» Blogging & Content Management Systems (WordPress & Drupal Reviews) *Updated*

Blogging & Content Management Systems (WordPress & Drupal Reviews) *Updated*

After developing using numerous blogging systems and now moving up to more feature and functionality rich content management systems. What is amazing is how much this area has changed (for the better) in the last 6 years when I first started producing and delivering rich media content on the web. I’ll be reviewing my two favorite systems: WordPress v1.5 and Drupal v4.6, both PHP-based database driven systems. This phenomenon is nothing short of amazing. Read further for WordPress, MovableType and Drupal experiences…

Technorati Tags: blogging, podcasts, drupal, wordpress, rss

In the Days of Expensive Content Management Systems When I started Adventure Zone Network, a digital travel entertainment network, in 1999, we created a travelog, the term blog wasn’t really in existence, at least not to our knowledge. The Travelog allowed users and travellers to create their own blogs by uploading content such as video, audio, photos and text with map and other meta information. This template based system was very advanced at that time. We used Macromedia Generator to deliver rich media content to client side Flash-based templates and we used Allaire/Macromedia Spectra as the content management system. We had QuickTime Streaming Servers, Java App Servers, Oracle database, and much more.

Why am I mentioning this?

Well, the reason is that, back then, this took us 9 months of development and $300,000, which was considered a bargain for a small startup deliver this caliber of service. In fact, we won some awards and macromedia accolades for this work. The fact was, many other companies were spending far more than this back during Web 1.0.

Today, it is nothing short of a major phenomenon. What cost me all this development time and boat loads of money and the inflexible system can now be done for far less in a considerably less time. This is because of open-source and the advancement and adoption of such technology. In fact, software, commercial packaged software sold by large companies are going to have a big challenge for them, the Oracles, Sun Microsystems (whom I used to work for), Vignettes et al. The days of paying six figure sums for content management systems and databases (unless you are a large organisation) are over for many companies. Blogging Systems In the last couple of years, we have been seeing some leapfrogging of blog systems, which are, in a sense, mini content management systems. The easiest of those are Blogger (part of Google), Typepad and other “hosted’ blog systems that charge a recurring fee. MovableType (MT) or Movable Hype as some call it, was the early leader in the do-it-yourself blog software systems. I first used MT two and half years ago, before the pricing and licensing changes, and it was the best system out there, and it’s still good. But, MT started to show some problems, partly due to how it was architected (in Perl). The other is that it is not truely open-source under GPL. This will have limit the community of developers over time and when big VC money starts coming in, the company started to change. It’s aiming to get acquired which should not be a problem for them. I switched off of MT to WordPress 1.5 a couple of months ago. Here are the reasons why we made the switch.

MovableType Cons:

- Rebuild Times (& Scalability) were taking too long. Every time I updated content or created an entry, I had to rebuild (index files) and the larger the site got and the more content there was, the longer the rebuild times. These times could start to grow and as you edit and post content, you may do this a few times per entry. This gets real old, fast. It’s also not too scalable for larger sites. This is probably due to the way it is architected and the fact that it is based in Perl. They do support a dynamic element but in my experience, it wasn’t too helpful for the way I had the system configured.

Design Latitude. I find the way the initial CSS-based templating system with MT less flexible and more difficult to change and modify (e.g. there are a few comment CSS files, etc). A vast majority of people use a CSS based template and do minor treatment to it. If you use MT now, you will see that the templates included in initial system are pretty ugly and not too functional (compared to WordPress)
Hosted and Self-Hosted Systems. It is going to be very challenging to Six Apart, the makers of MT, to develop two seperate product lines in tandem, i.e. TypePad and MovableType. They will and appear to be spending more time on TypePad. This is where the acquitision value is. You will notice that TypePad supports features that MovableType does not, like mobile blogging for example and other features.
Not Open Source. This will ultimately start to see developers write plug-ins or modules for other systems like WordPress or Drupal

These are pretty significant reasons. The move towards WordPress away from MT seems to be taking place and accelerating. You can tell when Mac users use client side applications such as the wonderful Ecto to upload blogs (versus using Web Browser QuickTags). See the poll there and you will notice that WP has now taken a lead on MT. Not scientific, mind you, but since Ecto is one of the leading client side blog apps, it is a good indicator. MT, to its credit, does support multiple blogs which is very good and WP 1.5 does not (although it supports ‘Pages’), this is an area where WP can improve, for example.

