A Comparison Between Commercial Open Source Web Development, CMS And E-Commerce Systems And Existing Open Source Systems. Part 2

It is widely accepted that Wordpress is an excellent system when you want your ideas out quickly on the web. It is therefore often used as a blog, because you are out there quickly, but Wordpress can be configured in many different ways.

Wordpress is extremely easy to use and setup. It can of course work as a blog, comments are already built into the system, as well as pinging services, multiple blogger profiles, trackbacks and common features you might expect from a blog. Most of the functionality is out of the box, and works as expected without the need of customization.

But the fact that customization was not the key driver for Wordpress, also is to a certain extend its limitation. Because very often, if you try to customize or you try to do different things with the system, causes it break or disappear altogether. Wordpress is far from being developer friendly and too many times upgrades to the system causes your website to simply disappear as well along with the upgrade and the customization and modifications you made are no longer available.

Wordpress Advantages
Very easy to use and few modifications are needed
Excellent for blogging or sharing thoughts in a sequential manner
Easy learning curve, also for the not so sophisticated users

Wordpress Cons
Not developer friendly
The community seems to like to complain
Upgrades bring more bugs than fixes

If you enjoy tweaking the code that makes up the framework of a website, then Drupal is probably for you. This advanced content management system is more a developer platform than a traditional CMS. Its not to say that only developers can use the system though, but to say that they will feel more at home here than in the other two. Interestingly, being more developer friendly does not automatically make it more user friendly - in fact the developer has to work hard to make it that way if they need the end-product to do so.

For those that are not so developer-minded, this can be the trial of their lives, but for people who live in code - well, they can literally get lost developing some very cool websites.
Being in essence a development platform and if you are a developer and are willing to learn the ins and outs of the proprietary system, you can surely make great websites with Drupal. But you will have a hard time make it look and feel the same way as it function. The underlying technology is perfect, the usability and the design is far from being perfect. So in a lot of cases, you could end up with a perfectly working website, but that is difficult to use and is not very neat in its design.

Drupal Advantages
Extremely developer friendly, but you need to engage in proprietary Drupal code.
Strong community to help discern the dozens (hundreds) of functions and tags available.
Can be used to create some really awesome websites that can outperform a majority of other sites out there.

Drupal Cons
Not very designer and user-friendly. It's hard for someone with little code knowledge to make the leaps required to do the very cool things that Drupal is becoming known for.

Theming of Drupal has been a huge case of failure. Themes are made by developers, not designers
Getting a Drupal website published could cost you more time, and thus more money, than Wordpress or Joomla and certainly compared to commercial open source software like WebriQ.