What Makes Drupal Awesome Compared To WordPress

I love working with Drupal for one main reason: its’ flexibility and power to add and create content. I must admit in the beginning I found Drupal quite difficult to learn, but once I got the hang of it – WOW!

I feel as if this question has probably been asked countless times online like the typical “XBOX verses Playstation” and “Andriod verses Apple” debates, but I want to express my personal opinion on Drupal verses WordPress and why I prefer Drupal every time. In my personal opinion, I believe WordPress is great if you are not firmilar with building websites or not tech savvy enough to understand coding or just want to whip up a simple, quick website. Sure, if you have a big budget and you know what you are doing, by all means use WordPress. In fact quite a large percentage of all websites on the web do use WordPress as a CMS. Drupal on the other hand is a bit more robust, powerful and heavy duty.

I work on WordPress all the time, however, there are a few things that I have experienced along the way that I found I had issues with whereas Drupal didn’t:

Firstly, WordPress has tons of updates all the time, where Drupal tends to have less. This is due to the fact that WordPress is more popular and prone to hacking so they need to keep it up-to-date.

Secondly, you might end up having to pay for WordPress plugins or a theme in order to get what you want. With Drupal I find you can build an entire decent looking site not having to spend a cent.

Thirdly, my pet peeve… WordPress is simply slow. I find even the core files of Drupal often times a fraction the size of a WordPress’ core files would be.

And lastly, I find WordPress websites look very similar. It just has a particular look.

I have three main reasons for loving Drupal:

1. Blocks:

A Drupal block or content region, is basically what it says – a region on a page. The number of blocks you’ll have or get depend on the theme that you choose. You can also add in your own blocks as well using a bit of code. You can add any piece of content to a block and a block can be in any region on a page. You can also have one block in a particular region and multiple pages. This makes is super easy and fast to use in terms of putting content wherever you want and not being restricted to where you want it.

2. Content and Content Types:

Content types in Drupal allows for a lot of flexibility. Drupal comes with a standard Article and Basic Page content type with predifined fields. You are able to add in your own fields, delete fields or simply edit exsisting ones. You can even create your own content type with your own fields. This is great if you have a large website with many pages and you want to categorise the events into a content type or your blog into antother content type.

3. Views:

This to me is what makes Drupal so powerful. Drupal views is a baiscally taking the field(s) of content or content type(s) and manipulating it in such a way that it spits out a visual result. Say for example I have created a custom content type called “Events” and I have 10 different events on my website, I can use a view to create a styled page. I am bascally taking a bunch of content and making it look pretty by only having to do it once. So this view can be how ever I want it: in a list format, tabular format or even a grid layout… basially anything you can think of, you can do with a view.

Interesting fact: Popular websites such as The White House and NASA both run on Druapl.

I would love to read your opinions on Drupal versus WordPress.