Blog Poll from Ecto (as of May 6, 2005—Click Image for Larger View) Favorite Blog System (2424 Votes) 1. Wordpress 29% 2. MovableType 17% WordPress 1.5. I will write a full review shortly. But, I love WordPress 1.5. Great community, fantastic support and good will, loads of plug-ins and creative CSS templates. Alex King ran a design contest recently and there are some great templates. Kubrick, Blix, Gespaa, Minima Plus (Doug Bowman) and others. The system is also fast. NO rebuild times, WP is developed and based upon PHP and the system is faster and more responsive that MT. The ability to design and implement several great modules is really good. My experiences with WordPress are also positive. This site, Tangent Mobile, is using WordPress 1.5 for example. Now, WordPress is a great blogging system that is a mini-content management system, is open source under GPL. But, WP stops short where you need more advanced features required for larger sites. This is where Drupal (or Mambo and other CMS’s come in). For a full comparison of the 50 or so CMS and Blog systems, see CMS matrix. Also, both Drupal and WordPress have support for ‘enclosures’ or podcasting.

Drupal 4.6 I am developing a site now for a client that will use Drupal v.4.6. It has similarities to WordPress. In fact, they could probably merge WordPress + Drupal which would be an interesting concept. Drupal’s architecture is very well designed in PHP (with PHP5 support). Many of the CSS templates have been ported over from WP to Drupal ( A group called GoodBasic has done some awesome work). Some of the biggest reasons to upgrade come from modules for ecommerce and subscriptions, user registration and other sigificant features not found in WordPress. More of a Swiss Army knife. It’s no surprise that Yahoo! has just selected Drupal as an internal CMS. And even progressive music artists like MOBY are using Drupal (moby.com). Drupal is going to make some fine progress in the months to come. If you have a site in which you require an area for premium or paid online content subscriptions or sell products are are trying to get people to register to build a more active community, Drupal is a very good choice. I’ll do a full review shortly. Mambo was my second choice, and while Mambo has a lot of eye candy, in the long run, it may be less flexible. It is also run by a couple of developers (but under GNU GPL) which means it takes in less ideas and improvements than the better Drupal developer community. If you thought WordPress, was awesome, wait until you see Drupal!

The drawbacks of open source are that you need to be careful which modules you use. Some can clobber the other and can break the system so testing is important and reporting feedback or bug changes yourself to give back to the community.

Next Post will focus on RSS and Podcast Search and Marketing and there are many exciting companies focusing in this emerging arena from Technorati, Feedburner, Del.icio.us, blogwise, feedster and more…..

NEW UPDATE: (30 May, 2005) So far, I have been working extensively with Drupal 4.6. I am starting to see the vast power of this system and the modular architecture/framework. One of the puzzling things I am finding is the terminology differences in Drupal from other systems such as WordPress and Movabletype. Terms like taxonomy in Drupal are categories in WP. The concept of ‘nodes’ in Drupal is also different (i.e. pages in rough sense). Taxonomies in Drupal are far more flexible than in Wordpress. This notion is going to be a bit of a learning curve for WP bloggers moving up the foodchain. Given all the power and flexibility in Drupal, this can also confuse and lengthen the learning curve and it may be a common mistake to try to do everything with Drupal.

Here is what I really like about Drupal so far: -eCommerce module. This is really awesome for creating all types of products for sale using PayPal or Authrorize,net. Even for someone new to this, it is quite straightforward. -Access Control Lists and Roles. I love this. It allows me to seperate anonymous, regsitered, paid users, administrators and modeerators into different roles. The one are I am fiddling with now is a premium and paid content model where a viewer can get a teaser for an article but has to pay a nominal fee for a online subscription. Using modules such as ecommerce, taxonomy_access, roles and other modules, I can customize this. -Advertising module for full banner system where you keep 100% rev share. Also, AdSense module is a nice compliment to this. -Blog of Blogs: This can be useful for community sites -Internationalization: Site supports numerous languages. -Mass Mailer. PHPList for built-in newsletter support. Functionality is still limited but useful. -Flexinode: The ability to create a custom content area. Built-in content includes pages, polls, story, blog, image. etc. -Trackbacks, Enclosures (Podcasting), and Pinging Services all supported in 4.6 and is similar to WordPress 1.5.

