CMS

Andy Senay
Contents
Websites ............................................................................................................................................... 2
Functionality ........................................................................................................................................ 2
Support for different business models ................................................................................................. 2
Available visual site managment tools and reporting .......................................................................... 2
Performance and stability .................................................................................................................... 2
Connectivity to existing business systems ........................................................................................... 3
Compliance with standards .................................................................................................................. 3
Global and multicultural capability ..................................................................................................... 3
Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................... 4
Bibliography ........................................................................................................................................ 5

Websites
WordPress is a Content Management System (CMS) with which you can build and maintain a website.
WordPress once started as a simple blogging system, in which the home page of your website always
showed your latest (blog) posts. Fortunately, you can now do a lot more with WordPress: it is now an
extensive CMS with a whole ecosystem of plugins and themes around it. In fact, WordPress is now so good
that it is even used by large companies. The question "What is WordPress?" cannot be answered just like
that (wordpress, 2020).

Drupal is a software package that allows you to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of
content on a website. Drupal is used by tens of thousands of people to create different types of websites.
Drupal is an open source software under the GPL license. It is maintained and developed by a global
community of thousands of users and developers. Drupal is free to download and use (drupal, 2020).

Functionality
Wordpress and Drupal use open source technology for creating websites, meaning you code it yourself.
They are free to use and have paid upgrades. On wordpress however you can use drag and drop themes for
an easy template, Drupal also has themes but it encourages custom development. This makes Drupal way
harder to use than Wordpress especially if you have no knowledge of coding. Both of the websites have a
wide variety of plugins and modules, this adds additional functionality. Drupal is considered more
professional and advanced. Wordpress originated as a blogging platform and doesnt really hold the
capability of sustaining very large and complex websites.

Support for different business models

Both of the websites can be used to showcase your business. Wordpress is ideal fo r those who need
minimal digital marketing, like small businesses, e-commerce, startups, nonprofit organisations etc. Drupal
provides the same tools but is more ideal for big companies and organisations. If you wish to upgrade your
business site costs star t to come in, you will need to pay for a domain name and added security. Wordpress
presents four paid plans which they categorise by the type of website you need: personal, premium,
business and e-commerce. The annual prices range from €4-45, which is really not that expensive and gets
you amazing services like for example a 24/7 live chat customer support, integrations with shipping
carriers, no annoying ads etc. Drupal can be more expensive because generally the creator will hire special
technicians for the development of the site, and hiring staff of course costs you more than doing it yourself.

Available visual site managment tools and reporting

Both of the websites have a large library of free and paid themes. Wordpress has very useful plugins like
social media, the equivalent of this on Drupal is the modules. Generally the paid plugins and themes are
cheaper on Drupal than on Wordpress, the latter does have a larger selection. Drupal allows you to create
different content types because it has taxonomies, blocks and views, you can organise your data and
present it whichever way you like. It also allows for completely custom content creation, you have the
freedom to create websites from scratch, wordpress has a limit as to how customised it gets.

Performance and stability

I didn’t run into any problems with either website, they are straightforward and don’t suffer from any
lagging issues. They are mobile friendly as well, which is a very important thing to note as we encounter
more and more mobile use wether that be through smartphones or tablets. Drupal scores the best on
security, it is very extensive therefore making it a favourite amongst governments. Wordpress has weak
points in its many third party plugins that make it vulnerable to hackers. Another common problem
reported among its users is the constant updates that don’t really make noticeable differences but are just
for the sake of the platform debugging and such, people don’t like this aspect and find it very annoying.

Connectivity to existing business systems

I believe that both Wordpress and Drupal score equally on the connectivity to business systems. You can
turn your website into an online store by buying a domain name. You can pay to do e-commerce and start
selling products. Wordpress uses woocommerce and Drupal uses shopify, which is a very popular platform
that I am familiar with

Compliance with standards

Drupal is much more sophisticated than Wordpress in the sense of their good terms of service and privacy
policies. They have advanced user permissions providing controlled access to content. As well as permitting
the user more liberties like supporting multiple stakeholders on one website having site admins and
content editors separated. This is all due to their high level security. On Wordpress you can manipulate
your website by through plugins to make it more secure by adding two factor authentication for example.
There are many resources online explaining in detail how you can make your website compliant to general
data protection regulations (GDPR).

Global and multicultural capability

Wordpress and Drupal are some of the most popular CMS platforms on the internet. Both of them have a
large diverse global community. Since they are so well known and commonly used, there is a big
community of people who spend their time teaching others how to use the websites to their full potential
with clever tips and tricks. Video tutorials can be found on youtube. Drupal provides translations for
different languages making your website multilingual. Wordpress achieves this through certain plugins one
must install (drupal, 2020).


Conclusion

These two websites can coexist as they appeal to two different demographics. Wordpress is perfect for the
beginner whose goal is to create a simple but attractive website and possibly run a small business. Drupal
has due to its learning curve less of an appeal to such people and is more for the experienced. To make the
very professionally advanced sites you are required to have technical experience. Trying to make simple
websites on Drupal is just not worth it, there’s a lot of hinderance due to these advanced features.
Therefore it is recommended for big companies and organisations who require highly complex websites.

Bibliography
drupal. (2020, january). drupal. Retrieved from drupal: https://drupal.be/
wordpress. (2020, 15 May). wordpress. Retrieved from wordpress:
https://wordpress.com/nl/create/?utm_source=google&utm_campaign=google_wpcom_sear
ch_brand_desktop_be_nl&utm_medium=paid_search&keyword=wordpress&creative=3296
89992224&campaignid=668278753&adgroupid=54005829765&matchtype=e&device=c&n
etwork=g&targetid=aud-1