The Girl-Geek Anthropologist

After almost two years of waiting and being frustrated, I have finally decided to drop Drupal completely, and move to Wordpress. I had Drupal in my "staging , for about two to three years, and never made the live move. This was due to a number of factors:

First, it was very difficult to edit the templates. Because there's no standardized way to write templates, anyone can write them. This can be a good thing since it allows for full creativity, and flexibility. On the other hand, it can be a major pain in the neck since the likelihood of porting an existing stylesheet into the new theme is not very easy, and, having to hunt for the right code to do something is also a major PIA. Very few are annotated, and certainly they are not organized in any understandable or logical way.

Second, there really weren't that many decent templates. Most of the ones out there look like they came out of the basic template. Sure, there are some excellent sites that were written on the platform, and they were fully customized, but the template is not available for the general public.

Third, support on the forums is ridiculously annoying. For the most part, people seem to have the "geekier than thou" attitude, and a simple answer can very quickly turn into a personal attack. It's very intimidating/

And last, it was an incredibly bloated piece of software. There's a new version that's in beta right now, but I was told that it was very unlikely that it would be live anytime soon. And, if it did, it will take a few months to a year for all the modules and plugins to get ported to the new system.

I consider myself a coder, and am really good at figuring things out. But, the amount of time I had to spend in order to figure out something as basic as a stylesheet really turned me off using it any further.

So, after all this time, I decided to move to Wordpress.

First, after a few hours of looking (i am afraid to think how much time looking for decent Drupal themes) generated over 50 possible themes that I can use. I downloaded all of them, and have been testing them. Some of them are quite excellent, that I will probably end up using.

Second, the themes are very well documented and annotated within the sheet. And, they're broken into different logical sections like "404" page", "main page", "index page", etc. So you can separate out the stylesheets.

Third, after the initial setup, I have not had to use my shell at all. After I load all the plug-ins through sftp, I can customize everything from the web. While I love using the shell, it makes editing anything on the fly nearly impossible. I can activate and deactive almost anything from the web.

Fourth, there are tons of widgets, and plugins and themes, and the community seem to be relatively helpful. Sure there is the internal bickering, but it is not very noisy, and it's very easy to ignore.

Fifth, the installation took less than one minute! And except for two plugins (out of about 20 so far), only two broke on Activation, which I very promptly deactivated, and left it at that. Even the themes worked straight out of the box.

Sixth, documentation is excellent. There's some people even making videos on how to install everything.

So... that's what I've decided. It took me less than two hours to customize my new site to a relatively stable format, and the functionality that I have added through the plugins (like converting pages on the fly to a .pdf, or including automatic front page excerpts) have made the site look more and more professional. That's only taken about two hours! So, once I get everything set up, I will ask my volunteers to help me port the site into the new format, and make it live. I am sick of working on formatting and styles, and I just want to add so many new things that require the improved functionalities, and the ability for the volunteers to do their own work, regardless of my ongoing involvement.

A note here, I have tried two other CMS. One is called PHP-Nuke, which was defaced and hacked into twice with pornographic images left on the front page. The other CMS I tried was Movable Type, and I decided that that too was incredibly bloated, and the shell to web ratio for customization was too high for my own taste.

So, Wordpress you have won my heart. I hope I never have to look back at anything else, and that I can have the platform grow with my new site.