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8 Ways WordPress Beats Drupal and Joomla

mike-johnston Profile

WordPress is a monster in the CMS industry, to the point that it's almost unfair how many websites are powered by the popular open source CMS. With a whopping 23.4% of the web running WP, it's amazingly popular and far surpasses any other CMS in the world. Today, I'm going to share with you my thoughts on why WordPress beats Drupal and Joomla. I'm going to do so by sharing what I consider to be the 8 ways it does this.

8 Ways WordPress Beats Drupal and Joomla

  1. Ease of use

    When it comes to ease of use, WordPress is definitely the king amongst these three. Not only does it have one of the simplest and most straight forward interfaces, it far exceeds Drupal and Joomla when it comes to usability (in my humble opinion). WordPress has been used by many projects as a model for how to do a proper user interface and continues to improve with each new update. For an overall writing experience, it also offers a very unique distraction free writing mode which allows you to focus solely on your writing. Drupal, for instance, has an interface that fosters confusion and feels too complex. It doesn't feel as fluid as I'd like to see from such a powerful CMS. Joomla has some oddball ways of navigating the menus and accomplishing simple tasks and still needs some work (although over the years I've seen some good improvements).

  2. Ease of Installation

    WordPress is incredibly easy to install, the entire process is very, very straight forward and requires little knowledge. Having said that, services like Fantastico have made it much easier to install all three of these CMS with relative ease. Without Fantastico however, WordPress is definitely the simpler of the three. Even better, if you are using a hosting service like Bluehost, it couldn't get much easier with their automated tools and WordPress managed hosting services.

  3. Word of mouth

    This is rather obvious but given the popularity of WordPress, it gets more word of mouth than Joomla or Drupal and is far more likely to be recommended as a solution than the other two. This can, however, result in people using WordPress for purposes outside the products means so it's a double edges sword in some cases.

  4. Theming options

    Sure, themes aren't the end all be all but for those looking to start a new website from scratch, they are certainly a huge help and with WordPress as popular as it is, there are literally thousands if not millions of themes out there to choose from. New theme development agencies are popping up every day offering more and more options to choose from which again, leads to more and more adoption of the CMS. Joomla is second to WordPress when it comes to theming and the situation with Drupal is just bad. There might be one or two decent Drupal theme companies out there but the work is often poor or unappealing to the masses (feel free to correct me if you know of some I'm unaware of).

  5. Community

    The WordPress community is nothing short of massive. With a huge number of blogs running on the WordPress.com hosted platform in addition to the downloadable version, WordPress has a community of millions of users around the world. This allows for a much quicker turn around for support questions and it's much much easier to find someone with the ability to assist in either developing plugins or a theme for your website. With a community this large, there are definite advantages.

  6. Integrations

    Almost any type of web software available has an integration with WordPress already in place or is working on one. This saves significant time working with code and allows users of the platform to benefit from the ease of use it's best known for. When integrating with a third party service involves a quick process rather than editing code, the world becomes an easier place for those looking to expand their websites with new functionality. Furthermore, with a massive directory of plugins, it's easy to accomplish new things and expand your website by simply installing a new plugin.

  7. Niche Adoption

    Since WordPress was a blog platform first and foremost, there was little competition other than Blogger to contend with. As a result, WP was quickly able to establish itself as the king of hte ring in this arena. As blogging became more popular, more of those individuals who first started out using WP for their blogs started to look at how they could continue their love affair with the plaform by adopting it to other niches. As a result, WordPress now can be used for far more than just blogging and continues to grow in capability.

  8. Ease of Development

    WordPress is a very simple CMS to use to develop websites. I've worked with it for years to build a number of sites including originally using it to power this very website you are reading this on. We are now powered by Processwire but I used WordPress to begin with to help me get this far. In addition, I built my wife's website, http://www.thekitchenmagpie.com (through which she ended up signing a book deal with Random House) as well as a ton of others such as http://www.baconhound.com and many others. I find the development process very straight forward and since I am self taught in PHP, easy to pick up and understand.

Now that I've shared the number of ways I think WordPress beats Drupal and Joomla, what are your thoughts? Do you agree? Disagree? Let me know in the comments below (but please do play nice!)

~Mike