I am starting to formulate these opinions as I dig deeper and deeper. 1. Wordpress for Blogging (You can also create multiple instances of Wordpress for multi-blog support). This is the easiest for beginners 2. Drupal for Blogging/CMS Community Sites (Swiss Army Knife: A grown up version of Wordpress). Steeper learning curve on confuration and modifiying the templates seems a little more ‘involved’ than in Wordpress as Drupal uses a theme engine (e.g. PHPTemplate system). Adding and extending Drupal I find pretty straightforward but users must be comfortable using a PHPAdmin for their database, etc. For this reason and others, Drupal may not be for the mass market bloggers out there but for the more geeky needing to move to the next level of functionality not found in WordPress 1.5. 3. Mambo for Corporate CMS sites. The direction for Mambo 5.0 is trying to be more Model-View-Controller or Object Oriented, thus adopting the modular layout found in Drupal today. Support for clean URLs seems immature in current Mambo. Mambo 4.5.1 supports a kind of hack using something called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) but this is really not â€œclean urlsâ€ which use a mod_rewrite. This is important for search engine indexing and increased web traffic. This is a downfall IMHO. Also, no support for a blogger API like MovabletypeAPI (which Wordpress uses) or Blogger API. This makes uploading content only available via web interface that I am aware of and thus great tools like Ecto, will not work. Mambo is mature and there are a lot of pre-built templates and modules and appears to be more of a traditional CMS than Drupal. Seems like there is more spit and polish albeit Windows look-and-feel (I’m a Mac person). I’d expect that Drupal will pass Mambo by the end of the year in terms of popularity among free Open Source CMS. Drupal has built a better modular runway and Mambo 5 is aiming for the new re-architected platform. Drupal also supports many of the W3C blogging norms and seems more geared towards XHTML, CSS, Modular, Blogging APIs. Just seems that while Mambo is GPL’ed, it feels like a more proprietary solution….it also seems more sluggish than Drupal after having installed both on my server.

What I would like is more support for a mobile Web initiative (See W3C Mobile Web Initiative announced 11 May 2005) and I am looking to integrating SMS, 2-way interactive and premium based campaigns directly into these systems in a cost effective way. This means using longcodes versus more costly (and more regulated) shortcodes and a host of other mobile initiatives I do not wish to divulge at this time….as we’re developing these for some clients under NDA.

Update: Oct 22, 2005 I did a site using Mambo before it migrated to an even odder name called Joomla (those Aussies). What I really found annoying with the lack of scalability especially with respect to a 72k db records limitation that is capped by many shared ISP hosts. Mambo 4.5.3 really takes a huge hit on the database with a thing called “max records” error. I had to do a PHP hack to 3x this (216k) for the ISP for the client. The site wasn’t even fully populated. Eventually, had to move to a dedicated server, which was bound to happen anyway. Moral of this story (unless this was fixed in Joomla–there were some rumors of a total rewrite of Joomla in PHP5 OO. Anyone care to comment on the future direction, feel free), don’t use Mambo on a shared ISP. I’m waiting to get my grubby little paws on Drupal 4.7

Comments?

Blog/Content Management blogging content management Digital Media drupal joomla mambo wordpress Blog/Content Management blogging content management Digital Media drupal joomla mambo wordpress

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Where was this article when I needed it? No matter, it was so gratifying to read it today after fresh installs of WordPress on my personal site and Drupal on my school site. I spent a great deal of time making these choices, so your well-considered opinions are very welcome.

Your welcome Julia and thanks for your comment. I also spent a great deal of time selecting and testing several systems before I came finally decided on Wordpress for blogs and Drupal for a CMS. Good luck with your school site!

Glad to see Wordpress is in the lead on the poll. I have also tried numerous blogging/cms solutions but I still think WP is the best ever.

Thanks for the review. i went through a similar process with evaluating blog software and I chose WordPress but am intrigued by Drupal. Cheers.

I did a similiar test run on various systems and have come to the same conclusion. The WordPress community/documentation is great. I am now in progress of implementing Drupal for an academic department.

[…] rdPress May 11, 2005 Drupal and WordPress Reviewed Just a quickie: TangentMobile’s review of WordPress and Drupal (and […]

Mambo was my second choice, and while Mambo has a lot of eye candy, in the long run, it may be less flexible. It is also run by a couple of developers and again not true open source which means it takes in less ideas and improvements

Just two questions on this:
1) Why, to you, is Mambo not true open source ?
2) Where do you think Mambo can increase in flexibility ?

Hi Lawrence,
I think this is a good thread.
http://drupal.org/node/15689

I have not developed a site using mambo but did take a look under hood. I think the architecture and structure for developers could be cleaner. I think having a good paltform, like building a runway, is always good for later on. Mambo is under GNU GPL but I have heard (perhaps incorrectly) that is less open in implementation. All open source is not created equally.

If you have a better understanding and feelings of Mambo over Drupal, I will be happy for you to submit a followup and I will post. Cheers.

For my needs as a MT –> WordPress –> Drupal migration path, Drupal suits my needs. I really like the ecommerce module in 4.6 and built an ecommerce area in one evening. Pretty powerful.

