Alisa Herr + Ruby Sinreich
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Andrew Hunt says
Notes from the session
Ruby Sinreich – currently a Drupal developer, but has had jobs working with WordPress, and her er
Alisa Herr – developer with WordPress, has used both but is a Drupal skeptic and likes to move people off Drupal
Alisa looking to find ways to defend Drupal–she can’t come up with reasons to use Drupal now.
Drupal has a Drupal way of doing things – need to accommodate that rather than try to do it yourself
The two CMSes have been converging in what they do
Round 1: getting started
Getting a site up and running, WP is easier. “5-minute install”
Round 2: blogging and commenting
WP started as blogging platform, Drupal started as forum software
Both like using Disqus as a way to outsource comment management and commenter authentication
Both PHP-based software, (typically) MySQL databases.
Basically a tie: commenting features are equivalent.
Round 3: SEO
Drupal themes come with semantic markup out of the box. WP markup depends upon the theme more heavily.
Variety of SEO plugins for WP, some single-purpose, others for whole suite. Drupal is largely better out of the box.
Round 4: Commerce
WP: WooCommerce now owned by Automattic, has improved over time.
Drupal: two options, Drupal Commerce, Ubercart
If you’re just doing a store, you might use something else
Round 5: Customizing appearance
Drupal 8 now uses Twig as the templating engine, Ruby hasn’t worked with it yet. D7 uses PHPTemplate.
WordPress core and plugins generate markup directly
WP has “customizer” that allows configuration of many things through the UI with a frontend preview. Drupal allows many of the same things to be accomplished, but not as user-friendly.
Both CMSes have child themes: you can use a base theme and then tweak it
New directions: people using “headless” WP or Drupal to get data from API and render it using Javascript or something else.
Summary: Drupal has more sophisticated theming but WP is easier for a site admin to make smaler changes
Round 6: Building online community
Again, WP started as blogging platform, Drupal started as forum software
Drupal is much more flexible for assigning user fields, roles, displays.
WP has plugins that allow defining roles and granting capabilities, but it’s available in Drupal out of the box
Round 7: Data driven applications
Both allow defining custom content types
Drupal has Views module that allows display of nearly any combination of data
Exposed filters: ability for visitors to filter on the fly
Views Bulk Operations: module allows doing things to entities appearing in a view
Facet WP plugin: frontend faceted filtering
Round 8: User experience
WP generally has an easier-to-understand user experience
WP media library is very helpful for
Round 9: Hosting and servers
Same basics: LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), or both work with Nginx instead of Apache.
Some specialized hosts: Acquia, Pantheon, WPEngine
Managed hosts do some things for you but also prevent you from doing some things: what makes it work better can add limitations
Round 10: Community
Both have large conferences, extensive websites
DrupalCamps and WordCamps all around the world.