WordPress and Drupal
I suppose everyone has an excuse when they don’t update their blog very often. My excuse is that I’m working full-time, working on a masters degree full-time, and mothering a very demanding 8-month-old.
Anyway, I thought I would take a moment to give some advice to anyone who is interested in having a blog or a website. There is a great, relatively new, category of software out there called a Content Management System (CMS for short).
CMSs allow you to create a website without ever touching code. You can change the layout any time you want, just by adding and activating a theme. Traditionally, there have been two distinct categories of CMS: blog managers and full-fledged CMSs. Until recently, WordPress was thought of as just a blog manager, but so many features have been added that people are now considering it a full-fledged CMS.
WordPress isn’t the only CMS to cross over into both categories. Drupal, another extremely popular CMS, is better known as a full-fledged CMS… but it is amazingly easy to set it up as a blog. As the web evolves, people are collaborating to create better software to make the web accessible to everyone.
This blog was created in WordPress, and I have never even considered using anything else. It’s just so easy to set up and maintain. There are hundreds of themes available — pick one, upload it to your server, activate it, and your entire site’s look changes instantly. And it’s very easy to learn how to create or edit a WordPress theme if you are familiar with HTML and CSS.
Where I work, we have two major websites that account for most of our business, and we are deep into developing two additional websites. One of our existing sites is patched together with legacy code, which means we have to pay a web developer $100 an hour for many of the changes to the site. The other site was created using a completely custom CMS that doesn’t allow us to make very many changes, so we end up calling that developer all the time too.
These two bad experiences have led us to hone in on Drupal as a solution to our problems. The open source code allows the developers to integrate some of our old features and code — we can’t quite scrap it all and start from scratch due to budgetary constraints — but its large user base gives us tons of resources. Once the developer has finished with the site, we will be able to update it mostly by ourselves. No more calling the web developer when we want to change a price.
The days of custom code are long gone, and it is refreshing to realize that there are several great different options for standards-compliant CMSs.
November 20th, 2009 at 7:51 am
Congrats! Sounds like a big win to me.