Choose your CMS: WordPress or Drupal?
Thinking about starting a new publication or a micro-site? I recently chatted with a Web developer for a news organization who professed an adamant hatred of Drupal, even though many people sing its praises. Then I saw this:
At this point, nearly all of the websites we build at The Bivings Group are either in WordPress or Drupal. Sure, we build custom applications on occasion and sometimes do Flash work that really doesn’t fit in a Content Management System. But mostly we use WordPress or Drupal.
Both are fantastic open source blogging platforms/ content management systems with robust user communities. Both systems have their strengths and weaknesses. They are great alternatives to closed, paid platforms and much more cost effective than custom builds.
To learn what each one does best, read more at the Bivings Group’s site. (Link via Kevin Anderson.)
What about Django?
… it doesn’t make much sense to compare Django to something like Drupal, because Django is something you use to create things like Drupal. (Source: Django FAQ)
Or to create things like Ellington, a full CMS that newspaper sites such as the Tampa Tribune have licensed.
Matt Waite, a reporter at the St. Pete Times, used Django to create PolitiFact. (I am still in awe.)
These are the names I keep hearing when people who make things online talk about making things. Of the four systems named here, all are free and open source except Ellington (which is open source but not free). Having suffered under the yoke of various custom-built newsroom editing systems that must have been built by people who had never seen the inside of a newsroom, I’m a big fan of the trend toward adopting systems that you can actually control and modify yourself.
There are other products out there too, of course. If you like one I have not mentioned, leave a comment.
Since you invited other suggestions, I have to put in a plug for Textpattern. It definitely feels like it was built by someone who has seen the inside of a newsroom (even though we have our suspicions it was one owned by Conrad Black). It has “sections.” And its user privilege hierarchy is definitely newspaper-like. And you don’t have to go near any PHP code to build the templates.
I can’t imagine building a great big newspaper (or other big) site in WordPress.
My impression of Drupal is that you either get it or you don’t. We haven’t messed with it around here much because I believe it really wants to run on a LAMP box and we don’t have a production-grade one of those.
The other CMS that seems to get some buzz in my circles is ExpressionEngine.
The FAQ about Django is spot-on. It’s a framework, not an application. CMSes are applications.
October 2, 2007 at 10:37 amI agree, I have never heard anyone recommend WordPress for something like a *whole* daily newspaper. However, the Cal State Fresno student newspaper, The Collegian Online, is in WordPress.
Textpattern is free, yes? And open source? Do you think it could support a full-size daily? And what about the development community? Is it large and active?
Once I heard about a part-time IT guy who claimed he could “write a CMS” for a student newspaper in Drupal. My first thought was, oh yeah, and then he will quit his job and no one will know how his CMS works. And he will blackmail the paper into paying him hourly to support the mess he made. Oh, bad idea, I thought (with a shudder). Lucky for the paper, they didn’t do it.
October 2, 2007 at 11:05 amI’m impressed by The Collegian Online. Thanks for sharing that.
Yes, Textpattern is free and open source. I don’t know if it could support a full-size daily. The development community isn’t as large and active as that of WordPress and it doesn’t have Matt’s pretty young face on it either. You will also not see someone blogging “50 must-have Textpattern plug-ins” like you would for WordPress. The community argument can be a double-edged sword.
You could tell that IT guy story about just about any of these platforms.
October 2, 2007 at 12:46 pm@ Mindy:
As the multimedia editor of The Collegian, thanks for the mention. Our WordPress version of our site went live in March ‘07 and we really haven’t had a single regret. We run text, images, video, audio slideshows, image galleries, etc. and WP seems to handle it all. Oh, and we have easily over 100 reporters or in WP-speak 100+ blog authors running on the system.
@ the college papers reading this:
If you have ANY questions or concerns about running your paper’s online product via WP, just contact me. I just consulted (and by “consulted” I mean free of charge… it’s just right to give back) on a high school paper two weeks ago to get them up and running with WP.
October 2, 2007 at 2:46 pmCraig: Your definition of pretty and young are very, very different from mine.
October 2, 2007 at 4:09 pmhttp://www.medina-gazette.com uses Wordpress as well. The site still seems to be in development.
October 2, 2007 at 4:35 pmTextPattern wasn’t designed by a news guy, but by a very smart fellow nonetheless (Dean Allen, who helps run my Web hosting company). My limited experience with it tells me it could support a relatively small-to-midsize paper’s site quite nicely, although to make the most of the experience does require a good knowledge of Apache, PHP and MySQL.
Another example is The Morning News (http://themorningnews.org/), which is published using MovableType.
Derek
October 2, 2007 at 5:20 pmI am also VERY impressed by The Collegian…
There are some people trying to develop Wordpress themes for newssites and I think we will have some interesting developments in the next few months. By interesting, I mean free templates…
See The Morning After theme used in PopSofa, for example, and the Revolution News theme.
October 2, 2007 at 5:36 pmThanks, António! I didn’t know about The Morning After. It appears to be free (like most WP themes), while Revolution News costs money.
October 2, 2007 at 10:37 pmSorry, typo on my link.
Send Collegian questions or comments here:
http://solomojo.blogspot.com
hollak@csufresno.edu
Joseph Hollak
October 3, 2007 at 12:11 amMultimedia Editor
The Collegian
California State University, Fresno
Matt: I bet we share our definition of pretty and young. My point was that WordPress has a visible face in the PR sense.
Derek: Dean Allen may not be a news guy, but his sense for how to structure a CMS for news use was right on (I was a reader of his old blog long before I was a user of Textpattern). Among my “clients” are a couple of broadcast news directors that one would hardly call “web saavy.” I set up Textpattern sites for them and they just “got” it right off the bat.
October 3, 2007 at 8:33 amHave been impressed by the Collegian’s use of WordPress, and InsideVandy.com uses Drupal. I’ve also used Textpattern and Movable Type. Since Movable Type is going back to an “open-source/free” model, it might be worth looking into. I like what I’ve seen of expressionengine, which runs the speakeasy online mag at Ohio U., for example.
All that said, I found Drupal very difficult to deal with as a new user. Not so much my experience with most of the others.
October 4, 2007 at 11:42 amHi Mindy,
Some more examples:
The Best WordPress Magazine Themes Available.
October 5, 2007 at 6:37 pmWhy choose between WordPress and Drupal when you can have both together?
October 5, 2007 at 10:38 pmWe’re doing our best impression of a CMS with Wordpress with the NYCity News Service. I love it for getting projects up and running same-day. Hopefully custom fields will become more powerful/manageable things in the next versions of WP.
October 29, 2007 at 4:05 pmI have to differ on the Collegian site — strikes me as a classic do-too-much on the home page site. You don’t know where to begin to look.
I am surprised, though, that Wordpress can create something like that.
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