Drupal, Blogging Platform of the Future?
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Thursday, 27 of December , 2007 at 2:00 pm
Not everyone uses WordPress for blogging and if current predictions from none other than Aaron Wall of SEO Book, “In the next 2 or 3 years, Drupal will be the CMS of choice.” These are echoes of what Brain Turner of Web Pro News said a couple of months ago when he said to, keep an eye out on Drupal as a potential CMS for the future.” I must confess that before reading Aaron Wall’s article, I had not looked into Drupal much, but his write up got me interested and I have to say, it looks good.
Turner makes some very interesting observations in his article which I feel worthy of repeating.
On integrating websites:
I think it’s especially important to leave plenty of room to manoeuvre with video, because if you can make & integrate that into a website, you have become a TV channel - and that means potential syndication in the still embryonic but rapidly expanding IPTV market.
On Wordpress:
My problem as a webmaster is that while Wordpress suits blogs and small sites fine, it simply isn’t geared to community participation - featured author and commentator profile pages are not a default part of the set-up, plus Wordpress has never really integrated community forums.
I love WordPress as a blogging platform, but I do tend to agree that it is somewhat limited. Nucleus CMS is a little better, but still very much blog oriented. Joomla is an alternative and while it has some very good points to it, the blogging platform is just plain nasty.
On Joomla:
(Note on Joomla: I’ve never liked the structure or coding - seems a very bloated, over-crowded attempt to create a CMS that somehow seems to struggle with basic functionality. Having been asked to look at SEO issues with Joomla a few times, I’ve developed an complete dislike of the platform - so much so that when a charity recently approached me looking for free SEO work on their CMS, I advised they would do better if I rebuilt it in Wordpress for them.)
I tend to take a less harsh view on Joomla, it has some very good points to it. It is easy to install and pretty intuitive, but it is a little bloated and requires quite a bit of customization. In my examination of Drupal, I have to say it looks very nice indeed. There are a large number of high quality free themes and looks like it will be ready to go straight out of the box. That is a refreshing change. Keep an eye on Drupal, it looks great and I think that no small number of people are going to be thinking the same thing. I would say it is going to start taking off over 2008. I don’t see any established Wordpress blogs making the switch. Wordpress covers basic blogging needs and can be enhanced enough with plug-ins to keep doing what it is required to do.
Category: Blogging
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Comment by namecritic
Made Monday, 25 of February , 2008 at 12:40 pm
It’s apples and oranges. Comparing wordpress to a cms system is like comparing a forum to an articles directory and saying phpbb is better than article dashboard.
If you just want a blog that YOU write to, then wordpress is the best platform.
If you want a cms system, then use whichever one you like.
If you want community blogging, wordpress mu is still a good platform and one of the most stable. It has already been proven to handle millions of users and over 100,000 blogs on one domain name. See wordpress.com as an example.
Show me a link to a drupal site that handles that many hits and users. There may be one. I just haven’t seen it.
Everybody including gurus have their favorites and all for personal reasons. Each person needs to make up their own mind based on their own needs and goals.
