Technology. Journalism. Tea
Oh, WordPress..
After a good few years of being a hardened Drupal developer, I decided to revisit WordPress for a project to build a hyperlocal website for journalism students. Seeing that a vast number of local news websites are using WordPress, I just had to try. And I’m glad I did.
Firstly, the back-end is just so lovely. It does what it says on the ermm.. tin. I’d had issues with the Drupal back-end (well there is none) and it often confused people.
Content types – Drupal oozes content types; and with Content Construction Kit you can build as many as you like. Good for some sites where maybe complicated workflow is in place, but for a one man outfit or a large group of students it’s a bit confusing.
I like WordPress for it’s two simple content types. Simple!
Categories and tags – One thing that I really like about Drupal is its Taxonomy system – tags that you can attach to content to categorise and filter. In fact it’s great, but not an easy thing to understand or use.
WordPress on the other hand uses a simpler taxonomy system based on Categories and Tags. For a Hyerlocal news site this is great because content can be put into categories e.g. news, sport, politics etc, then tagged in a more microscopic way which I suppose defines it as Hyperlocal e.g. Loitering, S1 3NJ.
Templates – Quite a few years ago, the first time I tried WordPress I took one look at the templates, and with my non-existent php knowledge, I didn’t understand them. Now, revisiting WordPress templates and armed with a basic understanding of php, I think they’re just fantastic.
2 Responses to “Oh, WordPress..”
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Interesting stuff Hadrian, I’ve been using Drupal as well as WordPress and have come to a similar conclusion. Drupal is quite a learning curve.
Although Drupal always seems to hold a lure because of the power it has as system don’t you think? but in terms of theming and ease of use there is no comparison between the two.
Maybe if the objective was to make a social networking style site you may prefer the functions in Drupal, but for a news site WordPress may be quicker and easier.
I noticed at the Social Media Cafe talk most of the people used WP, whereas I think only one of them used Drupal. Interesting what was said at the start to the effect that the platform didn’t really matter as much as the content.
Yes Darren, Drupal certainly is powerful and can be used for so much more than WordPress. I even made an estate agency type site for a client which harnessed the power of custom content types, field types and views. Very complimicated indeed!
The last news site I made with Drupal was a bit over complicated and tried to emulate something that only exists as a perception of the user (that the author chooses everything on a page). Students struggled a bit with it too.
WordPress on the other hand, I pretty much just told the students the URL and they were away!