WordPress vs Drupal – 7 things I miss about WordPress

As you probably have noticed, at least if you are a regular reader of mine, I had to migrate from WordPress to Drupal about a month ago.

Here are two blog posts explaining the situation:

• The Heaven and Hell of Blogging
• What Did I Learn From Blogging Hell

Now, that everything seems to be working with Drupal, I still sort of miss WordPress. The reason I miss it might be because I was used to WordPress, not that it’s an excellent blogging platform. The problem with Drupal is that it’s not built for blogging, it’s a CMS and therefore, it’s built for a lot more than blogging.

There are at least seven things that I miss about WordPress:

1. It was easier to write blog posts

It was a lot easier to write blog posts with WordPress. It might be because I used systems like BlogJet (PC) and ecto (Mac). I’ve read the instructions, and I should be able to use both with drupal as well, but so far I haven’t been able to do it. I have only been receiving errors. The systems can’t find my blog.

2. I didn’t have to think about SEO

When I used WordPress, I could just publish a blog post, and depending on the topic and the keywords, it would many times turn up at the top of Google. That’s not happening at the moment. The content of my blog are the same, I’ve only migrated to drupal. I might have to do some seo stuff to get things back to Google and the other search engines.

For instance, this post Everything You Need To Know About TweetAdder is nowhere to be found on Google, even more than 24 hours after I published it. With WordPress it didn’t take many minutes before it showed up somehwere on Google.

3. There were few Page Not Founds

I never experienced any problems with WordPress, my site was online 99% of the time. At least to my knowledge. And the 1% was due to my host and not WordPress. So far, my “new” site has been online 99% of the time as well, the only difference is that some of my readers have complained that some of my blog posts are not showing. They only get “page not found” when they try to access them, and the same thing happens with my home page. I have experienced this once already, and I have no clue why this is happening.

As I’m writing this I got a page not found of one of my latest blog posts. Weird.

4. A time when webdesign was easy and cheap

My new blog design was almost finished just when all my problems started. They designed it for WordPress, not for Drupal. It seems that Drupal is a lot harder to design for (I’m just guessing), I have waited an extra two weeks for the design. In the meantime, I have searched for templates and professional designs, and I have found some, but not as many as for WordPress. Templates for WordPress are a lot cheaper and a lot more cooler. That’s probably because a lot more people and businesses are using WordPress.

5. I had all the plugins I needed (and more)

I had a lot of plugins installed on WordPress, it was plugins for close to everything. At Drupal I have found some, but only a few that I’m actually using.

6. I didn’t have to think about cron jobs

I know close to nothing about technical stuff, and one of the first things I had to do after installing Drupal (one click install), was setting up a cron job in order for people to be able to search my blog. I didn’t do this myself, I paid a techie.

7. I only had to think about content

There are no WYSIWYG editor and no file management in Drupal.

I know html, so I don’t really have a problem with this, but I preferred writing text and not thinking about the coding. With WordPress I just uploaded files, with Drupal, at least to my knowledge, I have to use FTP and then link to the files. I understand now that I can download a modul for TinyMCE, and this would provide me with a WYSIWYG editor, but so far, I using html for all my blog posts.