Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler, and today we are back to the showdown. A few months ago I did a showdown between the different services online, like Squarespace, and Weebly, and Wicks, and Rainmaker, and a few others. And we really dove into those and kind of see how they compared and contrasted, versus WordPress. And now we're gonna go the self hosted route. Today we're going to look at Drupal is going to be the main topic of the show. Because we are going to look to see at different self hosted versions that you can install and run on your own webhost.

And so we’ll get to that in just a few minutes. But I wanted to tell you a few quick announcements here at the top of the show. I want to tell you about Friday. This Friday, February 6th at 10:00 a.m. Eastern, there will a webinar. And it is how to edit your premium theme the right way. I've got a few tips and tricks, and how to actually go in and figure out to change CSS. How to modify different things. How to add things that you need to your theme and your website. So we're gonna talk about that. You can register at yourwebsitenegineer.com/webinar. And again that’s at 10:00 a.m. this Friday. And if you sign up you’ll get an automatic replay.

I'll send you the link for the replay later then on Friday. All right, next up I want to talk a little bit about WordCamp Dayton. And that is going to be happening on March 20th and 21st. I'm one of the co-organizers, and I'm looking to try to find some great people to come and speak, and just hangout and have a good time here in Dayton. So if you're interested in speaking, or if you're interested in purchasing a ticket and coming to visit my hometown, you can find out more over at 2015.Dayton.WordCamp.org. And I'm excited because we are – we are looking to have a whole slew of great speakers.

And we've just selected the first few already, and the submissions keep coming in for sessions, it's gonna be amazing. It's gonna be really really fun. And I'm excited to meet people of the community that are outside the normal WordCamp – or WordPress Dayton meet up people that usually come to events on a monthly basis. And then lastly, on the same way of WordCamps, they’ve actually announced WordCamp Spain – or WordCamp Europe, excuse me. And that is going to be held in Seville, Spain. And that’s June 26th through the 28th. And so if you where in Europe, that’s where – basically they wanted to have it in late spring or early summer because they're doing the same things as what they're going to do for WordCamp San Francisco is gonna be no more.

It's gonna be WordCamp U.S. And so what basically happened was they took some of the biggest communities with great WordPress centered communities that have big meet up groups and what not. And there was three of them that actually worked together to prepare bids. It almost seems like it was like the Olympics. That countries were – they were actually competing against other WordPress meet up groups to see which ones had the biggest community, and the one in Spain actually won. So if you are in Europe, or you want to travel to Europe to do that, to hang out at WordCamp, that will be something that you want to check out.

And you can find all of the WordCamps that are coming up locally to you, over at WordCamp.org/schedule, or just head on over to WordCamp.org, and then you can see the entire schedule there. Today, the plug in for that – this one is actually really cool – and the name is Amazing Hover Effect. And believe it or not it is a pretty amazing plug in. It is a plug in that basically can give your site some amazing hover effects, using just CSS3 and eye to hover techniques. So basically you can load these up and you don’t need any special plug ins or browsers, or things, and it will just work on everybody’s computer, which are really really cool. So there's a free version and a paid version.

The free version comes with I believe like 20 some affects or something like that. And the pro version is $11, so it's not like it's really expensive to do that. But basically there's a demo and there's a link to the demo in the show notes. Along with there's a link to the plug in itself. But basically what it is, is it basically is creating all kinds of cool hover states for images. And so when you go to the demo page, you can see like the first one, if you hover over it, there's like a circle that kind of moves all at the same time in the heading, slowly fades in, and the description slowly fades in. On the next one it spins and the heading comes in. On the next one it like slides out of the way. It's just really cool.

You almost have to see it, it's very hard to describe on audio podcast. But this is something if you're looking for a little pizzazz for images on your website. You just want a little something extra, so when people are looking at a button, maybe it's a – maybe it's a button to link to a product, or affiliate, or something along those lines. Like, the effect number five I think is perfect. It kind of spins over a gradient type, or a – it's a translucent type blue background on top of it, and then it puts your heading right on top of it. It looks really cool. So I would recommend checking that out. It's kind of a newer plug in. And it's got only 6,000 downloads, but it looks really cool and I think it could do some amazing things if that’s the type of feature that you are looking for.

So today, like I said, we are going to be talking about The Showdown: The WordPress versus The Drupal. And I first wanted to just give you a quick definition about what Drupal is. And this of course comes from Wikipedia. But basically Drupal is a free and open source content management framework. Written in PHP and distributed under the GNU: General Public License. It's used as a backend framework for 2 percent of the web. And 2 percent of the website is world wide ranging from personal blogs, to corporate, to politics, and government sites including whitehouse.gov and data.gov.uk.

