4 ms·

Kudos for the reboot. I haven't touched Drupal in maybe 7 years, but I gather it must be orders of magnitude easier now to develop a site with modern software e

by rlander 11y ago

Kudos for the reboot. I haven't touched Drupal in maybe 7 years, but I gather it must be orders of magnitude easier now to develop a site with modern software engineering tools than it was then. However, this reasoning feels wrong: If we were to ignore these market forces, Drupal would be caught flat-footed and quickly become irrelevant. Wordpress is still the same big ball of mud it was 10 years ago and it powers 1/4 of the internet.

zdw 11y ago
> Wordpress is still the same big ball of mud it was 10 years ago and it powers 1/4 of the internet. This is mainly because a front end developer can vomit into a PHP file and Wordpress will gladly display it.
- 0x4a42 11y ago
  > This is mainly because a front end developer can vomit into a PHP file and Wordpress will gladly display it. This made me laugh, but it's, alas, very true. In WP's ecosystem, the code you find in plugins, themes and WP itself will just makes your eyes bleed.
  - Scoundreller 11y ago
    While in Drupal, you'll get a white-screen-of-death that can be hard to back out of...
    - Albright 11y ago
      Not if you don't have the stupid PHP filter installed (it was ripped out of core for the Drupal 8 release, praise be to the heavens; for those unfamiliar, it was basically <textarea> plus eval()) and you're using decent version control.
    - snowwrestler 11y ago
      I can tell you from experience that WSOD is plenty achievable in Wordpress too.
  - huskyr 11y ago
    Very true indeed. I've done maintenance on a few WordPress sites and every time i opened up a new theme or plugin i thought "this can't possible be as worse as the last one." Boy, was i wrong.
- fungi 11y ago
  it's moving further up the chain. it is not hard to find a graphic designer who fancy themselves as wp experts because they can copy pasta css, install a module or two and ftp it to $3/mo shared hosting. but honestly that is what many clients want, make it look pretty and don't bore me with your "best practice" and "you need to apply 12months worth of critical security patch's" mumbo jumbo.
donutdan4114 11y ago
I would argue that Drupal's target is much different than Wordpress'. Yes, Drupal has a tiny bit of focus on small sites, but Drupal can't contend with Wordpress, not even close. Wordpress is much faster to setup and get a nice looking site up and running. Where WP falls short is in the enterprise market, and this is where Drupal's ideal customer is. Drupal powers Tesla, Whitehouse.gov, Weather.com, Economist, NY.gov, and other major sites. So for Drupal to remain relevant to these types of clients it has had to play catchup. D7 changed a lot from it's initial release, and a lot of contrib modules helped make it a decent enterprise-level solution. But D8 is a whole new beast that really sets the bar pretty high. You can literally build anything in Drupal, and with it's new focus on having "headless" RESTful services, it can be used to power your entire content strategy (pushing content to apps, other sites, etc).
- zdw 11y ago
  > Wordpress is much faster to setup and get a nice looking site up and running. I would argue that this is faster than most Wordpress setups: drush dl drupal drush si drupal ... drush en "name of theme" Wordpress is easier to set up only for the "I still use tools from a decade or two ago" crowd.
  - donutdan4114 11y ago
    I mean, I don't just mean setting up a bare site. Between setting up content types, fields, putting in content, downloading additionally needed modules (which got better in D8 with Views/Twig/CKEditor in core), and how much custom theming has to go into a Drupal site, I feel like WP is generally much faster to deal with and has more beautiful themes/widgets that you can just plug n' play. However, I'm not an expert in WP dev. But I wouldn't recommend Drupal to a very small business that needs a basic site. For that I would recommend WP, squarespace, wix, or equivalent. I would only recommend Drupal if someone needed some enhanced functionality, in which case, Drupal is a great platform.
  - butterfi 11y ago
    That's presuming they can have command line access and the tools/know how to install drush. I suspect a lot of WP installs start with a single click button on a graphic UI.
jackbravo 11y ago
The creator of ghost (the blogging platform) was a wordpress developer. He doesn't think that wordpress hasn't changed: > http://john.onolan.org/project-ghost/ http://john.onolan.org/project-ghost/

by rlander 11y ago

zdw 11y ago

> Wordpress is still the same big ball of mud it was 10 years ago and it powers 1/4 of the internet. This is mainly because a front end developer can vomit into a PHP file and Wordpress will gladly display it.

