A fresh new website design kicks off Explosive Designs’ year in style
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Over our lunchtimes when we’re not invading the local cafe on mass for pepperoni and mozzarella paninis we sometimes trawl through news sites to keep on top of the latest developments in the world of web design. During one such break I read an article on onextrapixel.com about WordPress 3.0 and it’s latest features.
Now I have my own personal blog, bordagen.com built in WordPress but sadly it has been neglected of late (does October 2009 count as ‘of late’ still?) However with the release of WordPress 3 I might need to re-evaluate it’s purpose when I saw the bevy of new additions to the platform.
Whilst reading the list I was thinking how this compares to Drupal - the open source content management system we use in the office as the code-base for the majority of our websites. A lot of the features that had been introduced in WordPress 3.0 have been part of Drupal (or rather, modules that could be added on with very little effort) since Drupal 5 back in early 2007.
Don’t worry, I’m not writing an article bashing WordPress or preaching Drupal (although in our opinion it is a better, more flexible platform for websites) because of one simple reason... usability.
Although Drupal and it’s massive community is clearly ahead of WordPress in terms of features, with Drupal having a good couple of thousand modules that can be plugged in to extend the systems functionality, WordPress is lightyears ahead of Drupal is terms of user experience.
One prime example of this is installing a module:
Drupal
Download the module from the Drupal website
Unzip the module
FTP in and upload the module folder to the site
Login to the Drupal site
Activate the module
WordPress
Login to WordPress
Search for the module you want to install
Click install
Each platform clearly has it’s strengths, but each also has a learning curve. Drupal is geared towards the more geeky kind of person who likes to get their hands dirty with the code whereas WordPress is much simpler to use for ‘Average Joe’ to simply install and be on their way with. Although with any luck - and from what I’ve seen from previews - Drupal 7 could change the game completely as it has pledged to change the user experience to make it far more friendlier, as well as move some of the more commonly used modules in to the core software.