And it used for knowledge management and business collaboration. So that’s in a mouthful, it basically like – it's similar to WordPress because it's all written on PHP, which is nice. It is not similar to WordPress because it has 2 percent of the websites, versus 25 plus percent, or wherever we are at that point with WordPress. And so that’s kind of the similarities and the comparisons. And the standard release of Drupal, known as Drupal Core. They're very similar to WordPress Core. It contains basic features common to content management systems. This includes stuff like account registration and maintenance, menu management, RSS feeds, taxonomies, page layout customizations and system administration.

The Drupal Core installation can serve as a simple website, a single or multi-user blog in internet form or a community website providing for user generated content. And so Drupal is one of those biggest competitors, if you're saying that in quotation marks because that’s what a lot of people that don’t use WordPress, that’s what they use. Even though the market share is much much lower, it’s probably for the bigger companies that are using Drupal. So, the companies that are spending $100,000 to build a website, they're probably built on – they might be built on Drupal, whereas the WordPress sites are more the $10,000 to $20,000, or even the $1,000 to $40,000 range.

You know, you’ve got a lot of range with WordPress sites. And so I thought this was a good opportunity to just kind of go in and try to figure out a little bit about Drupal, how it works, and just to look at it for a little bit of time. Now, something that happened a few years ago, and this was back when I was in college. I was building websites for friends, and I had a few small little projects. And I was just really getting to learn HTML. And somebody asked me like – they're like, “Hey, you should go offer your services to one of the colleges.” You know, one of the university – or one of the colleges inside of my university, maybe they have some needs for – this could be more of a, not necessarily a work study job, you know, where I get paid, but it would be to – work study in the United States is to get paid.

You work so you can get paid to take off some of your tuition. But this would be like a fully fledged job where you could bid out. And so I actually did this for the College of Business at my university. I went in, I setup a proposal. I forget how much I was gonna charge: $20 or – I think it was $20 an hour. And I was gonna do all of this stuff. And I was gonna build this great piece of website. And right at that time is when they just started to move to Drupal. A new guy came in that was overseeing was everything and they were moving everything to Drupal. And I was like, “What is this?”

And it just kind of blew my mind that you could easily enter stuff – I could enter stuff on my computer without having a lot of access, and then they could format it and make it look pretty and put it on the website. It really blew my mind and kind of opened my eyes to that content management thing. And so when I got started with WordPress I'm like, “Wow, this is so much easier than Drupal.” And today when I installed Drupal, and started configuring and setting up, I was like: this is the same thing as what – this was the problem that I had before. It was very hard to use and things like that.

And so some of the things that we're gonna talk about, I'm not gonna go in super super depth because we are all WordPress users, that’s the reason that you're listening to this show. And you most likely are not gonna be switching to something else. But I thought I could compare and contrast a little bit about the differences between WordPress and Drupal. So Drupal, much like some of those other content management systems that I reviewed in 2014, doesn’t have a frontend or a backend, much like those other services. Like, they – everything appears in the themes, with the theme site of the background.

So when you login, it's basically like you have your menu, is kind of put wherever you want. So you can put the menu on the left, you can put it on the right. And this is the admin menu. So right now on the default theme that I have, I have my admin menu down the left side. And it basically has four pieces to it. It’s got four main parent menu items. And one’s my account, one’s create content, one’s administer, and one is logout. And that’s basically all there is, like you can put those things there, that what comes out of the box by default. So one of the really cool things that I liked about – what I liked about Drupal is you can actually customize this menu.

So for instance, like the how to organize a menu structure is buried really deep inside of like – under administration, and then content management, and then under about three more levels, and it was always a pain to get to. But you can rearrange these admin menus to put them exactly where you want them. So I moved my menus right underneath my account, so I could get to that boom, just as fast as I could. You know, because that’s going to be something that when you're building a site from very scratch, you know, you're going to be setting up menus. And you're going to be setting up: okay, this is how my pages need to look, and stuff like that. So I thought that was really cool.

And then when I'm done with there, then I can just kind of move it out of the way. Kind of like you're almost setting kind of bookmarks, or like favorites. Like, hey, I want to be able to get to this really really quick. So you can move those menus there. So that was really kind of cool. And so that was kind of my first instinct – well, that wasn’t the first thing because it took me awhile to actually figure out that I could do that. I guess, let’s dive in and say the very first thing that I found out in themes, are themes are broken down into what are called blocks. And so I kind of will say that blocks are the equivalent of widget areas within WordPress. And so with this default theme that I have, there was basically different – there was different blocks.

