Some here who have read my articles know that briefly I had them running on Drupal. I’d heard about drupal through a fellow web developer of mine, who said using drupal to make his websites was really easy, and made his life a lot easier since he didn’t have to develop things from scratch.
What he didn’t tell me was that Drupal was a constant annoying pain in the ass, requiring lots of time wasted on trying to fix and maintain the damn thing.
Seriously, Drupal was the biggest pain in the ass I’ve ever used in my life. After downloading it on my then-ubuntu server, I tried to install it. At the very least, it gave me a list of things it needed in order to be installed. Most of these things were mundane, but others took a long time, requiring me to download extra stuff. I made a database just for the site I wanted, got that all set up in MySql, and I was ready to go… Or was I?
It’s been a while, so I can’t exactly remember why this whole damn process took me an hour, but it did. I was digging and digging down this rabbit hole of troubleshooting until I forgot what I’d been doing and was just happy it worked.
For the most part, it did work… But there were annoyances…
I didn’t have that much control over the look and feel of the site, and eventually discovered I had to make separate installations for the separate sites. Not that big a deal, but I still think I should be able to have multiple blog sites easily in one place. No biggie, and after this move, I came to prefer it, which is why you’ll see that layout now here with my 2 wordpress sites.
After enough digging around and playing with it, I finally had a full-fledged blogging site, and I got right to work. I had about 8 posts written in it. The only problem I kept having was any time I added tags for the articles, and saved the post, I’d get this long-ass list of errors at the top of my page. Something about an array to string conversion… and the more times I edited my post, the longer the list of messages got… Always the same message.
I googled around, and ultimately to my (not) surprise, discovered that there’s actually a bug in drupal. It’s using older php code because the lazy creators couldn’t be bothered to keep up with standards.
I figured I’d just live with it for a while, but it had another problem…
Sometimes, the site just flat out wouldn’t load. I’d have to click on something twice to get it to work. No, this was not a problem with my apache server, because I was able to run other sites I ran that weren’t powered by Drupal just fine.
With the overload of errors, fidgety functionality, and overall bad experiences of setup and troubleshooting, I finally gave up. I’d heard of 2 others: Joomla and WordPress. I figured “Very well. I’ve heard lots of good things about WordPress, so let’s give it a shot.”
I was up and running in less than 10 minutes. I’ve had to tweak the sites here and there a little, but I’ve never spent longer than 10-15 minutes researching and troubleshooting anything. Drupal took me all day to figure out a problem.
I saw a hell of a lot more options for customizing the look of the site, and it worked every time I clicked on a link. Best of all, I can now actually tag my articles, and not have a giant bloated list of benign errors appear on my screen.
I’m actually very impressed with WordPress, and will continue using it.
Not sure what the hell my friend was thinking with Drupal… Every argument he made for it was completely false when it came to the practical test.
In short: Yay WordPress, Boo Drupal.
And if you’d like to see the errors I’m talking about in Drupal, look here.