I am evaluating CMS now. I have shortlisted WordPress (which I already use for Simple Thoughts blog), Drupal, e107. Will make a post when done.

Thanks for sharing your evaluation.

I tried out both drupal and wordpress, and came away with wordpress. This was mostly due to trackback and pingback ability which was lacking in drupal. Also, the lingo used in drupal did not make sense to me, nothing seemed intuitave. More importantly, there where no definitions of the concepts. Frustrating. WP is much better at this. My 3 cents.

Maxpower,
Drupal 4.6 supports trackbacks (See http://drupal.org/project/trackback) and also pingomatic supports. It seems less intuitive to me as well, partly because I am used to WordPress and partly due to the complexity for Drupal. It’s like going to a restaurant that has 5 items with pictures to the other that has a menu with 50 items. The terminology is different.

However, From Drupal site:
“After six months of development, the Drupal team is proud to announce the Drupal 4.6.0 release! Thanks to those who contributed to this release, either by contributing code, testing the release candidate, providing support or writing documentation.

The key changes since Drupal 4.5 include:

PHP5 support.
Better search usability, improved results and relevancy.
Personal contact forms for registered users.
Improved multi-site support to run multiple Drupal sites from a single code base.
Extensible RSS 2.0 syndication support for enclosures (e.g. podcasts) and categories.
Ping Ping-O-Matic, to ping all major ping services.
Usability improvements for permissions, block configuration, statistics tracking, logs, forum configuration, content administration, etc.”

I would add that if you want a blog with no registration, built-in ecommerce or levels of user access control, etc, then go for WordPress (BLOG). If you need those features above and host of others, then Drupal for more CMS like functionality. Drupal will have a steeper learning curve than WordPress but will be more useful for more fully functioning sites. Either way, both great and PHP, CSS based.

I am developing a Drupal site now and the theming from WordPress to Drupal is different as well….I need to have an area where there is a premium content/services section for paid subscribers and registration and free content for other non-paying users. As such, I am unable to that in WordPress. I have used the ecommerce package with uses authorize.net and paypal frameworks and that was pretty straightforward….

I will post a more detailed followup review for Drupal. Maybe even a chart of key differences and real world experiences

I have yet to test drupal on a full scale.
I had a previous Drupal version installed once but was not very intrigued by the way the system was setup. I just did not “feel” the system and that is a very important aspect for me if I plan on working with any system. It has to be intuitive and pleasant. That is not a criticism towards Drupal as I had no difficulties setting it up and testing it a bit here and there. It’s merely a matter of individual preference and personal perception and Drupal felt strange to me. For a larger CMS, I’d still prefer typo3 over Drupal because the system architecture makes more sense to me and the interface is a lot more appealing technically and visually. However, I’m going to take a look at Drupal again. Perhaps the new version is better than the one I had.

Another system I love is Textpattern. I use Textpattern a lot and find it to be extremely flexible as it can be used as a blog and simulate static pages simultaneously which is great. Wordpress is also wonderful, though both these CMS (Wordpress and Textpattern) lack when it comes to indepth levels of organization (e.g. information architecture, clever tree organization) in my opinion.

Kind regards,

Maleika

[…] and is nicely running though, the memory of the initial hassles fade away very quickly Read the rest of it here. […]

Good stuff! I’ve been using WP for a while now and have just (yesterday) started developing my first Drupal web site.

Thanks for highlighting Drupal’s key features so thoroughly. It’s a God-send for someone at my entry level.

Cheers!

Great post Reno. I came to the same conclusions on WordPress and Drupal. For those wanting to deploy multiple sites, pass up Mambo and go straight to Drupal.

This is true the best CMS ever in time is wordpress/drupal and they are both long away from the rest out there. wordpress 1.6 coming soon amazing and the new drupal 4.7 with less buggs and more goodies i cant wait..but there is different solution in every cms out there so we all have to look at that.. another good one for people that never wanna learning any thing just wanna click/pay should use subdreamer as a cms hoobylist.. before i said to my self drupal is the “one and only one” because under the hood the core is a beauty.. it’s like choose between unix/windows.. what do you choose. then i mean the core and build everything from there on.. can i really rely on on this soultion build something strong in this & security is good… it aint flawless but for a large and multi linked sites.. i luv it and i love wordpress to.. i love them both.

ohh one more thing you should really play around a lot in them both to find the sperit that you are looking for and then see this in live action and ask what you really wanna do with it…. and learn what everything is about in them both for search engines and all kind of stuff and what taxonomy, nodes , categories, permalink etc is wordpress/drupal, learn to know the different between them is good start.

