Inquisitive minds are always going to ask this inevitable question, which is a better platform between WordPress Vs Drupal 8 even though all efforts had been made by the enthusiasts of the respective platforms not to pit against each other in the public! Hence, keeping with the tradition, even after the release of Drupal 8 and WordPress 4.6 Beta2, there is still not much that is directly spoken about this either. Hence, I will try to focus on the salient features of the two so as to move forward with this discussion and enable readers to decide for themselves what suits them the most and their requirements.
The primary reason why the WordPress Vs. Drupal 8 enthusiasts don’t talk against each other is that most consider this topic as crass. They believe that advantages and disadvantages of either platforms is very much dependant on the decision maker with varying size of businesses and specific requirements. But no matter what, the site owners care less about such platform politics and they are always going to ask this question before investing their hard earned money for the maximum benefit! All the site owners need, at the end of the day, is to make a choice out of the two and as long as a choice exists, I see no reason of this debate fading away!
But before moving further to decide which is better between WordPress vs. Drupal 8, we must first try to define what exactly should be mean by “better” here? Because that is going to be very important in our decision making. Trying to define “better” from the perspective of the Content Management challenges recently faced, better is something very subjective and we need to make it objective enough to be able to define it comprehensively. So, to do that, we might bring into context the businessman’s perspective and what he thinks of “Better” here. Certainly, a businessman wants more out of his invested money. So, we need to find out the platform which fetches us more and that should be enough to put this debate to rest.
Specifically, every website can be thought of as a means to an end or a medium to reach your goal. So no matter what your respective industry is, all you are looking forward to is to acquire more and more. But, you must know for why you wish to acquire? The most obvious answer to the above would your users, context builders and content makers. And this clearly gives us the basis for determining platform superiority which is : content, context and their optimal use. It is more or less clear and probably agreed upon by all that for a business owner, the users should come first. Though in some specific cases, many may not agree with me on this. Next up in the hierarchy should be the content providers which includes the marketers etc. and then the ones who build your medium to be smoothly running and clearing the way in order to reach your goal and they are primarily the site developers.
Can you think of anything that could be more important than the three things mentioned above, that is end users, content makers and content developers? Of course, it is your growth. The paradox as it stands now, you grow more by providing more to the ones who help you in the process of growing more, return on your investment meets your generosity!
So, going back to the definition of “better” above in the context of determining WordPress vs Drupal 8, we have come down to the point where it is safer to say that “better” actually means more for your end users, your content makers and also for your site developers. In this situation, the best that could work for you and your growth is to empower the stakeholders that matter most because doing that will ensure that your stakeholders, in turn, would be successful in generating additional visitors as customers or consumers and then converts for your business.
Traditionally, Drupal had always been known for its high performance and scalable databases, built in caching etc. but it is not known for its back-end which is being said to be very complicated. The makers of Drupal admits that their biggest risk had been in not allowing any change and customization despite having such a strong platform which can virtually act as a strong foundation for almost any type of website. Compared to that, WordPress is considered to be the easiest of the lot by millions of users and adding posts and other contents media like images, audio or video is just so simple like the technology that powers it up. Not only that, WordPress is present with millions of themes and plugins to add variety of functionalities to your website within minutes. On any given day, WordPress is the easiest to learn and hence has been the most favorite platforms for marketers and developers alike. But the intricacy lies in the fact that WordPress is not as easily customizable or flexible as Drupal is! The similarity that both enjoys is that both are open source and flaunts contemporary Content Management System [CMS].
For long, Drupal was way behind WordPress in terms of usability until their release of version 7, because in Drupal, this was one aspect which never was given a topmost priority unlike what we see in WordPress. For an easy example, it can be pointed out that in Drupal you need to see two different pages inside the admin in order to bring out an external change. Whereas in WordPress, the admin console is perhaps the easiest it can get and almost everyone with or without any technical knowhow can easily get into and use it comfortable. But many Drupal developers think, unlike that of WordPress, that if someone don’t find Drupal usable and then probably it is not for their use.
Another remarkable feature which allowed WordPress to stand clearly ahead of Drupal was its penchant for backward compatibility. We know in WordPress most of their upgradation process is seamless, without any hassle whatsoever. But, in Drupal, whose core developers have a liking for keeping their slate clean from any previous major versions, that is not so easy. This might help the core developers to some extent but can pose a major threats to business houses. Anyone setting up an elaborate website with an old version of Drupal might face dire consequences amounting to expensive rewriting of their website from the scratch, once their version of Drupal goes obsolete! So, this doesn’t suit well for Drupal to go ahead of WordPress either.
Lastly, one of the most important factors that gave WordPress a clear edge over Drupal was the fact that Drupal’s source code is not as easy to manage as that of WordPress’s. The reason behind this is, Drupal actually mixes and comixes the user content with that of your website’s original source code! The major reason for this is Drupal was not PHP ready, which is why user content in Drupal used to get stored in MySQL. We know it is much easy to submit PHP for version control than it is to submit records in a database for the same purpose. This single handedly makes it clear why the previous versions of Drupal were no way conducive to be used as platforms for serious business websites.
For the above reason, it is much easier and cheaper to find skilled WordPress designers. The Drupal designers on the other hard not only needs to be skilled designers, but they also need to be good at PHP, hence making them rarest of the rare as well as very expensive to employ.
