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Comment by notastartup | Hacker News Reader

Why is Drupal so popular?

It's quite a good CMS. Lots of modules that let it be easily extended. Has a cli management tool (drush) that allows for a lot of automation. Non-coders can build complex content sorting and display pages with Views, etc.

It is a bit of a culture shock if you're using to spewing your PHP all over everything ala other lesser blogging tools, but once you've got your head wrapped around how it works internally, you can be very productive and do things that would be difficult/impossible in other systems with almost no code.

What a culture shock it will be once Drupal 8 comes out written on top of the Symfony framework.

Hopefully the code quality coming from an average Drupal shop will increase.

Now, can we fix the culture behind those other lesser blogging tools too, please?

I wonder if Drupal will ever recover after this incident.

I haven't used Drupal because the job postings usually advertise super low wages and I think I saw the code base and was totally freaked by how messy the modules and things were.

I won't even consider building something with Drupal unless it was secure but I'm sure this makes sense only in hindsight.

I believe it is because at one point Drupal was a pretty solid foundation for a lot of project types and was greatly flexible.

Right now WordPress is way more popular though.

Wordpress and Drupal have similar features, but typically WP is thought to be more of a blogging platform while Drupal has a platform for not just blogging, but online community, e-commerce, etc.

Well, truth be told Drupal is 13 years old and WordPress 11 years old. I am sure that they both had a lot of time to add tons of features so I am thinking that the gap between them is more in theory, judging by their roots, and less in practice. I know that WordPress has for example BuddyPress for social networking / communities and a number of (free) e-commerce plugins as well.

Yeah not really that much of a distinction these days. People have built just about anything on WordPress. Community & ecommerce are both covered pretty solidly by the plugin ecosystem.

You can build a skyscraper using a hammer, but you probably shouldn't. It's the exact same argument with WordPress and Drupal. Drupal is vastly superior for most dynamic website tasks then WordPress is. Views + content types provide that.

Having recently attempted to migrate a D6 site to D7, I really can't agree. It was a nightmare.

Moving from Joomla 2 to 3 wasn't a walk in the park, either. Mostly due to modules that were installed that simply were not compatible with version 3 and didn't have replacements.

Worked on both as a dev and decided to use WP for our business that sells mid-six figures annually through our shopping cart, which is just modified WooCommerce. I don't agree that Drupal is vastly superior at all; maintenance and sustainment is far worse with the Drupal project.

I've had the same experience and the opposite opinion.

I guess that's kind of the point. It all works just fine if you're a decent developer and know what to outsource and what to avoid. The platform/framework/language wars are a useless waste of time.

what is it that exactly sells for mid-six figure?

Retail goods and informational products. Why does it matter what it is?

In a nutshell: it's a hell of a lot easier to get going on than Drupal. I've been developing Drupal sites, along with much more experienced (general and drupal specific) developers for the past 6 months. And it's not easy to get going on.

Also, Drupal is often coined a CMS. If you google "drupal is not a cms" you'll find a number of people referring to it as CMF - content management framework. It really allows you to build a custom CMS for a specific purpose rather than customizing a CMS for a specific purpose. It may sound like semantics, but if/when you have a few Drupal sites under your belt you really get what they mean.

[edited for clarity]

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