Submitted by Jordan on
Steve Burge at OS Training just released an excellent article on how to make Drupal behave like a Wordpress blog. It's an excellent article and I recommend you read it. It also shows what's both good and bad about Drupal.
The conventional wisdom holds several truths:
- If you just want a blog, use Wordpress
- If you want something more powerful, use Drupal
- Drupal is better than other powerful CMS platforms (like Django) because it saves you development time
Steve Burge's article seems to hint that you don't really need Wordpress, you can do the same thing in Drupal in just 92 easy steps (I counted). That's true, but it belies Wordpress' very strength: in Wordpress, you can do all those things in one step.
At the same time, there's been a good deal of talk in the Drupal community about ease of use, especially for content authoring. Panopoly has a node edit screen that looks an awful lot like Wordpress, and that's not an accident.
But here's the key point: Looking like Wordpress is not the same thing as acting like Wordpress.
It's true, Wordpress is much easier to use, on the front end and the back end. It has some lovely features out of the box that Drupal does not. It's also true that for some of these things, there is no excuse for Drupal not being easier or friendlier.
But it's also true that Drupal is much more extensible and configurable. The simple fact that Drupal is more flexible means that its interface needs to be more open-ended. If you need a "recent posts" block on the side of your page, you are free to make one. If you need a custom database that displays the same information three different ways with Google Maps integration and a RESTful API, you can do that too - a lot easier than you could in Wordpress. Drupal is in the habit of giving you excellent tools, not a finished product.I think that's a good thing. I don't want my Drupal laden with a bunch of nifty little blog-friendly features that I won't ever use. Concentrate on more powerful things like bringing Views into core. If I need a blog, I'll use Wordpress with its preconfigured nifty little features. If I need something more powerful, I will use the advanced tools that Drupal gives me.
That being said, I'm still excited about the changes in Drupal 8 because a better user interface is always a good thing. A modern PHP framework is always a good thing. Object oriented programming is always a good thing. Clean core code and a comprehensible API are always good things. A learning curve is not a bad thing if you're a developer and you want to build something amazing.
Of course you can make Drupal act like Wordpress. You could make it work like Joomla too, or Django, or pretty much any platform out there. That's the beauty of Drupal. Steve Burge's article illustrated that point beautifully. I'm not going to start building blogs in Drupal, but it's nice to know I could.