Wordpress and Drupal are the two leading content management systems today.
Wordpress or Drupal? Comes the question where you are starting a serious web project. Design or Architecture? Right or Left mind? A new insight comes from a visualization workshop I've done in last week.
But first, to understand a Tool's mindset, we need to understand where it came from:
Wordpress has it's roots in the design world. It's more right-brain, simpler to user, but covers less teritory. "Small is beautiful", you may think. But what if you need the flexibility to want something more? In that case, you are on your own, with no ready-made plugins, actually writing PHP code.
Drupal has it's roots on the software world. It's architecture is much more flexible, and expandable. You can do much more sites in Drupal.
Writes Kyle Taylor:
### Are you starting a blog?
If you answered yes, go with Wordpress. I guarantee that even most experienced Drupal users or developers will say the exact same thing. Wordpress was built for blogging, and it will continue to excel at that. It's relatively easy to install, even for non-technical users, and it shows you exactly what you need to do to start blogging. The challenge is, once you get past the whole blogging thing and you decide you want to add new features to your site, you might run into trouble, depending on what you need. ((source)).
So why there are more Wordpress installations then Drupal?
Becuase in the information explosion era, we become more and more visual. There is no time to select by logic.
The outcome is a more fragile, less expandable information architecture for which we all pay the price.
On the visualization workshop, they told about an experiment where they split a groups of people to two parts, to prepare for a competition. One group did all excercises physically. The other group did them mentally. And when the competition came, the 2nd group got a much higher results - tens of percents more.
So, viisualization has power.
The Way Ahead
The two tools are aware of their limitations and come close to each other. Drupal is becoming more visual. And the wordpress architecture is becoming more flexible.
But to gain momentum, we must change the image of Drupal and that's not to hard once we are aware of it. Providing new base themes, having a flexible editor and core, and mobile awareness are part of the solutions which are being worked on.
If your needs are more then basic, I would suggest a Wordpressized Drupal as a better solution then a Drupalized Wordpress. Site re-design is quite easy. But you can't re-build your foundations.
