CA Trew
My Blog Site

This blog serves as my opinion on which content management system (CMS) is easier to use for blogging.

The 2 CMS’s are Drupal and WordPress.

Firstly installation. Since my website is being hosted by a hosting company, I was able to install both CMS’s from within the CPanel that was provided to me. Both systems installed with easy and no problems. So for me they are both the same in this regard. I have not yet tried to install WordPress manually before, but I have tried Drupal which also pretty simple to install if I remember correctly.

Secondly is the theme selection. Lets start with Drupal. To install a theme, you need to navigate to their website, browse for a theme (make sure its compatible), download, unzip it, then upload the files via FileZilla (or your preferred FTP program) to the right folder. Then head to the admin section of Drupal, activate it and then you can use it. Not the most user friendly process if you ask me. Since I am a web developer, the process is straight forward and easy to figure out, although to any person without a knowledge of web development, they will probably struggle to get it right the first time. WordPress on the other hand makes life very easy when it comes to themes. From the admin section, just click on Appearance, then Themes, then  Install Themes. You can then search for a theme. Once you find a nice theme, just click install and WordPress will download it automatically to your server, unpack and install it. Much easier than Drupals way.

Thirdly content. Drupal is built on the concept of nodes for its content type. The two default content types are page and story, although many more types can be added by installing modules. WordPress make use of posts and pages. Both are pretty straight forward to use: pages for static pages such as about us and a links page and story/post for a blog entry. The difference for came in when I wanted to put my post/story into a specific category. For Drupal you need to understand taxonomy for that. I tried to learn that but got frustrated as it made no sense to me. WordPress is a lot simpler when it comes to category. Also it when i comes to tags for posts, WordPress trumps Drupal.

Friendliness. Here WordPress is much better than Drupal for the first time user. Their menu under the admin section is nicely laid out and easy to use. Drupal’s menu system is not too bad but is not as nice as WordPress’s menu system.

Overall for the average blogger, I would recommend WordPress as the CMS to use. Even though Drupal is the favorite CMS out there, it is just too complicated for a standard blog site. But if you want to extend your website with other features beyond blogging, then I would recommend Drupal. WordPress gets you blogging quickly and efficiently with minimal effort.