What factors are involved in selecting CMS and Blogging Platform?

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1

I am trying to figure out the right CMS and Blogging Platform for a financial website that currently has about 150 pages. The website is a mini portal that offers both free newsletter and subscription fee-based newsletters.

Over 90% of the current content is in the form of articles with images. The remaining 10% are pages that market the free and subscription-based newsletters. In future, video would be added.

The site currently uses yourmailinglistprovider.com for authenticating paying members.

A blog needs to be added to make site maintenance and content addition easier.

I have just joined sitepoint forums and tried searching on Drupal and WordPress. The consensus seems to be WP is easier to learn or use and is more search engine friendly while Drupal can be handle customization and complicated needs better.

  1. What other factors do I need to evaluate Drupal and WordPress on before making a decision?

  2. Under what conditions in terms of features, customization, or needs would one say Drupal is the better choice?

Thanks,
Judy

2

It seems like your site will be dealing with multiple functions. While WP is gaining ground as a CMS I would still vote for Drupal in your case. It is a lot more robust as far as adding multiple advanced features such as mailing lists, blogs, image/video galleries, user management and overall customization of all aspects of it. While it is true that you can add many features to WP with plug-ins, Drupal comes with a lot of the functionality out of box.

I think your main concern should be with your own experience. First it is always a good idea to go with what you know. If you have used WP it would be better to take what you have and build on it if you want your content out there as soon as possible. Drupal can take you a bit to get over the learning curve but they are making improvements for navigating around the features. Drupal and WP both have excellent communities as far as modules being developed for additional functionality but Drupal has been in the field of all-in-one community-driven software a lot longer.

To make a long post short Drupal can let you have multiple users, create and assign various roles to who can post what, who can view what, and who can do what from the start. You can add more functionality for ecommerce with something like the ubercart set of modules that would allow you to handle subscriptions. Since its totally integrated with Drupal you can automate giving access or denying access based on their roles and it can handle a wide array of payment processors. WP can accomplish this as well but it would take a lot more time and effort to tweak it.

3

Thanks for the helpful response. I have three follow-up questions:

In considering Drupal vs. WP, does it matter whom I use as the web host? Currently the site is hosted by GoDaddy.

Is WP significantly better than Drupal when it comes to SEO?

Lastly, my knowledge of both WP and Drupal are close to zero at this point. What is the best way for me to get started in learning Drupal? (The CMS would be installed and customized by a professional.)

Thanks again.
Judy

4

As far as hosting the 2, Drupal is more resource intensive than Wordpress so while it will work on a shared host such as GoDaddy from experience I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re willing to take the time to tweak performance with modules such as Boost.

As far as features of the two, Drupal is for large or complex sites, Wordpress is for simpler sites in which content types and user access is not as important. Wordpress is getting better, but the granular permissions and fields ui (cck in drupal 6) is far superior to roles and post-types in Wordpress in terms of functionality and ability.