Drupal or WordPress?

I spent some time to decide which solution I should use for my new website installation. Since I lost all the postings and data from the last Drupal installation website, I can compare two without any prejudice beginning from fresh start.

However, I spent lots of time on modifying drupal modules so I am somewhat familiar and comfortable with drupal. For WordPress, I did have temptation of trying out WordPress few months ago because of its easy to use , simpler than drupal concept and features. And I did installed in my server but I did not have time to maintain two different CMS. So I gave up on WordPress at that time.

This time, I did spent some time installing and comparing the features.

Basically, I checked out three things.

• User comment functionality with spam protection
• Code Filter module/plugin support and its actual quality.
• Easy to use adminstration menu

Drupal
I do agree that Drupal’s latest version 4.7.3 has lots of improvements, but even after all the time spent with Drupal , I still find it hard and tedious to setup and make it do exactly what I want it to do.

Drual has comment module by default and you can install spam module if you want some protection. (I did not test with spam module by the way) I wanted to anonymous user to submit comment to my posting, but with anonymous comment enabled, there are no name and email address fields. I did not like that. I wanted extra name and email fields just like WordPress.

Drupal has Code Filter module in their website, and it has some improvments compared to the last time I installed like 1 year ago. It worked perfectly in the way I wanted , even it automatically converts color of the certain phrase in the codes! That was very nice. But still, setting it up in the drupal requires some experience with drupal. If I were a beginner, I would have spent quite time to configure it.

Also, it’s administration interface is not very intuitive. Some of the new comers may give up before they actually doing anything with it. New terms and concepts which are very hard to understand at a first glance.

But it does have its advantages once you become familiar with it. There are lots of developers out there making lots of useful modules and you can just install and use it! And if you have some PHP knowledge, you can even modify or create a module to fit your needs.

WordPress
Word Press is a blog application unlike Drupal which is a CMS . Blog Application is usually used for a person’s interest, not a goup of people. CMS is for group of people. That’s whey I liked Drupal at first time because it seemed that drupal provides functionalities for for much more posibility. But it is too heavy for me just writing few simple articles per month.

WordPress is way much simpler than Drupal . I believe that it is to me because I had some hard time setting up Drupal. It provides nice clean Ajax admin interface, and all the menus and interfaces are simple and easy to understand.

There is a web page in wordpress.org regarding Writing Codes in a posting. (http://codex.wordpress.org/Writing_Code_in_Your_Posts ) . To tell you the truth, the webpage is kinda long. You can just install this Code Filter module and all is completely done. http://redalt.com/downloads/

The actual coding outputs can be customized by working on the style.css file of your theme folder. Acually, I did copy below section from somebody else’s. The overflow attribute is very useful when your theme has fixed body content width and the code line is way much longer than that. It shows you the scroll bar automatically.


pre {
clear: both;
float: left;
overflow: auto;
_overflow-y: hidden;
background: #eeeeee;
margin: 0px;
padding: 8px 5px 18px;
min-height: 2em;
width: 98%;
border: 1px solid #bfd0d9;

}
pre, tt, code {
font-family: Courier New, monospace;
font-size: 0.9em;
}


To summerize, Drupal is a powerful and dynamic solution but it is hard to learn and customize.
WordPress is much simpler to use . I do not know if it is easy to customize, but I will try somethigs if I have time. So I decided to use WordPress for awhile.