In a recent post we talked about 5 reasons to consider Drupal which lead to some questions about how to compare Drupal to other content management systems (CMS). Here at CustomWeb2 we are focusing our theme development on WordPress and Drupal - but we continue to explore other CMS systems because each system has strengths depending on your specific needs.

Both Drupal and WordPress are excellent open source tools that are both blogging systems and content management systems. Each has robust user communities. Building on some of our prior WordPress and Drupal posts, we’d like to suggest some guidelines for helping with this critical decision.

Single Person or Small Group Blog - Use WordPress
If you are focused on developing a site that has a blog that will be maintained by a single person or a small group of folks then WordPress is your best solution. WordPress It has all the base functionality you will need with a great selection of robust plug-ins if you need to add on. The administration interface is very simple and we have found that anyone with basic computer knowledge can be a WordPress administrator. The WordPress installation is also simple.

Anything you can do in WordPress, you could also do in Drupal so it’s not like Drupal can’t be used for a small blog. However, Drupal is more complicated from a design and installation perspective. Drupal also has many features that you would not be using for something simple like this. - essentially Drupal would be like buying a really expensive car to drive to the store on the corner and back.

Blog Community - Use Drupal
At a certain point your simple blog can evolve into a blog community. Here are some criteria to help decide if your blog will evolve into a blog community:

* Might you want people to navigate directly to an author’s blog instead of the main page of the overall blog?
* Your blog has 10+ authors.
* The visitors who leave comments on your blog may also become contributors.

You could accomplish these goals by using plugins to extend WordPress. However, these kinds of sites are pretty much the reason Drupal exists. All the community-based features you need are available out of the box.

Blog Driven Website - Use WordPress
Is your site going to be built around a blog, but also have some pages for About Us, Contact Us, Products and Services you provide? With its pages section and various plugins, WordPress can be used as a full on Content Management System for small websites like this. Assuming your overall needs are for one level of menus with a few pages, certainly less than a dozen pages, than WordPress will works perfectly well for these types of sites.

Once again, Drupal could accomplish the same thing but Drupal it is a little more complicated to deal with.

Full Featured Vertical Market Website - Use WordPress with custom themes
When your website grows - that’s often a reason to consider Drupal but that can also add to your administrative burden. Frequently, this is where a WordPress theme like CW2 WP Adpro Jobs or CW2 WP Adpro Classifieds becomes a great solution. These themes can provide you the power to run a more full featured website without taking on some of the more complicated technology of a Drupal.

Full Featured Unique Website -Use Drupal
At a certain size, a site simply becomes too big for it to be sufficiently managed using WordPress. When you find yourself dealing with any of the following scenarios, you should probably be using Drupal:

* If you have multiple dynamic content types (press releases, news articles, blog posts, etc.). Drupal is great at allowing you to create this stuff on the fly, with WordPress you are hacking things together.
* If your site has more than a two template design structure (homepage and second levels).
* If you have numerous content blocks on the homepage or in sidebars that you will be editing frequently. Drupal is much better at managing blocks of content - WordPress widgets are more confining for this type of application.
* If you are trying to start small and expect your site to add tons of features/content moving forward.

At CustomWeb2 we know that picking a Content Management System for your website is a critical decision. No one article can magically tell you which system to use. However, we hope that our blog posts will give you a feel for the power of the various Content Management Systems and help steer you in the best direction.

Related posts:

1. Understanding CMS Jargon
2. What’s a Drupal Node?
3. 5 Drupal Settings for New Installs
4. 5 Reasons to Consider Drupal
5. Microsoft Word and your blogs