over 900,000
times.
 With each new version, downloads for
application grew and eventually it became the
largest self hosted blogging tool in the world.
WordPress Sites:
http://icondock.com/
http://bestwebgallery.com/
http://www.45royale.com/
http://www.unstructure.org/

4. Comparison
WordPress
Drupal
Ease of hosting and installation
Excellent
Excellent
Ease of setting up: simple site
Excellent
Good
Ease of setting up: complex site
Excellent
Good
Ease of use: content editor
Excellent
Good
Ease of use: site administrator
Excellent
Good
Graphical flexibility
Excellent
Excellent

5. Comparison (Contd.)
WordPress
Drupal
Accessibility and SEO
Good
Fair
Structural flexibility
Good
Excellent
Fair
Good
Community/Web 2.0
functionality
Excellent
Excellent
Extending and integrating
Excellent
Excellent
Fair
Good
User roles and workflow
Security

6. 
Drupal was built as a CMS.

WordPress was built as a blogging engine

Powerful yet confusing. Requires
technical proficiency to configure many
aspects of a website.

Less powerful but at the same time is simple
and requires less experience and technical
knowledge.

For development, user needs to learn
how it works.

A great deal of customization opportunities
exist in WordPress’ theme layer.

As user becomes familiar with Drupal,
adding new features become easy.

It becomes very difficult when additional
functionality is required to be added.

Drupal is making stride towards intuitive
usability.

WordPress is moving towards robust CMS
applications

8. WordPress
 WordPress is a great choice for fairly small (a few hundred pages or less),
simply arranged websites.
 It’s the easiest system to install and understand, and is easy to maintain and
update, putting site setup within reach of anyone with a sense of technical
adventure.
 However, WordPress doesn’t scale as intuitively as Drupal to support
complex sites.
 There is only limited support for differentiation of user roles, although addons are available to support permissions based on section or type of
content.

9. Drupal
 Flexible and powerful, Drupal is a great choice for more complex sites.
 It supports a wide variety of site
 It has particularly strong support for Web 2.0 and community functionality,
including user-submit-ted content.
 It’s also easy for content administrators to find and update content.
 But Drupal’s power comes with complexities. Under-standing what the
system offers and how to configure it is more difficult than WordPress.
 The administrative screens for configuring a site have a huge number of
options and settings, making them harder to interpret.
 Drupal 7.0, includes a new administrative interface that makes content
editing and maintenance tasks more intuitive, and adds the ability to create
custom content types without an add-on.

10. Conclusion
 Drupal is not exactly a blogging platform per se, as is
WordPress, but it is a CMS construction kit.
 The user profiles are extensible and allows for easy
creation of membership sites and portals.
 The categorization of content in Drupal is innovative as
well.
 Drupal does a great drop of building out dynamic sites,
something WordPress falters at.
 Drupal can be easier because the backend allows for themeing as well. If
you want your backend to look like your front end, you have that option with
Drupal. WordPress on the other hand has a set theme for its backend which
cannot be changed. This can be a little confusing for the novice webmaster.

11. References
 http://idealware.org/reports/2010-os-cms
 http://webhostingtop.org/blog/338-drupal-and-wordpress
 http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9219685/Site_builder_shootout_D
 http://www.chapterthree.com/blog/jennifer-lampton/wordpress-vsdrupal-saga-continues
 http://kevindees.cc/2011/10/drupal-vs-wordpress-the-epic-debate/
 http://poplarware.com/articles/drupal_vs_wordpress
 http://www.goodwebpractices.com/other/wordpress-vs-joomla-vsdrupal.html

12. Contact: sanam@drupalforest.com
All content in this presentation, except where noted otherwise, is Drupal
Forest licensed and copyright 2011.