Ask HN: WordPress or Drupal? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: WordPress or Drupal?

7 pointsDenisM8 comments

I have an iPhone app, and now I need a supporting website to go with it. The site should extol the virtues of the product to organic and ad visitors, allow changing the design/copy without programmers help, allow A/B testing of the same, and contain a blog and a user support forum.

So it seems that I need a CMS, and there aren't that many ways to get a CMSs that supports A/B testing. Specifically, it seems that Visual Website Optimizer is it. Hence my choice narrows down to Drupal or WordPress.

Which should I pick? I don't know PHP and I spend most of my time programming Cocoa Touch and .NET/MS-SQL (server side services).

Ideally I would also like to be able to customize the website later, adding things like end-to-end funnel tracking (extending into iTunes, and onto device itself so that I could see who bought the app). So it would be nice if the system allowed for me to ease myself into customizations without spending weeks learning things upfront.

I've used both Drupal and Wordpress. Each system has virtues. But from what you say, it sounds like you're looking for something that is going to be small and you don't want to spend a much time maintaining it. So I'd recommend wordpress. If you're using a shared hosting service, there's a good chance they already have a one click installer with automatic updates for you. So you won't have to deal with installation and updating and you can get lots of great themes for under $100. If you do go this route, my only recommendation is that you avoid using third party modules to avoid any security issues. As long as you stick with WP core and you keep the overal size of your site down then you should be fine.

Securing WordPress and using a 'small' selection of plugins to optimize performance (cache) are two critical elements of running a successful WordPress site.

If you're a non-technical user, trying to manage a website with more than 5-10 plugins is a recipe for disaster. Stick with the major plugins that are well supported and establish a relationship with a PHP/WordPress developer to bail you out if you mess something up down the road.

WordPress FTW. I deploy small CMS websites all day for my living and Drupal is just not fun (although slightly better for larger community sites). Joomla is a joke.

If you don't like WP/Drupal you can go with any of the 20 or so smaller CMS lite website-in-a-can services (Weebly etc.)

Also, the folks behind WordPress will even host and manage your blog if you blow up (VIP service).

You might take a look at ExpressionEngine. It's a PHP/MySQL driven CMS more like Drupal than Wordpress though it's not free. The benefit is that you don't need to know PHP to build templates and the templating system is much easier to use. The system also has a great forum module available.

But will I be able to hire a designer to design themes for it? The advantage of popular CMSs is that I can hire several designers for reasonably cheap to produce different designs and see which one performs better.

ExpressionEngine doesn't have themes like Wordpress or Drupal has. It's templating system is a little different. It's still all HTML / CSS though.

Here is what I would do. First have your designers create PSD mock-ups for their designs. Then, pick the winning design(s) and either have those designers build HTML / CSS from it or have someone else do this. Lastly, hire a guru of your chosen CMS to build that HTML / CSS into themes / templates.

WordPress - in my experience - is easier to deal with, while Drupal is a more complete solution, but with a steeper learning curve.

If I were you, I'd go with WordPress.

If I may add that the usability for the management of content is pretty bad with Drupal compared with WP. In my view this negates it's advantages in the 'complete solution' category.

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