Drupal vs. WordPress, why I’m having second thoughts

I’ve been working on a CRUD plugin for WordPress for about a week. I’ve got most of what I want in there, but I hit a road block. You see, I want my content to be searchable, so I used the wp_posts table to store the header for the record, and I stored additional data in another table. In wp_posts, I changed the post_type to “contacts” for my records so as to differentiate my data from posts and pages. This is effective, and it’s searchable, however I couldn’t find a way to display my data on the front end.

What I realized is that WordPress would be great if it could load a template according to post_type. Right now, the WordPress theme hierarchy does that for Posts and Pages, but doesn’t allow programmers to add their own entries to the theme hierarchy. It would be great if I could add my own entry to the theme hierarchy that says for the post_type = “contacts” use the theme page called “contacts.php” if that doesn’t exist, use “index.php” just like it does for posts and pages.

Maybe you can do this. I’ve been unable to.

So now I’m thinking… well Drupal does that already. Based on your node type, it’ll load the content using code in your module. In fact, across the board, Drupal is made to be extensible so much more than WordPress. So I’ll make this bold statement, at the risk of sounding naive… WordPress is made for Blogging. Period. It’s designers do not want programmers to make it into anything more than a blog. As such, it does blogging better than any other blogging engine available commercially or openly.

On the flip side, Drupal is a CMS, it’s meant to be open and extensible. However, it takes quite a bit of work to get it to do anything useful. A standard install with no additional modules will leave you wanting more. For example, Drupal doesn’t even have a WYSIWYG editor by default. Recently I’ve discovered a great module for that, but it still doesn’t have the file management (i.e. uploading files and placing links into an article) capabilities that WordPress has. Furthermore, there are NO good themes for Drupal at an affordable price. Granted, I purchased the theme that I use for this blog, it wasn’t free. However it didn’t cost me a fortune either. I’ve found no such theme for Drupal. If you know of one, please do tell.

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5 Responses to “Drupal vs. WordPress, why I’m having second thoughts”

  1. Hone Watson  on August 12th, 2009

    I think you might be able to achieve this outcome by extending some of the wordpress classes, using the wordpress rewrite api, and using the template redirect hook.

    I like Drupal, but I find it annoying that they have two simultaneous stable releases and a third development release. It makes it so much more difficult to maintain modules. I think Wordpress has better scalability due to the Drupal Database API.

    Magento is so slow even now with performance enhancements. I’m looking at starting a project that uses the post_type for products, and orders with a simple paypal express checkout as a starting point.

  2. weston deboer  on October 1st, 2009

    This is kind of a hidden secret that the wordpress community doesn’t really want you to know. But it is very easy to do what you are asking by using custom page templates. So you create your contact page template in your wordpress theme folder. Then you create your contacts page and select that page. Now within that you can do your custom php queries, custom loops.

    Or you can even go a step further and in your index.php or category.php template files you can say, if in the contacts category, show it like this, if not show it like this.

    I am sorry if this is an old topic, I was just looking around drupal vs wordpress

  3. Matt  on December 16th, 2009

    weston deboer, why would the Wordpress community be hiding said information?

  4. nomad  on February 15th, 2010

    I think under the hood Drupal code is much easier to understand then Wordpress.

    Wordpress attaches wp_ to everything, don’t know why they feel the need to, it only makes more of a mess and difficult to read the code.

    The code itself is not as straight forward as Drupal code which is pretty easy once you get the feel for it. Wordpress hides a lot of things which makes it difficult to extend.

  5. John Sostak  on March 20th, 2010

    Hi,
    I am not a developer or coder, but my partner is. We have tried Drupal, and for smaller websites, it is too much, of everything. We have started using wordpress as a cms for small sites, like http://cfdblaze.com/ which is the Chicago Fire Department website, and it is much faster to roll out. The wordpress cms is also easier for a client to administrate.

    That being said, the client must be informed of what not to touch. We haven’t eliminated the editor, plug ins, or themes from the back end. If they want to, they can do a little damage.

    It’s been our experience that the wordpress community is super helpful, so maybe you are just in the wrong forums? Check Matt Mullenweg and Tomi Schnieder, they actually answer email personally.

    I would like wp to do a little more, and the community will get it there. Unless we are building something really big, we prefer wordpress.

    Thanks, John


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