That losing scenario for Drupal had been a reality before Drupal 8 was launched. But, now as we have the new and sleek Drupal 8 under our armoury, I think the equation has changed and according to many, has tilted heavily towards the Drupal, in this eternal wordpress vs drupal 8 supremacy debate. With contribution from more than 3000 individual contributors around the world, Drupal has gone through complete transformation. So much so that it now boasts of user friendliness, easier ways to create data structures, out of the box mobile accessibility is delivered, multilingual capabilities etc. etc. Things have improved in Drupals side so much that end users, marketers and developers are taken into greater heights with Drupal and for the first time ever, Drupal has finally promised more for all of them.
The power packed feature of more flexible theme customization using Drupal’s back-end interface in Drupal 8 have risen true hopes of more changes and customization to come in the near future. For end users, this advanced customization and flexibility that Drupal 8 now has, been in the creation of responsive websites which can be viewed equally without the worry of taking into consideration user’s device’s viewing size. Drupal has taken into consideration the fact how people search the internet. Techinically speaking, Drupal no longer needs to load the javascripts as often as like before since everything is now cached. So, for the end user, once a site is viewed it’s content no longers gets loaded repeatedly – hence the site load performance has optimized manifolds compared to how it was earlier.
Coming to the content makers or marketers perspective, Drupal now has packed in a lot of power into their hands. Compared to the previous challenging versions of Drupal, Drupal 8 has been extremely flexible and simple. With the addition of on-page content editor, the content authoring for marketers had been very swift and simple process. Moreover, they can now navigate easily and all the content editing is smoothly done through the help of powerful tools like CKEditor.
The new module of Drupal 8 provides an easy tracking of the analytics and monitor all the activities with much ease unlike before. This very module produces meta tags which are customizable automatically as well as creates URL nodes based on URL for your website. Best of all, powerful tools like GoalGorilla and Yoast can be incorporated for developing complete SEO. Best thing for Drupal 8 is the ease with which it integrates with with Google Analytics.
From the web developer’s point of view, Drupal has integrated REST API’s which expands it’ reach many times beyond a traditional web publishing applications. Apart from that Drupal now comes ready with PHP 7 which allows a headless Drupal launch. Though the release Drupal 8 and that of PHP7 were within a gap of couple of weeks from each other, but that was not enough to stop Drupal enthusiasts from embracing this high-performance feature with an open arm! Lastly, Drupal can fairly be used as a data source now so that developers can take output in XML or JSON. Posting of data back from the front end is very easy now as well. With the implementation of Hypertext Application Language [HAL] in Drupal 8 has enhanced the ease of tapping the web service capabilities. Automated tasting of Javascript [JV] is also permitted in Drupal 8, which was absent in the earlier versions. This actually eases the work of quality assurance testers to work with JV front end and save a lot of time in the process.
So, with all of these newly installed features in Drupal 8, the fight WordPress vs Drupal 8 is no more as unbalanced as it was sometime back. The thing has changed quite a bit if not fully shifted towards Drupal unlike in the past when WordPress was the winner by miles. In usability too, Drupal 8 is much easier for everyone nowadays. There are facilities for long and descriptive texts, which user can make use of as help just with a mouse click and taking the tour. Drupal enthusiasts should no more feel intimidated by WordPress’s superiority anymore, because at present, it is much more a game of equals and not anyone’s alone.
Migrate Drupal to WordPress or Vice Versa
Undoubtedly, you can have dozens of methods to achieve this. If you own a small website with little content, moving it manually is not a big problem. However, if you run a big website with many articles, pictures, videos, and comments, migrating them manually can be really annoying. Therefore, we are going to present you the software – CMS2CMS, which can help you migrate website from Drupal to WordPress without any hassle. Note that the software is suitable for all kinds of websites.
CMS2CMS helps you automatically migrate site content from Drupal to WordPress accurately and flawlessly including articles, pages, images (optional), categories, tags, users, internal links, comments, attachments, custom post types, and custom fields. It supports Drupal versions: 5.x, 6.x, 7.x and WordPress versions: 3.x. In the following part, we list several features about CMS2CMS:
- Simple – no requirement of coding skill
- Quick – 15 minutes on average, depending the size of Drupal website
- Free Demo – show you how it works
- Live Support – solve your problem in a short time
Now, we are going to introduce you how to work the software. In total, there are less than 7 steps you need to cover. Firstly, visit www.cms2cms.com and register an account. Then, choose your migration type and from the two options: set up migration yourself or have it set up by their technical engineers. The latter one is suitable for those who don’t have enough time for the process.
The third step is to provide current and new website URLs and CMS types. You just visit your website and get the URLs. Then choose Drupal beside Your Current Site and choose WordPress beside Your New Site. After finishing these, click on Continue.
The next step is installing the connection bridge which allows data to transfer between current and new CMSs. You need to download Bridge file from www.cms2cms.com and extract the folder from the zip file. Then, connect to your Drupal and New Websites via FTP with the help of any type of FTP client software. Later, insert the “cms2cms” folder extracted into the root folder of both your Current and New CMS websites.
Choose additional migration options including media, URLs SEO friendly, clear current target data, design suggestion and permanent (301) redirects from your previous URLs to new URLs. After this you can start demo migration which allows you to check out the service operation. If you can sure everything is going well, you can start full migration. When full migration is done, you can sit down and enjoy your brand new website.