Thanks Starjive.
Looking forward to using Drupal 4.7. After developing a site using Mambo 4.5.2, Drupal 4.6.2, and Wordpress 1.5.1. What I do like about Mambo with its quirks is the configurable module locations (blocks/nodes in Drupal lingo). So, Drupal 4.7 will have configurable blocks and nodes so that placement in template can be in many locations versus just left and right. This means that Drupal can more effectively layout content blocks in a true CMS form whereas now, it is more in chronilogical order as in a blog system. Thanks for sharing your thoughts……Reno

I just finished doing a minimalist WP site for located here: http://www.tommarioni.com (clean and powerful)

I am now finishing a Mambo site which has integrated podcasting and mobile SMS capability. And nearing completion with a Drupal community site with mobile interaction as well.

i’ve been looking at pmmachine’s expression engine 1.3 and its looking very good. So far, I would say wordpress for blog tool, EE for blog/CMS and Drupal for more CMS/Community…..I’ve installed EE trial version and will write a review and may use for upcoming development….

I agree with you that the terminology is requires a longer earning curve for WP users.

Would you recommend Drupal for a small website with a couple of static pages and a blog?

Hi NCHENGA,
No, I would reccommend Wordpress for that. Use the ‘pages’ feature for static pages. It’s much simpler and easier to use plus there are a lot of good templates which you can modify the CSS and add your own images later. Drupal is for mid-to-larger sites that want a more content management and community driven system. It would be overkill for you. Sorry for the late reply…..

Your article really helped cement my decision to develop a new site on drupal. I needed a system I could easily build a site with free content, teasers and premium constent for subscribers. Mambo can do this, but I think Drupal will do it better.

Actually I came to Drupal a while back when I was looking for something that could do multilingual with elegance, something Mambo does not do at all well.

I love wordpress also and my own personal blog is on WP - . I spent a lot of time looking at the various options. WP attracted me for a numberr of reasons, the codex, support, elegant backend, plugins esp for spam blocking (Karma) and RSS feeds (Chaitgear), easy peasy templating, no rebuild updates, pages, etc etc I can go on and on. Certainly the COMMUNITY around WP attracted me the most. The HUGE codex and incredible support community will blow you away.

I think I should just add to Renos post by saying the backend of WP is beautifull, other blog/cms developers really need to get there act together in this area as some are just horrible. Mambo not included, witch IMHO is eye candy. Perhaps Drupal could do with a face lift also.

Oh forgot to add kudos for your http://www.tommarioni.com site, very nice and earily similar to a site I am doing for a friend except instead of the simpleviewer we are using Slideshowpro.

AND before I forget, if your considering WP check out a new project - FLOCK, a new browser built on Mozilla with goodies for bloggin with WP and much much more…

Here is an article that compares Blogger, TypePad and Drupal, in an attempt to answer the question: Should I Pay to Blog?

http://paininthetech.com/shouldipaytoblog

I do agree that Drupal is one of the best opensource CMSs available now. Simple & easy interface and excellent search-engine friendly URL. But please test the add-on modules before you use in your live website.
I heard that Drupal is not faster. Is it true?

Amarnath,
Good advice. Drupal’s performance is pretty damn good and is also very search engine friendly (unlike Mambo/Joomla which uses a SEO Search Engine Optimization hack–no true clean URLs).

Drupal’s performance can be enhanced using caching and throttling on a module by module basis. I’m testing Drupal 4.7 Beta now but it won’t be for 6-8 more weeks until it is a RC/GA and more modules have been certified with it.

All the best,
Reno

Thank you for doing the best job i’ve seen comparing these products.

I’m debating b/w expression engine and drupal.

How is expression engine working out for you?

Best,
Michael

Hey Michael,
Sorry for the late reply. Worked with EE, it looks good but the development community around Wordpress and Drupal are far superior especially now with WP 2.0 out. I have tossed out Mambo/Joomla now and focused on WP and Drupal. I still have the same conculsions as last year, Drupal for more full blown functionality for advanced users (with available nice designed templates) or Wordpress without the community/cms features (but far superior templates to work from). Either way they are the best in my opinion. I really don’t have time to invest in yet another system and have put EE on the side (its a good system though).

I couldnt agree more!

Great writeup. I’ve been on MT for quite some time, thinking about porting all my various blogs and websites into Drupal. The Mambo info was good too, enough to get me solidly over into the Drupal camp. As always, your mileage will vary.

i’m using bluehost as well andycho….they are excellent. only problem is that if you ever need a shared or dedicated server, they cant hadle but for blogging and lower volumen CMS, they are great on many levels…

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