Following on many good comments about how Drupal compares to Wordpress MU I'll throw in some comments about my team's experience, most of which has been with Drupal 6 over the past 18 months, though we have built a few small sites with WordPress.
We've certainly found that Drupal holds up well when building some very ambitious user-generated content social media sites such as this extensive citizen science educational environment recently completed for the Gulf of Maine Research Institute www.vitalsignsme.org. Many details of this project's development are profiled in the Drupal Showcase at http://drupal.org/node/694998. As we specified and prototyped the architecture of the site we were concerned that the number of Drupal modules we would need to fulfill the requirements of the project would be far more than what the underlying Drupal structure would support in terms of acceptable performance. Most recommendations were to keep the total number of modules used under 30 or so with a maximum of 50. The Vital Signs environment is composed of about 80 modules, including 13 original custom modules created by our team. Performance has been very good and I would highly recommend Drupal for smaller projects as well as for large, ambitious projects or projects that will have to grow extensively in phases. A new hosted Drupal 7 solution is also in the works and should be available by fall 2010. Named Drupal Gardens, this will be 'Drupal as a service', making it very easy to setup small sites ala Wordpress or SN ala Ning, yet Drupal Gardens sites will be fully extensible and able to be moved onto your own Drupal hosting install whenever desired. This should be a very powerful addition to this already capable platform. http://buytaert.net/drupal-gardens You'll find many answers to questions about our Vital Signs project on the Drupal Showcase site and I'll try to find time to answer others that may come up. Dana Dana Hutchins Image Works/XhibitNet 541 Congress St. Portland, ME 04101 207.773.1101 ext.102 dana at imagewks.com www.ImageWks.com www.xhibit.net On 2/22/10 3:44 PM, "Eric Johnson" <ejohnson at monticello.org> wrote: > Hi, all-- > > Last summer was the most recent discussion I've found on MCN-L about Drupal as > a content management system, and I was wondering whether anybody has done any > recent comparison between Drupal and WordPress (especially WordPress MU) as a > website CMS. > > We're planning on using one or the other as part of a complete site redesign: > using the content we currently have as a base, but updating the overall site > design and navigation; permitting content editing by multiple staffers; and > providing a more sophisticated integration of social media (multiple blogs > among other things). > > So we're trying to get a read on the current state of these two platforms. > Along with general opinions about ease of use and the their development > communities, we're interested in: > > * ability to handle heavy traffic > * security > * how well customizations roll from upgrade to upgrade > * social media integration > > Any and all opinions, pro and con, about either Drupal or WordPress MU (or > both) would be most appreciated! > > I'm happy to write up a summary post of anything I hear (and to clarify if > needed). > > Many thanks! > > --Eric > > Eric D. M. Johnson > New Media Specialist > Monticello > P.O. Box 316 > Charlottesville, VA 22902 > Phone: (434) 984-7570 | Fax: (434) 977-6140 > http://www.monticello.org/ > ejohnson at monticello.org<mailto:ejohnson at monticello.org> > > > _______________________________________________ > You are currently subscribed to mcn-l, the listserv of the Museum Computer > Network (http://www.mcn.edu) > > To post to this list, send messages to: mcn-l at mcn.edu > > To unsubscribe or change mcn-l delivery options visit: > http://toronto.mediatrope.com/mailman/listinfo/mcn-l > > The MCN-L archives can be found at: > http://toronto.mediatrope.com/pipermail/mcn-l/
