WordPress vs Drupal

Question

I am going to be developing a site for a client and am torn between using WordPress or Drupal. I have moderate experience with WordPress, a little less with Drupal.

The site will feature regular postings from the site administrators, but also needs to allow easy postings from authorized members. Members can join via the site or via Facebook/Open ID. Postings would include images, and the ability to incorporate content from YouTube, Flickr, maybe others. Postings would allow for comments, which would generally be moderated.

There would also be areas of the site that incorporate RSS feeds, twitter/facebook integration, and somewhere down the road some possible e-commerce type stuff.

The people who will do the day-to-day admin work are moderately computer savvy, but don't have any real CMS experience.

I like the power and extensibility of Drupal, but am worried that it may be too much complexity; but likewise I am worried that Wordpress may not be extensible enough.

Any thoughts/recommendations would be very much appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

I'm slightly biased because I have more knowledge in the Drupal realm of things more so than Wordpress, however, given your criteria you may want to think about investing more time into learning Drupal, especially if you see this project as something you want to continue to grow over time.

Drupal was built as a fine-grained multi-role system where you can assign different permissions to different roles to do different things (e.g. content editor, content reviewer, member, etc.) and assign users to these roles.

Also, Drupal has a lot of modules available that just plug in and work to enhance the system (probably Drupal's greatest strength). The trick is trying to figure out which ones to use for your use cases, and understanding when it makes more sense to build a custom module. For your scenario, you may want to check out these modules:

http://drupal.org/project/twitter <--for twitter integration
http://drupal.org/project/fbconnect <-- for logging in with Facebook
http://drupal.org/project/emfield <-- for easily adding youtube, flickr to content
http://drupal.org/project/feeds <-- RSS feed agregation
http://drupal.org/project/ubercart <-- a fully fledged eCommerce module

Drupal does have its learning curve, and for getting started, I would recommend a good book like: http://www.drupalbook.com for increasing your knowledge on the development side of things.

Answer 2

A software package that does not meet your requirements is likely to be more complex than a software package that does. Managing the wrong piece if software is complex!

Answer 3

This may seem like it shouldn't matter, but how strong are you on front-end development? I say this because although Drupal does have a large variety of themes I have found that getting those themes to work properly with modules and custom elements can be an absolute nightmare. If this project is going to be handled by you and you alone, I would recommend Wordpress. Not only does Wordpress offer just as wide a variety of extensions as Drupal (plugins), but the html it spits out is much easier to style.

Also, in my past experience of working with editorial teams in both a Wordpress and Drupal environment I have found that with Wordpress MUCH less of my time has been spent troubleshooting issues for writers. Lastly, though custom user roles cannot be created from the admin interface they can be added very easily by writing a simple plugin.

Evan