Is Drupal or WordPress best for site editors?

Building a new website generally involves our clients saying 'goodbye' to their old one. Sometimes, moving on is accompanied by a huge sigh of relief, but it's always a hurdle for site administrators to get to grips with content publishing on a new website.

If the old one was built in WordPress, site editors are sometimes concerned that moving to Drupal for editorial tasks will be tough. Over the past week or two, we've received feedback independently from several customers, who have all migrated to Drupal from WordPress in the past quarter. It's been gratifying to see an emphatic 'thumbs up' across the board for the Drupal experience. Their new site has been a joy to use from a site editor perspective.

Here is what they said:-

Because Drupal insists you think through the underlying architecture carefully, the route through the admin interface is quicker to navigate and easier to pick up;

the editor screens are uncluttered and consistent across the site, so there's no intimidating learning curve;

it's easy to model a sensible editor workflow amongst a staff team and to moderate content;

it's straightforward to keep on top of user management and publishing schedules;

routine content publishing jobs are simpler to perform and more intuitive in Drupal;

training costs are very modest.

So a well-built Drupal site is easy to master for the site administrator team. Perhaps this can be put down to having a better structure than WordPress, which leads to simpler, more considered routes through the admin screens. This can help content strategies too, since we all know that if a job is not a chore, we're more likely to do it on time.

As developers, we chose Drupal at Sereno because we liked its security record, its solid performance for busy sites and its modular design principles. At the back-end, the community-maintained modules are freely-available, so they tend to work nicely together and last longer. In fact, some of our Drupal sites have been going quite happily for many years without needing a rebuild, but still performing nicely as new devices emerge. It's good to hear that solid technical choices are reflected in a simpler admin experience.

Of course, a well-planned WordPress site will always be easier to use than a poorly-built Drupal one - there's much more to this than simply choice of technology. But it's nice to hear our vote for Drupal borne out by the experience of site editors - that moving to Drupal from WordPress feels like an upgrade.