28 Mar Drupal Vs WordPress: A CMS War 2019
If you are thinking about the website development then I am sure about the one challenge that you will be facing is choosing the right content management system(CMS). The war begins between the Drupal and WordPress. It’s the toughest part of the process of website development. Therefore, this is the little help from my side to make your task easier to choose the correct CMS.
These two CMS platforms have always been successful in dominating the world of CMS since 2010. They are in the war for almost 10 years. At the end of this article, you will be easily able to choose and decide which CMS you would be comfortable with.
Before getting the war started, let’s get into the similarities phase.
Topics Covered
Similarities of Drupal and WordPress
1. Both the platform Drupal and WordPress are open source free software licensed under GPL. You can download software free, use and modify it for free as you like.
2. Both the platforms have built their own community consisting of developers, designers, trainers, users, and volunteers. The community has got a goal to make the platform better by sharing the knowledge, supporting the users, organizing events, solving the events and many more.
3. Both the platforms are based on PHP and MySQL.
4. Both the platform also uses the themes and templates for the designs and plugins to add additional features and functionalities.
Looking at the above similarities, you will be able to make some decisions that they both provide similar platforms and features and services. I have tried to show you the differences in the below table where you can have a brief overview of it.
Here, is the summary of the Drupal Vs WordPress CMS war
Let’s begin with a full review of the two best CMS platform.
Drupal Vs WordPress: Introduction
WordPress and Drupal are the two best CMS platform which was introduced in the early first decade of the 21st century. Drupal was first released in 2001 by Dries Buytaert and WordPress was released in the year 2003 by Matt Mullenweg.
In about 20 years only, these CMS technologies have changed the way people make their websites and web app development. These CMS platform has evolved as a perfect website development platform for the non-coding normal users that is easy and quick setup and easy to manage while being cost-effective.
So, what is Drupal?
The second most popular CMS since in use. More than about 3% of CMS based websites are created using Drupal. What Drupal focuses on is the standard features including reliable performance, strong security, and reliable customizability. There are millions of websites on www(world wide web) that uses Drupal including government agencies, eCommerce, blogging, education and other various industries.
Drupal has a huge community with the millions of developers, designers, trainers, strategists, editors, and sponsors worldwide. Moreover, it has been working with regional meetups and groups all over the world. With this, DrupalCon the event is also organized where users can take the skills training and also can level up their skills.
Now, what is WordPress?
WordPress is the topmost CMS since it has been released. Today over 28% of all websites based on CMS is built using WordPress. This means about 60% of the CMS market share. It was first introduced as a blogging platform in 2003. In a few years, WordPress development has evolved itself as the complete content management software. Because of its user-friendly approach i.e. providing the simple and intuitive approach where the users are not familiar with the coding aspects. They can do website development and web app developments their selves without anyone’s help. NO coding skills required.
WordPress is used in all types of industries and professionals as the era is all about going viral and famous being online. The most popular sites who use WordPress is Sony Music, MTV News, The Walt Disney Company, Official Star Wars blog, Bloomberg Professional and many more….These are just a few famous brands that use WordPress for their website.
The Competition is for Ease of Use: War of Drupal Vs WordPress
Online era makes the online presence vital in every sense of the business and also to the web developers. The CMS provides the platform for website or web app development to the people who are not involved in coding and have no idea about the coding. However, all the platforms don’t give the same priority to the user-friendliness.
Let’s check out who provides the best user-friendliness: Drupal Vs WordPress.
War of Ease of Use with Drupal
Nowadays, every web hosting companies offer one-click installation and so does the Drupal platform. This means there is no pain in installing the software, just a click away.
The next step you need to do is fill in the information related to your websites like website name, slogan(tagline), and email address.
Drupal dashboard seems to be clean with the minimalistic layout. And every menu on the dashboard has a brief description of it. There are about eight menus on the dashboard.
1. Content: Addition of articles and basic pages. The articles are similar to the WordPress posts and Basic pages are similar to the WordPress pages
2. Structure: Complete control over your website elements. You can add, edit, and manage various elements which can include Block layout, comment type, contact form, Content type, menus, etc from this category.
3. Appearance: Customization of Drupal themes.
4. Extend: Drupal modules work as plugins for WordPress. This can add functionality to the Drupal website. What you can do in this category is, see the list of modules installed, install new ones and manage them.
5. Configuration: A basic administration panel where you can find account settings, basic site settings, Search engine indexing setting etc.
6. People: Here it allows multiple users. You can add a new user, assign status, role, and permission to the user.
7. Reports: Availability of updates, recent log messages, Field list, status report and more.
8. Help: Guidance on using Drupal.
Drupal dashboard might seem to be simple but it will not be the same going forward for your website to go live successfully. Drupal has always grabbed the audience’s attention because of its massive flexibility and that has disrupted the simplicity.
Compared with WordPress, Drupal is a bit difficult. It has a great number of modules for every kind of extension. But to choose from this list of modules is difficult.
Now, Ease of Use with WordPress
The same method goes with WordPress. A click away from installation and a form to fill entering the information related to the website like website name, slogan(tagline), and email address.
WordPress is simple and user-friendly. What the WordPress dashboard has on it is here in a small description.
1. Home: The default page of the WordPress dashboard.
2. Updates: Frequent updates available in the core software with the themes and plugins.
3. Posts: The category to add general post and blogs and articles.
4. Pages: Add pages like “Home”, “Contact Us” etc.
5. Comments: As the name suggests, the comments from the site will be available here
6. Appearance: Complete control of the designs of your website via this menu including themes, widget, customize, menus, headers etc.
7. Plugins: Add new plugins and manage installed plugins from here.
8. Users: This menu consists of import and export of tools by default.
9. Settings: Menu consists of all the site configuration options here including general settings, writing, reading, discussion, media, and permalink.
10. Collapse Menu: Here if you want full width to manage the content, you can collapse the menu.
WordPress is simple and will remain simple for its rest of time as well. Choosing themes are simple. If you don’t find the feature you are looking for, find out the plugin and install it and you’ll be ready to go with your features. Hence, WordPress is the most beginner-friendly platform. No coding skills required.
Talking about the Design and Functionality
WordPress Development totally depends on the themes used. WordPress always stands out of all the platform when compared with regards to design and functionality. The advantage of using the WordPress platform is that it provides direct access to the official free themes from the dashboard.
You can even see, the number of free themes provided by both Drupal Vs WordPress, Drupal is lacking behind WordPress in this category.
Drupal Vs WordPress: SEO, Security, and Support
Both the platforms have been created with the security standards. The difference is Drupal is a strong platform while WordPress is secure when security issues are handled carefully.
Talking about the SEO, WordPress is surely on the top as its beginning was of “blogging platform”. It consists of SEO friendly frameworks and has a huge amount of SEO plugins. Drupal also has various modules and extensions for SEO and marketing but still lacking behind.
Support is one of the important aspects to choose the correct platform. Both platforms are community-based. So, one could get plenty of support and resources. One can contact the community support forum or can solve the issues via documentation.
Wrapping it up
With No doubts, choosing anyone from these two platforms can never be the waste of time but it would be better if you could have a better vision to make a clear distinction and choose with actually fits your needs.
So, I hope that you find this article helpful making a clear distinction over these two platforms. Have any thought? Comment in the section below.
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