- Continuation of comparing WordPress to Drupal for an up-coming project;
- Competitive analysis and first draft wireframes (desktop and mobile versions) for another up-coming project;
- Browser testing (Chrome, Firefox, MS IE6, IE7, and IE8, Opera, and Safari) on a soon-to-be-launched website;
- Content updates on a couple production websites; and
- Tracked down and fixed why a Drupal site was showing more recent blog posts than desired.
WordPress 3 vs. Drupal 7: The main focus of this comparison is around custom post type (WordPress) versus custom content type (Drupal). This is by no mean an in-depth comparison. The opinions and comments here are strictly my own and not that of Wasserman + Partners Advertising.
Not every website consists of blogs or articles or simple pages. There are times you want to provide content writers (non-technical staff) to easily create complex contents like events, product price list, etc. (something more than just a title and a body). In WordPress, this is done by creating custom post types. From what I have found so far, there are a couple of methods to do this: via theme's functions and via plug-ins. Creating custom post types via theme's functions requires you to understand WordPress API, PHP, and HTML. I followed a tutorial from a book called "WordPress 3 Complete."
From plug-ins perspective, I've tried one called Custom Post Type UI. This plug-in is great if you care not technical (know programming). Like the theme's functions method shown in the book "WordPress 3 Complete," it does not create a custom entry form with custom fields (fields other than title and body) for content writers to use. Every time a new post is created, the user needs to select the necessary custom fields (after they have been created the first time around).
Drupal on the other hand makes this task super easy. The process of creating custom content type, you get to decide all the fields required for that content type. You also get to define how the edit form looks and their validations (i.e., the order of the fields, mandatory vs. optional, length, minimum and maximum values, etc.). Custom fields can be of any data type (date type requires a Date module but this module a lot of features; features like popup calendar picker, date range, etc.). Custom fields can also be drop-down pick lists or check boxes.
Based on the above, I vote for Drupal. Please note that I am not saying there isn't a WordPress module that can do what Drupal can do. It's just that I haven't found that module yet. If you know of one, please let me know via the comment of this post. Thanks.
