Drupal to Wordpress

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I’ve been using Drupal to build websites for years now. I’ve used it for a few of my own sites, and for a number of client sites. Since version three point something I’ve been comfortable with it’s often weird ways and always been able to mould it into whatever it was I was trying to build.

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I’ve read books on it, I’ve build themes from scratch and coded the odd module. I’ve listened to many a podcast on the subject and generally been in that world.

But a couple of things happened recently that have made me reconsider and, in the first instance at least, start switching over to Wordpress.

The first thing was my blog being hacked. I missed a critical security update to the core Drupal platform and nasties got in and took over my site. Ok, these things happen, my fault really. After nuking the site from orbit and restoring from backup I put it behind me.

The second thing was me flipping out and ranting about ‘it shouldn’t be this hard to put a picture where I want it!’ when adding a blog entry. I’d not noticed how backward Drupal had become over time when performing the basics of content editing. It’s just not acceptable nowadays to need to tweak a million and one things just to add text and images to a blog post. Just search the web for ‘wysiwyg editing drupal’ to see what I mean.

The third thing was Drupal 8 was released. And to my dismay, it still needed FTP and files copying about in order to apply core updates, and basic content editing seemed no better.

Sorry Drupal, but life’s too short to be swimming against that tide any more.

A quick Wordpress install later, and I can now install themes and plugins via the dashboard, and also apply security updates. Minor ones can even be set to install automatically.

Content editing is so much better, with no strange behaviour owing the complex behaviour of text filters, and if I want an image, I just drag and drop to upload it and it ‘just works’.

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Drupal has always been a more developer-centric platform and Wordpress more user-centric, but over time Wordpress has evolved it’s developer side whereas Drupal still feels clunky from a user perspective.

Sorry Drupal but you seem to have got carried away with the latest PHP dohicky and database widget behind the scenes and lost sight of the user experience, and Wordpress is stealing your lunch.