There was a sidebar block, a left and a right. There was content, so that was the main body of the page. There was a header, and there was a footer block. I can move modules into different sections of these blocks. Now it wasn’t quite as intuitive. You know, I'm looking at my website and I can see like the dashed dotted lines in the areas, like left sidebar, right sidebar, footer, things like that. But I couldn’t actually from that widget page; I couldn’t actually drag them to those specific areas. I had to drag them up and down to get them into – it was a basically a list view. So it said at the top, it was like header.

And then you could put anything that you wanted in the header, whether that be a logo, or a menu, or anything like that. So the Drupal’s themes are broken down into blocks. And of course, you could probably add more if you knew what you were doing. I had no idea how to add more to this particular theme, so I basically was stuck with the four or five areas that were built right in. Another section and another feature of Drupal is called modules. And modules are the equivalent of plug ins. And so right now today it looks there's more than 16,000 modules to choose from. And it's kind of a – you can go over to Drupal.org, and you can do a search, and you can download and install these different modules.

And so that was one of the big ah ha moments too with these plug ins, or these modules, you can't install them from your dashboard. You actually have to download them, you have to unzip them, and then you have to upload them to your server, into the modules folder with an FTP client. Much like a manual installation of a WordPress plug in, but WordPress now has that slick little user interface. You search their WordPress repository right inside your dashboard. And then you're able to hit a button and say install and then it's just done. You don’t have extra files residing on your desktop, or in your downloads folder, or anything like that.

So I also noticed that the modules, when you search, like you can search there the different maintenance statuses, development statuses, module categories, core compatibility, status, features, you know, there's a bunch of different things. And then the crazy part is, then you have to look to get the right version. So WordPress, you know, is – you know, everything is normally up to date, and it's always good with the latest version. And you have to be careful when you install an older version of a plug in with an older version of WordPress, that’s when you really have to test. With Drupal, you have to like – you just have to pick the one that they have tested the best.

So like I'm looking at one of these that I couldn’t install, and it says basically recommended releases. And I could have – I need to download version 1.6, if I'm version seven of Drupal. But if I'm on version six of Drupal, I have to take 1.11. And so those are zipped out, and I can see the date that they’ve been last updated and things like that. And so it just – it seems like it's a little bit more cumbersome to get something that’s not out dated, and get the right piece up and running. I should have said when I installed Drupal, I used the one click install, much like you can do the one click install for WordPress.

And I was prompted with, do I want version six or do I want version seven? And I was like I don't know, like I don't know the difference between them and I'm just doing a test site. So I tried to install version seven, and there was some configuration error and it couldn’t be loaded. And I'm still working with my hosting provider to try to get that fixed to see if I can take a look and see what version seven looks like. But I was able to download version 6.4, I think is what was preloaded there within my hosting company. And so I went ahead and did that, and that’s the one I played with and took a look at. So those themes we've got, remember they’ve got their blocks, they’ve got modules, and they have themes.

And themes are very similar, I mean almost identical to the themes in WordPress. There's an area within Drupal.org that you can search for different themes. At this time there's just over 1,300 themes in the Drupal repository. And themes just like the modules need to be installed by downloading them, unzipping them, and uploading them to your theme’s directory. And so there was no really even visuals, I don’t think, when I was looking for themes. Like, let me see here, maybe there was. Yeah – uh, no there isn't really. They have screenshots of like the theme – it’s like the theme logo, but there doesn’t seem to be a very easy way to find out.

Like, Bootstrap 3 has a framework that can be used for Drupal, but there's no way for me to preview what that theme is gonna look like. So that’s kind of like it's gonna take a little bit more time to try and figure out: okay, I've maybe got to go over to this website. I got to try to figure out: okay, what does this theme look like before I actually install it? The main overview that I got from Drupal was this is a perfect platform for somebody who wants a content management system and that’s it. They just want ability to have somebody login and put information in, but they don’t want to have any other disruptions. They want to hand code and build everything else themselves.

And I think that’s probably where that is best suited for users or for developers because they don’t want to have to interfere with – maybe they don’t want to have to learn all the hooks and everything that you have to use for WordPress. But they want a great looking site that’s going to be powerful, that’s going to withstand a lot of heavy beating, a lot of traffic, things like that. Some of the things I struggled finding when I was trying to use Drupal, I couldn’t figure out how to edit a page, or even find the dashboard of a page that didn’t have a menu item. So if you create a page and you don’t create a menu item for it, I had no idea how to go back in there and fix it. There’s no like pages area, where it lists all the pages top to bottom.

