Having built a number of sites in Wordpress I recently decided to take the plunge with Drupal in order to see how it stood up to the excellent Wordpress platform.

Expecting Drupal to be more advanced that Wordpress I was quite surprised to find that it wasn’t particularly straight forward to set up. I thought it would be worthwhile posting this guide to some of the key areas I had identified as either being confusing or not what I expected.

I have not dealt with the set up of Drupal here as there are already a number of useful tutorials covering this process.

The main points for attention are:

1) The supporting site is pretty confusing, if you have no understanding of php you will be stumped. I also think the style it is written in is needlessly confusing and content seems to jump around without providing enough explanation of how you actually do things (just a basic outline)

2) There is no WYSIWYG visual editor – big shock! I wasn’t aware that you would have to download this functionality as a module using a separate editor. Isn’t this the point of a content management system? Perhaps I have been ‘spoilt’ using Wordpress. I use http://tinymce.moxiecode.com which is platform independent (can be used in Drupal or wherever) – I couldn’t get this to work then I read that you also have to download the TinyMCE engine here: http://drupal.org/project/tinymce .You have to download and install both the module AND the engine: http://sourceforge.net/projects/tinymce/files/ – this isn’t clear at first read. If you get stuck read this: http://drupal.org/node/30159

3) At this point I think it’s important to point out to those of you who are Wordpress users that by Module I mean Plugin in Wordpress terms. All of the modules I have downloaded so far are .tar files so you will need to download: http://www.7-zip.org to unzip (they are not normal zip files). 7Zip is free and I’ve been using it a while, seems fine. For mac you can use stuffit expander

4) The admin area is integrated with your theme – I got a bit of a surprise when I uploaded and activated my theme to find that most of the admin section and navigation had disappeared. The solution is to use another module which provides a separate back end or admin navigation which is independent from your front end or theme: http://drupal.org/project/admin_menu. You also then need to select another theme for the admin section via: /drupal/admin/settings/admin

5) For meta tags and descriptions which are unique to each node get the Nodewords module: http://drupal.org/project/nodewords

6) To get your URLs to say something meaningful e.g. “/my-node-title.html instead of /node/123 “you need..you guessed it..another module: http://drupal.org/project/pathauto and http://drupal.org/project/token

So as you can see there are some fundamental differences between Wordpress and Drupal – essentially a lot more set up work is required for Drupal to achieve parity in terms of functionality and user options.

I think I will be sticking with Wordpress!