Make it like Facebook…or not?! Or: From WordPress to Drupal

My colleague and me had got the task of creating an intranet site “like Facebook”. OK, so we checked alternatives and installed a site with WordPress and BuddyPress.
Guess what, after we showed the result to our boss, friendships had to be removed, groups had to be removed etc. etc.
After realising we had disabled virtually every BuddyPress feature and after struggling with getting some sort of rights system into the site, we finally recognized WordPress was not the right base for our site and went looking for alternatives again. Imagine we had settled on a proprietary platform, we’d been stuck!

Then I discovered Drupal. “Oh look, they’ve got something like a structure. Oh, wow, permissions are in core modules. Cool!”

Drupal just is much more structured and generalized than WordPress. The downside is it takes you longer to figure out how things work. Maybe I should have looked into “Understanding Drupal” earlier but I just “had no time for that”. ;)

Community support is super helpful in irc or managing issues. Translation process is really cool, making it possible to edit translations in-site and (after a little configuration) also giving back to the Drupal community.

So, if you want to hack together a simple page in short time, take WordPress, but if you need a little bit more structure, I’d recommend Drupal!

Side note: As a Python fan I also tried but alas, it’s very hard to install compared to the two other systems. And if users won’t get your system installed, they won’t use it! And no, it isn’t helpful to first give you a toy server and then let you figure out how you turn it into a production system via several unconnected help documents.