Drupal and WordPress; A CMS
Drupal and WordPress are famous and widely used open source CMSs (Content Management System) for developing websites. By CMS, we means, a web application that helps to create websites and web applications in an easy way. Lot of developers all over the world are continuously contributing to both these CMSs.
Using a CMS for website developing websites is always a good idea, because of many reasons, some of them as follows:
- Require less time due to availability of ready made modules and plugins.
- Secure from hacking attacks due to minimum vulnerability.
- Reliability because functions used in CMSs (especially the open source) have been tested, used and reviewed by number of developers.
- Ease of use.
Working with Drupal
We (me and my friend, Vigas) were assigned a task of developing a dynamic website within a very short time. We decided rather from developing it from scratch, we should use a CMS. But both of us had no prior experience of working with any CMS. Rai sir choose Drupal, because he thought that many LUG members already worked on drupal so we could have enough help from them if needed.
Drupal’s Installation is fantastic. It hardly took 10 to 13 minutes to be ready to be used. We started working creating pages, adding blocks and content, installing new themes and modules etc. We could easily change the visibility settings of each page. Large variety of themes and modules are available to choose from.
Reasons for shifting to WordPress
Since Drupal is very vast but still we didn’t found it much useful for our project because of following reasons:
There is no option of editing the content of pages. Our client need the admin control of the website where he wish to make changes according to his requirement. For example drupal has no text editing options while creating pages. On the other hand, WordPress has cool testing processing tools available during new page / post creation.
Secondly, WordPress plugins can be easily installed, activated, used and deactivated whereas Drupal modules require configuration settingsLot of developers all over the world are continuously contributing.
The problem of version incompatibility between latest Drupal installation and modules and themes is there.
Also other features of WordPress like “Preview”, “Drag & Drop feature”, “posts” easy system and appearance appearance settings etc attract us. So we shifted to WordPress.
WordPress
After shifting to wordpress, our main motive was to do the work done in Drupal in WordPress. We did more than this in one day. We were impressed by its cool features like drag & drop widgets, easy menu settings, easy text processing tools, options for changing / modifying appearance of whole site without affecting the content of pages and posts.
WordPress plugins helps us in adding more features to our website. They are easy to install, activate and use.
Moreover, I also found that creating a WordPress plugin is very easy and simple task given that you know basics of PHP. WordPress has number of built-in functions that allow the theme / plugin designer to alter the behaviour of you wordpress site or blog. Also, very good documentation is available on each built-in function, triggers etc. If you wish to distribute your plugin, WordPress recommend to follow the “WordPress Coding Standards” to avoid any inconsistency.
Working on wordpress project and then developing a simple small plugin I found that wordpress is best place for a user to create websites, who don’t know any web development language and web developer who knows programming well because the open source nature of wordpress allow him to use its functions in his own way. Also the wordpress functions are used and thoroughly revised by web developers throughout the world so they fully secured and reliable.
Harmanpreet Singh 