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Things are happening on the Drupal forepart. At that place's a new drupal.org website upward today; and the first beta of the long-awaited v7 emerged a fortnight ago. I hear talk of Drupal-based projects and proposals in the vicinity of Whitehall, including diverse staff moves. In that location may be big announcements on the immediate horizon.
It's been a while since I ventured into Drupal – and so I downloaded the v7 beta, to requite it a spin. And whilst it looks a scrap prettier than previous versions, information technology even so feels like the aforementioned old Drupal underneath. A rather tortuous installation procedure, requiring much chown'ing and phpmyadmin'ing, and manually shifting files from folder to folder. And at the terminate of information technology, an empty vanquish, with little guidance as to what you might practise next.
Permit's just imagine for a moment that you want to beginning creating a page. You lot click on the 'Add content' button, which now lives in an admin bar across the superlative of the page. This generates an overlaid window offering various content types: choose one, and you end upwardly on an authoring screen – with no WYSIWYG text editor. That'south right – out of the box, you're expected to lawmaking your ain pages in HTML.
Of form, you lot can accept WYSIWYG: but you lot need to add it equally a plugin – er, sorry, module. You can choose from a dozen different WYSIWYG editor functions, all of which have various benefits and drawbacks. And so, you're probably going to have to put them in the right binder manually.
This rather encapsulates the Drupal mentality. Perhaps you're someone who gets very worked upwards almost the use of one particular WYSIWYG component over some other: well, Drupal gives y'all the selection. And for a sure type of person, that's just what you want.
The WordPress mentality, on the other hand, favours sheer simplicity. Install WordPress, and a WYSIWYG component is already installed. (TinyMCE, since you asked.) It's more than satisfactory. At that place are certainly a few things it could do better. But it looks and feels similar Microsoft Give-and-take – and for the vast majority of my clients, that'south precisely what they want.
Geeks love Drupal; people love WordPress. The Drupal guys know this. In kick off the Drupal vii user experience process, Drupal founder and projection leader Dries Buytaert wrote:
Drupal'due south steep learning bend filters out far too many smart, motivated people who could benefit from Drupal. We run into it all the time in the Drupal.org forums, in my "State of Drupal" surveys, on Twitter, when talking to customers, and on the web. Fifty-fifty though nosotros've made significant progress with making Drupal easier to use, a lot of work is left to be done. With other content management systems such as Joomla! and WordPress making strides to catch up to Drupal in terms of development flexibility, if we want Drupal to remain competitive, we accept a challenge we have to face: we demand to create a user experience that makes it easier for people new to Drupal to detect all of its richness and power.
Oh – and which platform did the Drupal seven user experience team use to blog their work? You'll never guess. Leisa Reichelt writes:
We know Drupal is astonishing and nosotros love it … but unfortunately, for the fourth dimension beingness, it is likewise broken for u.s. to exist able to do the work nosotros need to do on this project at the footstep that we demand to do it. We don't have time to 'learn' Drupal, nor the skills to bend it to our volition (and arrive wait passably pretty), we tin't fifty-fifty get a blog post on the homepage. We capeesh all the offers of porting this blog over to Drupal, but to exist honest, I really like using WordPress and zippo I've seen of Drupal makes me want to switch over at the moment.
We know that Drupal is not WordPress, and we have no intention of making information technology and so, only using WordPress helps united states of america get our work washed faster and easier for the time being, and it helps us maintain perspective and distance – and for now those things are really important to united states of america. But if, this time next year, this blog isn't running on Drupal and if it doesn't wait astonishing – then please come up and shout #fail as loudly as y'all tin. Considering and so you'll be completely right, nosotros will accept failed.
That was written in March 2009. The weblog is however on WordPress, by the way.
Leisa later hints at some of the underlying tensions in making Drupal more human being-friendly:
Drupal developers are … the most of import audience. What this audience wants is non Drupal equally a production that (ordinary users) tin can use out of the box, they desire a developer toolkit that gives them more and more flexibility and adequacy to build cool stuff, and to push Drupal way beyond the realms of a simple Content Management System. And so nosotros accept this tension. Drupal equally a 'Consumer Product' and Drupal as a 'Developer Framework'. Currently, the official direction is that the projection is going to attempt to exist both. I call back this is a serious problem.
I know that for many people the idea of making a Drupal that (ordinary users) can love, making something that tin can actively compete from a UX perspective with the likes of WordPress, is a yard aspiration. So it is, but unfortunately I also think it is the wrong aspiration for Drupal core. The sooner we focus on the core target audience of Drupal cadre – the developers – and commit to making a user experience that supports them in their utilize of Drupal, the sooner nosotros'll really have actually achieved a really Smashing User Feel for Drupal.
Now permit me be absolutely clear. Drupal is an fantabulous platform. Great things tin can be done with information technology. And on some levels, comparisons between Drupal and WordPress are pointless. They are currently aimed at different types of people, and different use cases – then information technology's ridiculous to say that 1 is materially amend than the other. Too, they're quickly converging: Drupal with its UX improvements, WordPress with its custom post types etc. They tin can both exercise clever things like multisite installs. They both have thousands of user-created plugins/modules. They can both be whatsoever you desire.
But if I were contemplating a big-scale decentralised publishing platform for mainly text-based information, there's absolutely no doubt in my mind: it has to be WordPress. Our recent work with Defra is a perfect example in bespeak: multiple independent child sites, with tweaked themes as advisable to the subject matter, giving relatively non-tech-savvy authors considerable creative freedom and flexibility, inside bounds permitted by a central administrator.
If you're listening to the users of that platform, you'd build it in WordPress. If you lot're listening to the geeks, you'd build information technology in Drupal. It's your choice.
Source: https://puffbox.com/2010/10/20/thoughts-on-drupal-7/
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