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Drupal vs WordPress

John Hannah — Sun, 13 May 2012 12:48:26 +0000

The conventional wisdom has it that when it comes to usability, WordPress blows Drupal away. If you're looking for power and flexibility, Drupal reigns supreme. But is the conventional wisdom really true?

When comparing Drupal and WordPress, the conversation can often get heated. The die hard Drupal folks will scoff at the very suggestion that WordPress is a true competitor, while the WordPress crowd will lament the steep learning curve and stubborn usability issues that are supposedly part and parcel of Drupal site building and administration.

Some of us, however, don't have the luxury of being rabid partisans. We serve small businesses and sometimes Drupal is the best fit, and other times WordPress is the right choice. Over the past year, I've had to spend more time with WordPress and have gotten to a place where I can speak to the pros and cons of each CMS. What follows are some of the most important points to consider when choosing which system to recommend.

Creating Content

If you're a professional web designer, you can probably navigate your way around Drupal's lack of a built in editor. But that means you're going to have to do the work of installing one yourself and it may be a challenge putting together something that is as good as the editor that comes installed with WordPress. It's simply the best I've seen, by far. Editing in full screen mode was also recently added, leaving Drupal farther behind.

I wrote a recent post on the topic of Drupal's lack of built in editor that sparked some interesting conversation, but it also left me feeling that no changes will be made to address this issue in the near future. WordPress is certainly a better choice on this score for users that require something simple and relatively bulletproof.

Displaying Content

Out of the box, both WordPress and Drupal offer two content types, pages and posts/articles. If you need more flexibility from WordPress, you'll need to go looking for a plugin. In Drupal 7, the mighty CCK module has been moved into core (now called Fields), giving users the ability to easily configure any content type they choose.

When it comes to flexibly displaying site content, both platforms send you to the development community for help. Fortunately, both have options available. WordPress has two main choices, Virtual Pages and Query Posts, with the latter being the more popular of the two. Drupal on the other hand has the very powerful Views module.

On this score, Drupal has the clear advantage. Views can take a while to get the hang of, but once you do, you can slice and dice your content every which way and serve it up on multiple pages, blocks and feeds. There is no real challenger to Views in the WordPress community...yet.

A nice companion to Views is Semantic Views which can help keep the sometimes ugly markup generated by Views nice and clean.

Blocks vs. Widgets

One of the first things a site builder usually wants to do is add some sidebar content and this is where blocks and widgets come into play. Although it may come as a surprise to some, Drupal has the upper hand in this area. It's true that the WordPress interface is more intuitive, but it's also more difficult to restrict the display of a widget to certain pages, something I find to be an extremely common requirement. WordPress does have a plugin for this, the awkwardly named Widget Logic Visual, but even that doesn't come close to the flexibility of Drupal's block system.

Modules vs. Plugins

Adding modules, or plugins as they are called in WordPress, is often the first post-installation task when setting up a site. Although Drupal has a very good selection of modules, and some that are true standouts, WordPress has an embarrassment of riches on this point. Another thing I've noticed is that in the cases where a publisher produces a plugin/module for both systems, the one for WordPress invariably works better.

In my view, this is simply a function of the enormous size of the WordPress community. For most scenarios, WordPress has not only one, but usually several good options. This is a very important point for a lot of small businesses that may need to add functionality but have tight development budgets. It's also an important consideration for designers who are doing site building for a client. It can really make the process much more efficient.

That said, Drupal has you covered with an adequate solution 95% of the time, but it is something to consider.

User Management & Permissions

Most sites that use a CMS have multiple users editing content. Those users will often have different roles and need different permissions. WordPress has five built-in roles: Administrator, Editor, Author, Contributor and Subscriber. These roles have what WordPress defines as Capabilities, for example, the capability to moderate comments. This provides some nice out of the box functionality that will suit most site's needs.

Drupal, on the other hand, has three roles defined: Administrator, Anonymous User and Authenticated User. Despite having fewer pre-defined roles, Drupal makes it very easy to create new roles with fine-grained permissions.

Users can even be given access to specific fields on content types, allowing site administrators a great deal of control over the information and features available to site visitors and contributors.

