Interesting Discussion In The Drupal Forums

[Jeffro]

Very interesting discussion that took place on the Drupal forums today.

http://groups.drupal.org/node/136294

Talks about everything from how hard it is to work with Drupal to the website that surrounds the project and how it doesn't help much when it comes to new users looking for information. The post author had a lot of nice things to say regarding the WordPress.org website but I think the WP.org website could definitely be better, especially in terms of pointing people in the right direction.

[chipbennett]

The most fascinating part of that link is not the blog post, but rather the comments.

[Ryan]

Like Chip said, fascinating conversation in the comments. It reminds me a lot of the conversations that go on surrounding WordPress. Lots of informed comments with spatterings of complete and utter bollocks.

WordPress seems to get knocked pretty bad, even by those in the community and it seems the same is happening over at Drupal. I think some of their comparisons of the two communities are overly biased against Drupal. I've heard Many of the community issues the commenters are complaining about leveled against WordPress time and time again too; they're just issues with open source software projects in general IMO.

Drupal is pretty darn good IMO. Sure there's problems, their site as the original poster pointed out is quite confusing, but it's far from a disaster, and there's a lot of advantages to using Drupal over WordPress. Drupal is still the #1 competitor to WordPress IMO and that's not something to be sneezed at.


The following sort of comments always tick me off. WordPress is stupidly easy to use, so most sites are built with the off the shelf templates and plugins, so no wonder they mostly look the same. It doesn't take any more effort to make a WordPress site look unique than it does Drual (probably less in fact).

Its pretty tough to tell a Drupal site from a custom site. Its easy to tell a WordPress or Joomla site, because THEY ALL LOOK THE SAME!

[Ryan]

Cross-posted from the Drupal post:

I found this post via WP Tavern ... http://www.wptavern.com/forum/genera...esting-discuss...

I'm a self-professed WordPress evangelist, but even I find some of the comments here to be overly critical of the Drupal project. You guys have a kick ass piece of software here. Anyone with half a brain can see that.

Sure your community isn't quite as well setup to handle noob users, and yes that is a definite problem and something which should be corrected but you guys are still a clear cut above the rest of the CMS market and definitely fill a large niche as a developer oriented platform which WordPress does not cater for quite so well.

And don't go thinking that the WordPress world isn't in fear of the Drupal project :P Drupal is clearly a more sophisticated piece of software and if you guys can improve the usability to the point where it is as easy to work with as WordPress, then you will be able to start slowly chipping away at the WordPress market share. But do you even want to? Do you really want a bunch of noob users filling your forums with silly irrelevant questions? Catering to the masses could be an unwanted distraction and a drain on resources.

The beauty of Drupal is in it's complexity, the beauty of WordPress is in it's simplicity. They are both beautiful in their own rights. Do you really want to compete with the giant of WordPress? Or fill a much needed niche in the world of CMS's?

[Otto]

Some of those comments are really interesting in underlining how differently some people see the world. For example, this one:

Remember that at the moment, if you come to Drupal.org to get Drupal you have to be able to get through the bit before the installation process - where you download it to a server, have a database etc. That in itself excludes a huge proportion of the population.

Clearly she hasn't dealt with a lot of first-time-bloggers setting up a hosted site. Getting a server and a database can be done cheaply for like $6 a month. Even n00bs can get that sort of thing going in a matter of half an hour with instructions.

I've always taken the approach that my mom should be able to figure it out. My mom is a smart person, but lacking knowledge. At first, I had to show her how a mouse worked (seriously). But she is now on Facebook and posts all the time. So it's just a matter of her sitting down and figuring things out. She could figure out how to set up WordPress if I showed her where the setup instructions were, I feel.

[Otto]

I found this video link in those comments. Well worth a watch: http://www.archive.org/details/Wordp...eloperTakeNote

[Jeffro]

People seem to have taken things out of context and the discussion went off topic but this little bit of text pretty much shines the light on what the original poster had in mind.

Unless we wake up and realize that we need to better communicate our accomplishments to those that haven't discovered it yet, then we will fail in getting them as new users.


As I said in the beginning, this discussion is not about how great Drupal is, we all know that, or what markets it targets, we also know that, it is about that we are probably losing minimum 60-70% of the new users due to that we are not able to communicate this so that these new users quickly get it too.

[Elpie]

What that post and its comments says to me is that both Drupal and WordPress have problems. Drupal is developer-centric and needs to focus more on end-users, whereas WordPress is end-user centric and needs more up-to-date developer resources to attract new developers. WordPress benefits from its easy install so has a greater reach to new users. However, most of these users are just that - users, not contributors. Both platforms are excellent at what they do, but each would benefit from being more rounded in the documentation and resources that are available. Of course, this comes back to documentation being the least-favourite job in any open source project.

[dgwyer]

As a developer I have to say the WordPress Codex has come a long way over the past couple of years. It was a pretty frustrating experience to make sense of the limited (and up-to-date) information when I first started using WordPress. These days it is very well organised and pretty much up-to-date even with major releases of WordPress coming out.

[Elpie]

As a developer I have to say the WordPress Codex has come a long way over the past couple of years. It was a pretty frustrating experience to make sense of the limited (and up-to-date) information when I first started using WordPress. These days it is very well organised and pretty much up-to-date even with major releases of WordPress coming out.

I agree. However, for a new developer coming onto the scene it would be difficult to find their way around. We know about the Codex, trac, dev blogs, mailing lists, where to get old releases, etc but it takes some moseying around to locate all these resources. There is no central area for developers - its almost like development resources are aimed only at end-users who happen to have the skills. New developers have to find all this for themselves then try to work out where they could fit in, what areas they could work on, and how WordPress development works. There's no guide on how to make contributions or what is involved to take the steps towards becoming a core developer, for example.

WordPress is totally reliant on developers, yet they seem to be seen as a subgroup of end-users only, which doesn't really encourage new blood.