Good-bye Drupal, Hello WordPress

After months of thinking, dwelling and pondering, I finally decided to ditch Drupal and go with WordPress. I know, I’m a developer and I’m ditching a developer friendly CMS. There are several reasons behind this change. Some of these may not be solid reasons, but they are mine nonetheless. All of my content, except blog entries, has been moved over. I’m not sure if I’ll port the blog, but everything else should be in working order.

1. I want to blog and to make blogging fun

The user friendliness of WordPress lured me about a year ago, but I hit a few issues and was deterred from using it further. When I used Drupal, I wanted to add more blog entries, but I never felt motivated to do so. Part of the problem was working with Drupal’s admin to create the content. It’s made by developers and I understand the layout just fine, but compared to WordPress, it seems antiquated and mentally, a turn off to make blogging fun. Even if it’s just a mental effect, the differences between the two for blogging purposes only are enough to get me from not motivated to ready to rock.

2. Updates, updates, manual updates

Drupal is constantly releasing security updates. This isn’t a bad thing, but dealing with the nuances of upgrading an existing install and thus upgrading any existing modules can be a pain. Many times I’ve upgraded my install only to have forgotten about key files and now I’ve got dead links.  There are ways to automate, at least in part, upgrading Drupal, but no such method exists natively. I am new to WordPress and upgrading it may break a plugin or two or all, so time will tell if I have any pains to deal with then.

3. What I want hasn’t been ported in years

I have wanted to use the Project module in Drupal for two years now, and yet it still remains in the alpha phase for version 6. Drupal version 7 is less than six months away. It’s the most prominent example that comes to mind, but I’m sure there are others. Also, I haven’t found a similar option in WordPress, but I may not be using the right terms. If I cannot find a similar option, then I’m in the same boat as before with releasing any code I want to share. Another problem to moan about another time.

4. Some plugins are not well built

The Flickr module in Drupal leaves so much to be desired. The settings ask for a Flickr API key and secret, yet I don’t recall ever seeing a need for it. You also have to manually enter Flickr information, such as the set, collection of Photo ID. If I have to do all of that to link a single photo, I might as well add an HTML anchor and image myself and ignore the module I specifically sought out and installed. I even had to hack the code to simply provide the latest four photos on a sidebar. The Flickr Manager plugin for WordPress, however, is incredibly easy to use and incorporate into posts and pages. This is crucial for the sake of simplicity.

5. That learning curve may cause me to flip

I tried to get into developing on Drupal, but I found it to be a labor-some process that involved a steeper learning curve than I was willing to take part in on my spare time (spare being the key word). I also have this OCD complex for viewing code and the style used in Drupal is counter-productive for me. Theming on Drupal wasn’t terribly difficult, but I did manage to get Becky’s website ported (which I later ditched), but on WordPress it was a lot easier than I anticipated.

The issues

I did run into some issues when installing plugins. One project management plugin would fail to run the SQL queries to create the tables it needed. The plugin lacked any validation when it was activated, and even when it did not add projects or clients you told it to add, you were told they were added. The plugin was also generic and required a lot of time to setup and well, I wanted to work on something now, not after 30 minutes of reading.

I also hit an issue with my beloved Flickr Manager plugin. I almost went to WordPress a year ago, but this same plugin prevented me from doing so. This time around, I decided to see why it wouldn’t work, and the should-not-have-been-necessary JavaScript fix was quite simple. When I hit issues like this, I seriously question the developers ability in actually testing their work. This problem prevented the plugin from adding any images into a post, so the plugin was immediately useless. I had to change a handful of jQuery selectors as the ones in place cause JS errors:

// Before
$('input[@name=photo_id]')
// After
$('input[name=photo_id]')

That’s pretty much all I can think of for now, but in a nutshell, my experience with WordPress was enough to switch. I still think Drupal is great and has its own set of strengths to make it a better option than WordPress, but I was ready for a change.