Or, more to the point, where’s Dougal?
Sorry about the long silence here. After our son got out of the hospital from his pneumonia, he had four weeks of therapy before he returned to regular school. I had to drive across town to drop him off and pick him up, which ate up around 3 hours of each day when all was said and done. I’ve also tried to devote some time to taking care of some tasks around the house before I start my new job.
New job, you say? Yup. I’m going to be working at MailChimp (go ahead, post all your ‘code monkey’ puns, get it out of your system). MailChimp is a service for managing email newsletter campaigns, with nicely formatted HTML mail templates, and readership analytics. The team there is already doing a lot of nifty stuff, like when they used Amazon Mechanical Turk to help vet a large set of programmatically generated themes and color schemes. I’m looking forward to seeing what I’ll get to work on, both in the main service, and in their “MailChimp Labs” projects.
I’ve also been dipping my toes into Drupal a little bit lately. My wife, Susan, uses Drupal at her job, and I figured it might be nice to offer her some real ideas every once in a while, instead of just saying, “if you were using WordPress, I could help you figure out how to do that.” And no, they can’t just switch to WordPress, unfortunately 
Drupal does have a steep learning curve (if you really want to do more interesting things with it), but it also has some nifty architectural bits. While much of it still feels alien to me, some of it has more in common with WordPress than I expected. When I feel like I’ve learned enough, I’ll try to write up a WordPress/Drupal comparison (mostly from the developer’s perspective).
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22 Comments
The Drupal/Wordpress comparison sounds like a great idea!! – I look forward to it.
My very first client approached me for a WordPress themeing job once. A week later, the client bailed out because the client found someone else to theme Drupal.
Sigh.
Congrats on the move to MailChimp! They’re doing some exciting stuff over there.
I also want to say Congratulations MailChimp!! All the best
Hey, found this post through the “Other WordPress News” section in my WP Dashboard, and for some reason, the headline caught my attention.
When I decided to get back into web design after a 3-4 year hiatus, I actually started with Drupal. I hadn’t really done tons of research about the different CMS packages out there, but I heard theonion.com is based on Drupal, and their site looks pretty snazzy, so I went with Drupal. And to say there’s a “steep learning curve” is a massive understatement. I tried Drupal for awhile, but eventually gave up and went to WordPress. I think WP just has so much more support, in terms of plugins, themes, and general tech support. Didn’t seem like there were as many “extras” for Drupal, and it seems like English is not the creator’s native language; much of the documentation was tough to read because of the broken English.
After nearly 2 years of WP, it might be easier to go back to Drupal now. I’ve had time to refresh my own skills, and I’m sure Drupal has improved just as much as WP has over the past 2 years… but I’m gonna stick with WP. Best of luck with your experiments with Drupal, though!
Hi,
I found this post through the -Other WordPress News- section in my Dashboard too,
I just want to tell you sorry for what happned to your son, and I’m happy because he’s fine now.
I second the Drupal/Wordpress comparison
It is become attractive, because the CMS develop more fast and fast. So we always want to try it
I still didn’t take the step into drupal, simply because I still have more to learn about wordpress, but at the same time it’s in the back of my head, so I’m surely interested to read some more comparisons between drupal and wordpress.
With that title I was expecting to hear about the story book with images of Waldo. Liked the post still though.
Drupal/Wordpress comparison in what way? Which is better for blogging? I have to say that wordpress is great for me : friendly interface, lot of plugins and free themes. I look forward to read your future post to find out more about drupal.
I’ve taken a look at Drupal for a few projects in the past and though I liked what I saw, the steep learning curve you mention forced me to abandon it for other CMS platforms in order to get things done in time. It’s definitely a platform I want to revisit in the future as there is a lot of power under the hood and once mastered I’m sure it could be used to do great things. As a Wordpress user I’m looking forward to your comparison, I haven’t had a chance to play with Drupal since an early version 5 so it will be good to see how the two stack up now.
Love the ‘Edit Comments’ feature here by the way, I’m always making typos!
I would like to see Drupal Wordpress comparision article cause I have stumbled upon more and more on drupal sites and they look promising. Have been using wordpress like two years now and I have seen where it is capable of and would like too see the alternatives now for this nice blogging system.
I personally like wordpress but now I’m attracted to drupal because some of the modules I find are simply amazing. I’m working with one of my site currently with drupal and it’s going on great.
Anyway I would love to read a post for WP Vs DP comparison.
Been using wordpress for quite some time now, but gotta admit, Drupal does look exciting and promising.
Comparison between these two would be great.
I had a client recently who wanted me to use Drupal rather than WordPress based on a recommendation from a business adviser (whom they ended up firing shortly thereafter) – I said the same thing you did, “well, if we go with Drupal I’ll have to learn the whole thing. WordPress I know like the back of my hand!”
If you could do a blogspot – wordpress – drupal review that would be even more great for me that uses the first two ones only.
I was making a blog couple a days ago, and I remebered I read this, so I started to searching a little more info about drupal, and wanted to try it, but in the end, I gave up, maybe I’m just dummy but it looks lot more difficult to set up and maintain than Wordpress.
Does mailchimp Have good relations with AOL postmasters and the like?
Drupal, Wordpress, and Joomla comparison would be sweet also!
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I think WP just has so much more support, in terms of plug ins, themes, and general tech support. Didn’t seem like there were as many extras for Drupal, and it seems like English is not the creator’s native language; much of the documentation was tough to read because of the broken English.