Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

Dries Buytaert re-tweeted a couple of interesting things on Twitter earlier today. First was this one:

RT @chx1975: WordPress is now approximately where Drupal was around Drupal 5 w/ content types. See you in 2015.

Ouch. Okay, so we’re late to the game where custom content types are concerned. But I doubt it will take us until 2015 to catch up.

But Dries is even-handed, and calls fair game when someone retorts in favor of WordPress:

Agreed, and fair enough. RT @newoceans_en: @Dries Drupal 7 will hopefully be where WordPress was around 5 years ago regarding UX.

I haven’t had a chance to look at the Drupal 7 user interface yet, so I can’t say if that’s a fair comparison or hyperbole. But, I suspect that five years of catching up is another exaggeration. But these two statements do highlight one difference between where each project has focussed their attention over the years: Drupal has essentially been building a robust content management framework, and is working towards usability. WordPress started with ease-of-use and is becoming a more capable content framework.

I think that in both cases, this is a result of project leaders listening to their respective communities. I’ve seen many instances of WordPress developers saying “Drupal makes it easy to do X. Why can’t WordPress do that?”, or Drupal developers saying “People like WordPress because it’s so easy to use, right out-of-the-box. Why can’t Drupal be like that?” Each project is learning from the strengths and success of the other. And that’s awesome, because everybody wins.

It seems to me that both communities have a lot of good things to look forward to.