Drupal vs. Wordpress

I have stumbled across more situation where companies are pitted in the "Drupal or Wordpress" decision making situation...and it seems the decision is often pretty evenly split between the two.

I have been working with Drupal for quite a few months now, and have been knee-deep in Wordpress for the last many weeks getting a good look at it, and now, I can see why it's a tough decision.

Drupal it seems has from early on established it's core competency as a "web site" CMS, whereas Wordpress started as a "blogger" but through the course of development has been trying to move more toward a web site management tool, but still, as I see it, retains much of it's "blogging" structure. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, as Wordpress, from a non-technical perspective seems much more user friendly in many respects, whereas Drupal is a bit steeper of a learning curve.

Both systems have a very active community of users and developers making little addons for each. In Wordpress they are "widgets" in Drupal they are "modules". These addons tie into the systems API and extend the capabilities of each.

Drupal, as I see it has a couple of big pluses...natively it has much more navigation structure control and web-based customizations of themes are great. The downsides is that there is no native WYSIWYG editor, and it's a complex array or modules, dependencies and configurations to get one working for typical non-technical users.

Drupal has one great strength of it's ability, and clever implementation, of running multisite setups, which, if this is important to you, would make it a clear choice. That being said, Wordpress has an "MU" edition that makes it easier to multisite, and in their next major release will combine the core of Wordpress and Wordpress MU into a single product, which will bring Wordpress into line with Drupal in those terms.

I like the single screen interface Wordpress has to add, move and configure widgets, but it lacks the ability to assign a single widget configuration to multiple available spaces, instead it has to be manually added to each space and configured independently. Drupals "block" interface makes it a multiple page affair to add and configure it's little "widgets" however, they can be placed in a very granular fashion and have one assigned to one or many pages.

Wordpress is seeming easier to theme and develop for, but I haven't really been deep into Drupal in that fashion, so I could be wrong, basing that on more of a flyover look at Drupal.

Bottom line, for me, once the next major release of Wordpress comes out, implementing multisite into the core product, it'll be just as powerful as Drupal, and the choice of one over the other will be harder, only depending on any familiarity with one or the other within your existing team, or very specific needs.

Search Engine Friendly URL's in Drupal

When most people think of "search engine friendly URL's" they are simply thinking of removing querystrings and rewriting them into the URL. However, there are more options that can help a great deal. This Blogger tool is a good example of it, how the title of the post is actually in the URL, thereby placing good keywords in the URL to be indexed.

This is possible with Drupal as well, and it is possible to make it automated. All you need is three Drupal Modules:

• Path (a core module)
• Pathauto
• Token

Enable the three of these and when you save a new page, this system will take the title of your page, throw out the "stop words" (meaning and, of, is, not, or, etc) and concatenate the rest of the words with a "dash" and add the resulting string as an alias URL.

With the, instead of your new page having the URL of http://www.domain.com/node/10 it would have http://www.domain.com/content/your-page-title as it's domain in the menu system. This alias also follows through into the XML Sitemap module.

If you have existing content, you simply need to go into it and resave it, and the new alias will be created then.

This is a great way to help your rankings a little with good keyword placement in the URL as well as the meta, titlebar, heading tags and page content.