WordPress has some modules that can more or less replicate the functionality of Drupal's core user management and permissions, but considering the strength of Drupal's default features, it clearly comes out on top.

The Best Tool for the Job

Over the years, I've trained a lot of people to use both systems. With Drupal 6, the process was truly painful. But with Drupal 7, I've seen a really big change. Content contributors, publishers, and new site admins all have a much easier time with things. It's gotten to the point where I don't think it's considerably more difficult to pick up Drupal than it is WordPress. Is WordPress still a bit easier? Yes, but when you factor in the flexibility you get with Drupal, I think it's a pretty close call. Make no mistake, when it comes to content management systems, flexibility is a usability issue.

My basic recommendation is that if you are building a large, complex site that is supported by professional staff, Drupal is the clear choice. If you're building a smaller site with non-technical staff administering it, WordPress is the way to go. Everything in between is a toss up based on the particular requirements of the organization in question. If you have any thoughts on the pros and cons of the two systems, please share them in the comments below.

About the author
John Hannah owns Redpoint Web Marketing, a Tucson web design firm that helps small businesses and non-profits design and market their websites, something he's been happily working at for over ten years.

Best Drupal 7 Themes

John Hannah — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 19:51:21 +0000

It was about a year ago that I wrote my first post on the best Drupal 7 themes. At the time, it was slim pickings coming up with a list of strong choices. Fortunately, a lot has changed since then.

A couple quick points before we get to the themes. The criteria I used in putting this list together has changed a bit since last time. First of all, these are all free themes. Extra points were awarded if the theme uses responsive design or an installation profile, especially if it includes a WYSIWYG. These are things that I think show extra attention to user experience.

Alphorn

First up is Alphorn from Symphony Themes. It's a good choice for a corporate site, includes three color schemes, uses responsive design and has an installation profile that includes a lot of useful modules like Google Analytics and Pathauto, among others. An added bonus is the inclusion of layered PSD files so you can more easily do a theme modification. However, it doesn't look like they include a WYSIWYG by default, which I think would be a big plus considering the target market.

Omega

This is the first base theme on the list and I have to tell you, I really love it. Omega is designed as a responsive theme built using HTML5 and a 960 grid.

It's highly configurable and its maintainer, Jake Strawn, is skilled and committed. Strawn has also developed a companion module, Delta, that offers some really great additional functionality. Of all the base themes, this is easily my favorite. UPDATED: Read my full review of the Drupal Omega theme to learn more.

Marinelli

Marinelli is a classic Drupal theme, but it just barely made the list this time around. Sure, it's a nice looking theme, but it hasn't yet adopted responsive design and there isn't an installation profile available. I think if you're developing a new site these days, addressing the needs of mobile users needs to be a major consideration, and Marinelli is lagging in this area.

One thing it does have going for it is an integrated jQuery rotator, which can save a little time. It's also an excellent choice if you're building a site that puts a premium on accessibility.

Zen

Yeah, you gotta love Zen. It's billed as the ultimate base theme and it certainly has a lot going for it. If you're looking for a well-documented base theme produced by a top-notch developer, you can't go wrong with this one. And yes, Zen has finally gotten on the responsive design bandwagon.

TouchPro

TouchPro is a free theme from Jurriaan Roelofs of SooperThemes. Jurriaan has developed his own responsive base theme Arctica. Although I didn't include Arctica on this list, I think it's definitely worth checking out, especially in combination with Tundra, a sub-theme that adds a lot of bells and whistles.

TouchPro also has an installation profile that includes a ton of built-in features. If you need to get a website set up really quickly, this theme is a good choice.

TB Sirate

Sirate is a great theme for a corporate site from the guys at ThemeBrain. Like a lot of the the other developers on this list, ThemeBrain are doing some cool things. First of all, they have developed their own base theme, TB Nucleus, which looks pretty interesting. They have also included an installation profile, Superfish menus and lots more. I also had an exchange on Twitter with these guys and I'm told they are already at work implementing responsive design. Pretty good stuff.

