Wordpress or Drupal? [closed]

Question

I am planning to build a training site which will accommodate multiple users. It will also have lots of custom pages with videos in them. Which CMS/CMF is better suited for this project? Please advise..

Answer 1

Wordpress is designed from the ground up to be a blog, but also to be modular. Drupal is designed to be a complete CMS out of the box, but there are also extensions for Drupal too. Both are CMS systems, but again, Wordpress is really designed to be a blogging platform. Also, Drupal is a little more complicated at first and has a higher learning curve.

However, you can do what you are trying to do with either one. In addition to out of the box functionality, you can customize both Drupal or Wordpress. People tend to specialize in one or the other, and the choice comes down to personal preference (people make a living off of being Drupal or Wordpress developers, that's what's great about open source!). Once you become proficient in PHP and the CMS platform of choice, you can build your own extensions/modules and have a very custom website, but I would minimize customization to only what you absolutely need. If you are creative in using the framework and freely available modules, you may not need to write any code.

Lastly, Drupal is getting a complete re-write with version 7, which people have been waiting a long time for! If you want to get into Drupal, you may want to look into the newest version.

Edit: Personally, I prefer Wordpress, I think the admin section looks great, gives you a lot of control, but without being overwhelming (however, my opinion doesn't really matter). I really think Wordpress has a lower learning curve. I'm also pretty sure, although you haven't given many details, but if you are planning on having simple pages with videos on them, and want access to those pages to be restricted only to authenticated users, I'm pretty sure you can do that without any custom PHP coding, just some HTML.

Here's a couple helpful links for Wordpress:

• Restrict Page View to Authenticated Users
• Setting your Posts or Entire Blog to Private

It can be confusing trying to decide which CMS to dive into; I hope that helps a little!

Answer 2

The answer is Drupal.

I've been running various websites, and few years ago I decided to use Drupal as my main CMS engine and I never looked back.

I used Joomla, phpNuke, Mambo and WordPress before and nothing is as flexible, as maintainable as Drupal.

My biggest website – www.mugen.pl has 14853 registered users so I can confirm Drupal is just perfect for big, heavily used web portals.

Drupal has few wonderful 'social-networking' modules I make an excellent use of to make sure my users are keen to stay on the website, sneak preview: (sorry, I've got only screenshots in Polish):

_{(source: mugen.pl)}

Unfortunately for Drupal, sometimes it takes a while to understand this system. Some theming stuff is not that obvious at first, but the online community is huge and always helpful.

Additionally, Drupal has excellent support for SEO. It’s built-in “path” module allows to set custom URLs for every item on the page, and other available modules (i.e. Nodewords) allow to set custom meta data for every subpage.

When you decided to go with Drupal, you should have a look at the following modules:

• Content Construction Kit - http://drupal.org/project/cck
• Views - http://drupal.org/project/views
• Custom breadcrumbs - http://drupal.org/project/custom_breadcrumbs
• Last Node - http://drupal.org/project/last_node
• Nodewords - http://drupal.org/project/nodewords
• Fivestar - http://drupal.org/project/fivestar

Go with Drupal ;-)