Drupal has a huge following and a very impressive community of contributors, it seems to be growing in popularity every week which is made apparent by the number of contracts available requiring Drupal experience. Surely it must be good in that case, right?

Because of this I decided I should make some effort to run after the bandwagon, waving and shouting in the hope they’ll let me hop on for the ride. I have been completely focused on back end PHP development for a couple of years now and I was beginning to feel left behind by the industry. Don’t get me wrong here, it’s not PHP that I’m left behind with -far from it in fact – I have probably been pushing PHP well ahead of the industry if anything. I’ve been Porting techniques from Java, and really pushing object oriented development in very enterprise level applications. I’ve been focused on real gritty backend systems development and the web 2.0 movement has got all fired up and started running around like a dog at dinner time while I’ve been sat in my dark room obsessing about making scalable & efficient budget strategy management systems for my employer, TradeDoubler.

Granted, it’s been exciting stuff to work with, but I’ve decided it’s time to hedge my bets on the direction of PHP. If I remain a solely backend developer then I’m putting absolute faith in the direction PHP as a language is going to take, and this strikes me as foolish, so once again I’m opening the dark room door and stepping in to the blinding light of web development.

So, what’s all this got to do with Drupal being shit? Well, Drupal was my first port of call on the journey to web 2.0 acceptance. I installed it on this very website, to run this very blog, but gave up in frustration. Sure, I got the blog working, but actually managing the content of a Drupal website via the admin area was tedious at best. It’s unintuitive, and if I’m going to be using a Content Management System, then I jolly well expect managing content to be the top priority when it comes to making things quick and easy.

Then there’s the code behind it all Maybe I’ve spent too long in my dark room surrounded by elegant design patterns and silky smooth OO, but I took one look at the Drupal source and was instantly reduced to a quivering wreck.

So, I installed Wordpress, which straight out of the box is much easier to actually get a working site up and running and much, much more usable and intuitive. Also, contrary to popular opinion, Wordpress is not just a piece of blogging software, it’s a fully fledged CMS.

But Drupal is much more powerful than Wordpress! I can here the echoes of Drupal fans already and I’m not even going to try and disagree with them, I shall take it for granted; If you’re building “complex” websites then Drupal is more more suited to the job than Wordpress. Fine, I’ll accept that without a fight, but I will say this; if you’re building “complex” websites, then a solid MVC framework is far, far more powerful, flexible and scalable than Drupal ever will be.

If you’re building a complicated website, then go with Symfony, because as soon as you want to do anything more than manage content, it is a much better choice for absolute control over your applcation, and if you just want to manage content on a fairly simple website, well, I’d choose Wordpress all day long… if only the community support was up there with the behemoth of the Drupal develop collective!