So I created a couple and I have no idea where they are. I don’t know how to get them back. I don't know how to – I didn’t find and easy way to export content. I did a little quick search if I wanted to move from Drupal to WordPress, and there's some ways to do it, and you have to use a third party server, so you have to – you know, it's kind of hokey how you do it. It’s not like an easy like: oh, let’s export everything from WordPress and then I can use it wherever I want, or just export the database. You can always export the database, but I'm not sure exactly if that would be importable right into WordPress.

And then, I also noticed that there was – even after looking for some modules, I couldn’t find any that would do like CSS customizations. In order to – you know, like with WordPress, you can either use a plug in to make some custom CSS tweaks, or sometimes it's build into themes, or you can use Jetpack. Or you can use even just the visual editor; you can just go right in there and make some changes. I couldn’t find out a way to do that, so basically you have to – you know, you have to mock everything up on your computer. You’d have to save it and then you’d have to upload it back up.

So that’s kind of where I got to the mindset of this is more of a developer type CMS, where people can go in, the developers can go in, they can do the stuff that they need. They can add classes and IDs and everything they need to make that website look exactly like they like. Some cool features like I said, one of the things was that admin menu, so you can drag them to the places that you would use most regularly, you can go ahead and do that. Another cool piece that was built right in was a – it was called a top page not found errors. And this was an area where you could just go and you could look to see how many pages had reached – or how many times somebody had reached a 404 page.

And so for example, like if you just type in 1,2,3,4,5, after the URL, like it would show how many time people actually clicked 1,2,3,4,5, and went to that specific URL. Which I thought that was kind of neat, like that was a neat way to – it was all built right into the dashboard. Another thing that was cool is they have site maintenance built right in. So if you wanted to just turn it off, you know, you basically – it was kind of a standard generic page, didn’t look like you could do a lot of customizations. But you could basically say: this site is offline for right now. I'm working on it and I'll be back a little bit later.

So that was some of the cool pieces that I found. I mean, it's basically – it looks a lot – there are a lot of similar features that WordPress has. Like I said, there's RSS Publishing, there's taxonomies for different categories, there are content types, so you can use different content types, or comments that you can use within Drupal, which is nice. You can do access rules, so you can basically say that certain user names can't login, or you give permissions for different people, who have different roles. You know, maybe some people can only view; some people are authors, things like that.

That’s all built in. They do have some other reporting things. You can view logs right within side you Drupal dashboard, things like that. And then, you build the site with the blocks, modules, and themes. One other thing that I did notice, and I think this is true, and I think I've heard kind of nightmares on upgrading from like WordPress – or from Drupal, say six, to Drupal seven. I think it's kind of a tedious process. I think the way that it works is you basically – you keep like your blocks, your modules, and your themes, you keep these folders, and then you remove everything else on your server, and then you bring – then you unzip the newer version, and then you have to push all of those back up to your server.

So you're basically reinstalling it completely from scratch. I could be wrong, but I think it – I've heard horror stories of people upgrading to the newest version. And they have to test everything and make sure everything works right and things like that. So, that’s kind of Drupal in a nutshell. I think it's a perfect tool for certain developers. The people that want to control everything, but maybe they don’t need to give their clients access to the things that – you know, to make updates and changes, but they want an easy way to update and change. There are a lot of different people that could use Drupal and it would work really well for them. I think though as WordPress users, you look at it and you're like, “Wow, this looks kind of old and ancient.”

But I'm sure there's a lot of power under the hood. There are a lot of things that it might be able to do that we can't do with WordPress. Or maybe there are some free modules that are out there that we have to pay for within Word Press or things like that. But overall, I was kind of impressed. Like, yes, it's difficult, but it was still kind of intuitive. I would say on the scale of intuitiveness, like it was definitely the lowest one of any of the systems that I've tested before. And next week when I look at Joomla, I'm afraid that Joomla is probably gonna be along those same lines as kind of a lot of clunkiness.

There's really no images. There's no like even icons or anything, it's just all text – or text and links with descriptions underneath them of what each item is. So kind of basic, kind of generic, but I think Drupal could be good for certain people, like I said. All right, well that is going to wrap up this Showdown episode. I've got at least two more that are coming in the upcoming weeks. We're just gonna do brief high level overviews of some of the competitors. Maybe some of the things that we can learn from them and what we can do to implement them or create plug ins to do similar things within WordPress.

And so it's always kind of fun to step back and look at something as a brand new user, and figure out: hey, is this better, or worse, or how can we make WordPress better? So that’s what I wanted to share with you. Don’t forget to sign up for the webinar on Friday: yourwebsiteengineer.com/webinar. We’ll talk to you next week. Take care. Bye.