I created my own CMS long ago, but it’s amateurish, of course, so I’ve been plotting to upgrade to something else - probably WordPress or Drupal. I was expecting Drupal 8 to be available by now, and I just read an interesting article that claims neither WordPress nor Drupal are the best CMS.
I was just wondering how hard it would be to create a multi-site WordPress installation, developing all my sites in WordPress, then - if it looks like Drupal might be a good fit for certain projects - transforming certain sections from WordPress to Drupal.
For example, imagine a website with three sections…
mysite/world
mysite/topics
mysite/reference
The entire site - home page, all three sections, any miscellaneous pages - would be done in WordPress.
But if the Topics section gets really big and complex, I might want to reconsider Drupal. Rather than change the entire website to Drupal, how hard would it be to just change the section mysite/topics to Drupal?
I probably won’t even touch Drupal unless I can hire someone to help me get it up and running. I might even hire someone to help me with WordPress, just to speed things up. I’ve been told that Drupal can be set up to make it pretty easy to administer, but WordPress still sounds a little more user-friendly. Still, I suspect I may want to tap into Drupal’s special features for some of my projects down the road.
Well, Wordpress has changed quite a bit since the pre-WP3 days and Drupal has changed since the pre-Drupal 5 or even pre-Drupal 6 days. As far as it goes, 99% of the time the best CMS is the one that you know inside and out and can solve any problems with. For me that’s Drupal and for you it may be WordPress but I don’t think I would ever mix the two simply because the beauty of using a cohesive CMS is that it is cohesive and everything is controlled and accessible by the Core CMS. If you try to graft one CMS with the other, you loose the benefit of everything being accessible from the Core API. My suggestion is to pick a CMS, get your hands dirty, so to speak and learn everything it can do.
Regarding Drupal 8, I expected it would be released in June of this year but now I’m leaning towards seeing it release in January. All of the beta-blockers have been removed so I expect we’ll see the beta released in September (it’s at Alpha 14 right now). It’s a complete departure from previous and a ground up rewrite leveraging Symfony2. The result is a modern CMS that has done away with all of the procedural spaghetti hook code we used to write when building modules and extensions. I’ve been tinkering with it for the past year and it will be a bit of a learning curve for developers but for Admins and site builders who just work with the config screens, I think it will do more right out of the box than any previous version of Drupal and in my opinion, is quite intuitive to just start doing things with.
Thanks for the tips. Yes, I would like to broaden my horizons. There are just so many CMS’s to choose from, and I don’t have time to try them all. I think it’s natural to go with one of the more common choices, however, the article I linked to in my original post has a lot of food for thought.
Yes, absolutely. I meant to mention that as well. I’ve really immersed myself in the one I work with (Drupal) and tend to ignore others but that’s not to say they don’t matter; there are probably a good half dozen CMS’s that I’d like to explore if time permitted it.
I agree wholeheartedly. It’s the main reason why I’ve immersed myself in the platform for the past 7+ years.
The trick to changing parts of websites out is to use reverse proxies in front of them so you can carve out holes and then swing those to other sites – even running on completely different stacks and servers.
D8 looks nifty but I find myself asking myself “why not just use symfony directly?”