Wordpress is the top blogging platform. So, when I decided to build this blog I fully expected to use Wordpress and was really looking forward to it. As a full time Drupal developer it’s inspiring to use a different tool. This gives me a chance to use a different and refreshing user interface, see under the hood of a different source code, and be inspired in my daily developing.

But, when I looked over my resources and requirements it turns out Wordpress was not the best fit for this site. Since a big part of engineering web applications is starting with the best tools for your task (or at least the best as far as you can tell) here is why I chose Drupal instead of Wordpress.

Performance

One of my initial requirements was to run this site with as little of a performance burden as possible. Performance is one of my big interests (most on this is later posts) and I am running this blog on a server with other sites that use a lot more resources. After doing a little testing I found that I got better performance from Drupal than Wordpress (with caching of course).

Customizations

Few sites are complete without customizations and I like to tinker... a lot. When I got under the hood of Wordpress to make some of those changes it felt icky. Basically, you need to do some ugly hacking.

Drupal, on the other hand, breaks out it’s layers (Presentation-Abstraction-Control) quite well and provides a robust system to tinker without hacking anything in the core download. Being able to make changes without altering the core download makes updates easier, smoother, and cleaner.

Future Plans

Once I started to think about what I might do with this site and reflecting on what the original inspiration for this site talked about, I came up with a few future plans for the site. A roadmap if you will. I then started looking into how to build out those features in Wordpress. At this point I still wanted to use Wordpress to learn and use a different tool.

This was the straw that broke the camels back. It would have been a bit of work (not the fun kind) to build out the additional features in Wordpress. This is what pushed me back to what I know I can build them in.

Wordpress Is Still No. 1

This isn't meant to be a Wordpress vs. Drupal post (though I'm sure my bias hasn't escaped). Wordpress is the top blogging platform and for good reason. If you want to install it and have a blog up and running quick that just works Wordpress is your choice.

This is about looking at your requirements, resources, and maybe a roadmap for where you are going and trying to choose the right platform based on these instead of what’s shiny and at the top of the charts.