codza

This site used to be powered by drupal, but after several weeks of configuration hell I decided to try wordpress- and I was pleasantly surprised.

Before I go any further, I’d like to point out that this is not a drupal vs wordpress flame bait. This is simply my experience. I hope it helps you if you are deciding between the two systems for blogging. From the post title you probably already know what my preference is. I’m writing this about  drupal 6.8 and wordpress 2.7.

I wanted a blog with the following features:

• wysiwyg editor
• ability to upload images and other media through the borwser
• customizable theme
• image gallery
• user friendliness for those who don’t have a computer science degree in the household

I had a pretty stupid approach about deciding which software to go with. Instead of quickly test driving each option, I picked drupal because it seemed to have some ties to Hungary. I learned to NEVER AGAIN make an emotional decision about technology.

I immediately realized about drupal that:

• it has a steep learning curve
• you start with a blank canvas
• you need lots of modules
• documentation is spotty
• admin interface is very complex
• it is way too powerful

Installation  of drupal is easy, just like wordpress. Extract the tarball, make a copy of the sample config file, add the database info and point the browser to the new site.

Plan on spending some time to figure out where everything is in the admin interface (you can see a screenshot of mine at the bottom fo the post.) Things have weird names and are usually many clicks away. I think this is referred to as “drupalism”. An example is the taxonomy module. It is basically a hierarchical tagging system, and if it was called “tags” or “categories” new drupal users would automatically know what it does without having to dig through the handbook.

The handbook is drupal’s community written documentation. It would be cool if it was a wiki, but it’s more like a collection of blog posts. You have to read the article and all the replies to the articles, because most likely the article has errors or was written for an older version of drupal where the admin interface was completely different. The follow ups usually help, you will enjoy it if you are a fan of “Clue”.

Even though one of drupal’s strongholds is the taxonomy (tagging) system, it’s not applied to the themes database. The available themes are listed on a mile long page at drupal.org/project/Themes. Actually it’s two pages. Scrolling through is a major pain. Many themes have no preview thumbnails and you pretty much have to read through all the descriptions to figure out if a certain theme will work for you. However if you are a drupal newbie, most likely you won’t undestand the lingo. There is a project called the drupal theme garden that has previews of many, but not all of the themes.

I ended up going with the Zen theme starting kit. The style sheets are well organized, but get ready to be working on a dozen style sheets with a bunch of overrides. Don’t even start without the firebug plugin and a good ftp client or ssh access to your web server.

Then I wanted a wysiwyg editor (crazy, huh?). By default drupal doesn’t come with one, which is a huge mistake. I know it allows freedom, but it’s kind of like buying a car without car seats. There are a bunch of options and you will have to try a couple before you find one that somewhat works. I found FCKEditor the best. Don’t get fooled by the 7 minute installation screencast… you will spend much more time than that getting spell checking to work and toolbars configured.

You also need a custom editor because there’s no other way to upload and insert images into posts. There is the default image module that allows you to post an image with some description, but most likely that’s not what you want. With FCKEditor images are uploaded one at a time, it doesn’t work with drupal’s image module and you have to pick images from a file browser without preview. But still, I was happy that I could add images to my posts.

Then I wanted an image gallery, and this is where I gave up. I tried many approaches, for example the “Maintanable Image Gallery” in 21 minutes. It uses about 8 (eight) new modules, the screencast is with an old version of drupal and it gives you one static image gallery of all the images uploaded to the site. I also tried the “Brilliant Gallery” module which uses yet another way of storing images (also incompatible with the drupal image module) and didn’t really work with the latest version of drupal becasue of several bugs.

I could never get a functioning, decent looking image gallery to work.

I received lots of help from the #drupal-support irc group on freenode. If you are a drupal newbie and having trouble, that’s where I would look first.

I definitely don’t agree with how drupal is described on the official site:

Drupal is ready to go from the moment you download it. It even has an easy-to-use web installer! The built-in functionality, combined with dozens of freely available add-on modules, will enable features such as:

• Content Management Systems
• Blogs
• Collaborative authoring environments
• Forums
• Peer-to-peer networking
• Newsletters
• Podcasting
• Picture galleries
• File uploads and downloads

It is not ready to go out of the box, it is not easy to use it for a blog and definitely no picture galleries. So please stop advertising it like that.

OK, so after I passed the breaking point I installed wordpress. I was shocked:

• it has a built in wysiwyg editor with full screen mode
• it lets you upload multiple images
• media library has previews of images
• the admin interface makes sense and it’s fast
• the themes page has thumbnails AND previews of all themes
• themes and plugins have user ratings and user comments
• the theme’s CSS can be edited  in the admin interface
• great documentation

and some unexpected features:

• auto save
• page break
• spell checking in many languages
• handles not only images but video and audio
• import and export
• things make sense
• and it just works

What took me weeks to do in drupal was  up and running in wordpress in minutes.

I really wanted to like drupal. I truly believe that it’s a powerful CMS. But it’s not a blogging tool and it’s not user friendly. Even though Szeged, Hungary has the best ice cream and paprika. And even if a bunch of magyar huszárok (Hungarian cavalry) attack my house.

So for blogging, I’m going with wordpress.

The admin page from my drupal 6.8 setup:

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web by lajos