It's been about a month since I made the switch from WordPress 2 to Drupal 4.7 to power my blog. There have been some ups and downs, but I have to say that I have absolutely no regrets about the move, nor do I plan on moving back any time soon.
Some things I still miss from the WordPress days though -
- commenters able to subscribe to a thread of comments via email. sounds old school, but it REALLY helps keep conversations going.
- actually, that's just about it.
There are some little niggles, like not being able to use the Flickr.module to integrate my Flickr sets here, but that's a limitation of DreamHost's security setup (disabling fopen), not of Drupal. If that REALLY bugs me, I'll look at hacking the Flickr.module cache code to not require fopen…
Once Drupal has been configured, it's no harder to run than WordPress. It performs as well (or better) once caching has been enabled. The threaded comments are great. The custom node types are really handy – I'm not using them so much on this blog (yet) but am using them quite a bit on some project sites.
The set of modules I'm using has evolved over the past month. I think I've come up with a pretty decent set of modules for a blogging platform in Drupal. It's not perfect, but it does the job quite nicely.
I'd recommend WordPress for new bloggers, but I'd wholeheartedly recommend Drupal for people that want to take advantage of some of the more flexible content management stuff available in a higher-end app. Not a shot against WordPress at all – the two platforms serve slightly different (and complementary) roles.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
My blog is on Wordpress platform and it’s working well. Indeed I’m a new blogger but I think WP is cool. I never heard before about drupal and it’s sounds interesting. Thanks.
Charlie – subscriptions.module doesn’t play nicely with anonymous users. People shouldn’t need to create an account here to post a comment (would you have?) so I’ll need to keep looking…
Andrew – I’ll definitely check it out! Thanks for the link!
Not sure if you are interested but I am working on a new flickr module. It can be found here: http://drupal.org/project/flickrhood .
Sets aren't implemented yet but I'm working on it!
Would love your insight,
Andrew
"commenters able to subscribe to a thread of comments via email."
We use the subscriptions module for this on Kairosnews ( running 4.7). I don't remember if I grabbed the module with a 4.7 tag or CVS, but it works as well as the 4.6 version. However, I don't think it works with anonymous users (we require registration), but the advantage is that the logged in user can manage their subscriptions and also check an option to automatically subscribe to threads in which they have posted.Â
Just made the conversion of my Wordpress blogs using wp2drupal. Previously I had drupal as a front end with a seperate blog system.Â
You inspired me to make the move.Â
Unfortunately the limitations of my hosting location (PHP4) were a roadblock until I thought of setting up a virutal server in Parallels running on my Mac, copied everything over, ran the conversion, then put the new database back on the production environment.
Virtualization rocks.Â
cool. have fun, Bill! I just did the upgrade on my Powerbook directly in PHP4/MySQL5, and pushed the result of that to the server. I never do anything iffy directly on the production server – always test locally, run experimental conversions locally, and leave production stuff alone until you know it worked
D’Arcy, did you ever find a workaround to DreamHost’s fopen() block? I am running into the same problem loading remote feeds into Elgg.
I’ve been reading your blog for about a year now. Thanks for keeping it up!
Richard
Richard:
He made an attempt to switch it from fopen to CURL, something that is supported by Dreamhost.
Good luck!