TB Methys

So the last theme on the list, Methys, is also from ThemeBrain. It's has all the bells and whistles of Sirate, but is quite different from many other free themes with regard to design. It's a sophisticated, feminine theme, something you don't see much of from the male-dominated theme developer community. Methys would be perfect for a magazine or fashion retail site targeted at women.

Wrapping It Up

There is a lot going on with Drupal themes right now. It's an exciting time, but it can make it a bit more difficult to choose a theme that is going to meet your needs going forward. Hopefully this list will help you narrow it down some. If you think I've left a deserving theme off this list, leave me a comment below. You may also want to check out my recent post on some of the best premium Drupal themes.

Drupal Multisite Install with cPanel

John Hannah — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 00:08:56 +0000

I recently did some work for a client setting up a multisite install on a shared hosting account using cPanel. With shared hosting, if you run into any problems you're pretty much on your own. And unfortunately for me, there were problems. Since I'm always looking for an opportunity to turns lemons into lemonade, I thought I'd write a 'how to' post to save others a bit of aggravation.

Let's step through the process...

Initial Setup

We'll begin by assuming you have a basic Drupal install up and running. For the purposes of this tutorial, and because I'm a bit hungry, we'll call this base site taco.com. This will be the default domain for the install.

To convert our single site Drupal installation into a multisite setup, however, we'll need another domain. Let's stick with the theme and call this one burrito.com. We need to make sure we set the name servers for burrito.com to the same host that we are using for taco.com. You can set the name servers in the control panel provided by your domain registrar.

Create a Parked Domain

The next step is adding your new domain as a parked domain in cPanel. You could choose to configure this using the Addon domains option, but I prefer going with a parked domain - fewer form fields to complete.

You'll notice in the screenshot below that the domain root for our new site is /public_html. That's where I have my default domain as well. If your default site is in another folder, you'll need to make sure your parked domain is pointing to the same place. If you can't do this using parked domains, give it a try using the Addon domain method. The important thing is that all domains using the Drupal multisite install are pointing at the same root folder.

Another thing to keep in mind is that it may take a while for this setting to take effect. You're making a DNS entry for this new site and it can sometimes take up to 24 hours to propogate, although in my experience it's usually just a few hours.

Create A Database

For this example, each site is going to have it's own database. We can do this by going to the MySQL Database Wizard and following the prompts.

Although it's possible to have multiple sites using a single database, I feel it's simpler for each site to have it's own db and it's also the more typical configuration. There are cases when you really do want a shared database, however, so if you're interested, take a look at the Domain Access module as a starting place.

Create Site Folder

Now we need to create a folder for our burrito.com site. We add this folder under public_html/sites/burrito.com. Next we need to copy default.settings.php to this folder (it should be in the default folder from the initial Drupal install) and rename it to settings.php. Make sure the permissions are set to 644 (right-click a folder or file to set permissions). You should also create the 'files' folder inside the burrito.com folder and make sure it's permissions are set to 755.

Modify .htaccess for www resolve

This is one spot where I got a bit tripped up. If you care about SEO (and you should) you'll want to make sure your site properly handles www resolution to avoid duplicate content issues. If you're not familiar with this issue, you can read more about it here.

So we want burrito.com to always resolve to http://burrito.com. If someone comes to our site by entering http://www.burrito.com we want to have a 301 redirect send them to the proper URL. To do this, we need to add the following snippet to our .htaccess file:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.burrito\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://burrito.com/$1 [L,R=301]

The thing I goofed up on was forgetting to do this for all of my domains. If you forget to add this snippet for each domain, when you go to your new site you'll be redirected to the default site instead of being prompted to install Drupal.

Install the New Site

OK, if all went to plan you should be ready to install your new site. In our case we would just go to burrito.com and then we'll be prompted to install Drupal as usual. That wasn't too bad, was it?

Troubleshooting Advice

There are a lot of ins and out when it comes to getting to this working with different hosts. Bluehost.com, for example, doesn't let you create sites that both point to the same root folder. In that case you'll need to use symlinks which are a different conversation altogether. I recommend checking out Kobashi Computing's write up if the process I've outlined isn't working for you. They specifically talk about symlinks which may be something you need to get your setup properly working.

If you've got any tips of your own, leave them in the comments. I'd love to add your advice to the conversation.