Mark's Tech Notes

I have used Drupal for a long time on all of our websites, but recently I needed to set up a simple blog for the Airdrie Cadets.  I needed something that would be really simple for them to use and maintain.

After looking around a bit, I decided to try out WordPress.  Since then, I have started  porting several of my other blogs (including this one) from Drupal to WordPress.  Now, I have seen a number of posts recently on this and I realize that basically there is a lot of religous preference involved (meaning that it is more based on beliefs and gut feelings than any definite provable facts).

This morning I was quickly reminded of why I switched.  Basically, I didn’t need a lot of Drupal’s more advanced features and was starting to find that it was a bit like taking a helicopter to the corner store.  Sure, it is really cool to do, and the helicopter can do a lot, but then you spend hours on maintenance.

So, when I opened up my WordPress site this morning, what did I see? 

• There was a note next to the plugins letting me know that there was an update for one of my plugins.  So I told it to update.
• There was also a note showing how many comments I had and how many the SPAM filter had caught.  So I checked the filter.  It was correct, so I deleted the comments (I could just let it do it too).

All told I was done in a minute or two.  To do the same thing in Drupal took me a lot longer and involved opening various pages to check if there was anything that I needed to do (WordPress gives me a central dashboard highlighting all of this).  To update my Drupal modules, I had to:

•  actually be on the server (or at least have access to the drive)
• download and unzip the module
• copy it into the appropriate directory
• put the site into maintenance mode
• run an update script
• enable the site

Sometimes, this still failed to properly mark the module as updated and I would then keep getting a warning about the module being out of date even if it was not.  Overall, it is a pretty painful process.

To filter my comments, I was actually using a Drupal port of the WordPress anti-spam module, but checking comments was still took a lot longer than   through WordPress.

So far, I have been really happy with the WordPress sites and soon I will probably switch my wife’s main site Green Colored Glasses over to WordPress.  I just can not justify the extra time that it is taking me to keep it running properly under Drupal.

Tags: blog updates, Blogging, compair Drupal and WordPress, Drupal, easy blogging, WordPress