0x4a42 11y ago
> This is mainly because a front end developer can vomit into a PHP file and Wordpress will gladly display it. This made me laugh, but it's, alas, very true. In WP's ecosystem, the code you find in plugins, themes and WP itself will just makes your eyes bleed.
- Scoundreller 11y ago
  While in Drupal, you'll get a white-screen-of-death that can be hard to back out of...
  - Albright 11y ago
    Not if you don't have the stupid PHP filter installed (it was ripped out of core for the Drupal 8 release, praise be to the heavens; for those unfamiliar, it was basically <textarea> plus eval()) and you're using decent version control.
  - snowwrestler 11y ago
    I can tell you from experience that WSOD is plenty achievable in Wordpress too.
- huskyr 11y ago
  Very true indeed. I've done maintenance on a few WordPress sites and every time i opened up a new theme or plugin i thought "this can't possible be as worse as the last one." Boy, was i wrong.
fungi 11y ago
it's moving further up the chain. it is not hard to find a graphic designer who fancy themselves as wp experts because they can copy pasta css, install a module or two and ftp it to $3/mo shared hosting. but honestly that is what many clients want, make it look pretty and don't bore me with your "best practice" and "you need to apply 12months worth of critical security patch's" mumbo jumbo.

donutdan4114 11y ago

I would argue that Drupal's target is much different than Wordpress'. Yes, Drupal has a tiny bit of focus on small sites, but Drupal can't contend with Wordpress, not even close. Wordpress is much faster to setup and get a nice looking site up and running. Where WP falls short is in the enterprise market, and this is where Drupal's ideal customer is. Drupal powers Tesla, Whitehouse.gov, Weather.com, Economist, NY.gov, and other major sites. So for Drupal to remain relevant to these types of clients it has had to play catchup. D7 changed a lot from it's initial release, and a lot of contrib modules helped make it a decent enterprise-level solution. But D8 is a whole new beast that really sets the bar pretty high. You can literally build anything in Drupal, and with it's new focus on having "headless" RESTful services, it can be used to power your entire content strategy (pushing content to apps, other sites, etc).

zdw 11y ago
> Wordpress is much faster to setup and get a nice looking site up and running. I would argue that this is faster than most Wordpress setups: drush dl drupal drush si drupal ... drush en "name of theme" Wordpress is easier to set up only for the "I still use tools from a decade or two ago" crowd.
- donutdan4114 11y ago
  I mean, I don't just mean setting up a bare site. Between setting up content types, fields, putting in content, downloading additionally needed modules (which got better in D8 with Views/Twig/CKEditor in core), and how much custom theming has to go into a Drupal site, I feel like WP is generally much faster to deal with and has more beautiful themes/widgets that you can just plug n' play. However, I'm not an expert in WP dev. But I wouldn't recommend Drupal to a very small business that needs a basic site. For that I would recommend WP, squarespace, wix, or equivalent. I would only recommend Drupal if someone needed some enhanced functionality, in which case, Drupal is a great platform.
- butterfi 11y ago
  That's presuming they can have command line access and the tools/know how to install drush. I suspect a lot of WP installs start with a single click button on a graphic UI.

jackbravo 11y ago

The creator of ghost (the blogging platform) was a wordpress developer. He doesn't think that wordpress hasn't changed: > http://john.onolan.org/project-ghost/ http://john.onolan.org/project-ghost/