WordPress & Drupal: Community and Contribution Differences and Lessons

WordPress and Drupal are two leading content management platforms on the web. They have similarities in community and architectures, but they also have remarkable differences in the same.

In this session I’ll go through community, contribution, architecture, and open source differences and lessons including:

Community similarities and differences
Plugin / Module conceptual and architectural differences
Differences in the communities’ approach to open source and contribution
Lessons that can be learned and adapted from all of the above.
This will not be an overly technical session, but will be suitable for anyone looking to learn from “off the WordPress island”.

Transcript

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2. Mike Herchel
   @mikeherchel
   

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5. Overview
   • Perceptions
   • Similarities
   • Core Differences
   • What can Drupal learn from WordPress?
   • What can WordPress learn from Drupal?
   

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6. Perceptions
   

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9. Similarities
   

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10. Both are Tools to do a job
    

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11. Free Open Source Software FTW!
    

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12. Both use PHP
    

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13. Both use themes/templates for site
    appearance, and plugins/modules
    for extending features
    

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14. Both have amazing and strong
    communities
    

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15. https://central.wordcamp.org/schedule/
    

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16. https://www.drupical.com/
    

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17. https://www.phase2technology.com/blog/open-atrium-2-proudly-invented-elsewhere/
    Terminology
    

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18. Terminology
    Module → Plugin
    Node → Post
    Block → Widget
    Acquia → Automattic
    Drupalcon → WordCamp US
    DrupalCamp → WordCamp
    Drupal Assoc. → WordPress Found.
    Content Types → Post Types
    

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19. “Core Differences”
    

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20. • More developer centric
    • More developed APIs
    • Symfony PHP framework in core
    • Object Oriented PHP
    • Twig Templating
    • Configuration export to version control
    • Separate DB tables per field
    • No auto-updates
    • No auto-installation of themes
    Drupal’s Architecture
    

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21. • Drupal’s modules more like tools that enable you to
    build additional functionality
    • Drupal modules have a built in API that allows them
    to set dependencies to other modules
    • Its very common for modules to depend on ones
    created by different authors, with very few conflicts.
    • It’s not uncommon for Drupal sites to have over 100
    modules installed.
    Drupal’s Architecture
    

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22. • Drupal separates functionality from theme
    • Drupal’s theme is used to render markup around
    functionality, in addition to styling and JavaScript
    • Site Building: Functionality is generally built using core
    modules such as fields and Views
    • Non-standard markup
    • Makes it more difficult to purchase themes with built in
    functionality
    Drupal’s Architecture
    

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23. WordPress and Drupal Economies
    

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24. Extension Ecosystem
    

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25. WordPress Ecosystem
    • Robust theme ecosystem
    • Very common to pay money for themes
    • Incentivizes people to create new themes
    • Robust plugin ecosystem
    • Common to pay money
    • Incentivizes people to create new plugins
    

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26. Drupal Economy
    • No modules for sale (all are free on Drupal.org)
    • Incentivizes code contributions
    • Developers make money by consulting
    • Having more contributions to code enables you to
    charge more
    • Incentivizes community to not reinvent the wheel,
    but to improve / collaborate on existing wheel.
    

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27. Drupal Economy
    • Weak commercial theme ecosystem
    • Because functionality is so decoupled from
    presentation, markup is generally one-off, which
    makes it difficult to have turn-key themes.
    • Because of that, there’s not a large selection of
    commercial themes, Drupal sites tend to be more
    complicated and want custom themes.
    

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28. What can Drupal learn from WordPress?
    

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31. On-boarding New Devs
    • Theme browser integrated into dashboard*
    • Module browser integrated into dashboard*
    • Automatic updates*
    

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32. More Needed Changes
    • Media management
    • More core committers
    • Better Documentation Tools
    • Easier updates between major versions
    

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33. Preserving backward compatibility often requires
    that you drag historical baggage along, and in
    interpreted languages like PHP, this comes at a
    significant performance cost.
    — Dries Buytaert in 2006
    

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34. Updating from Drupal 8's latest version to Drupal
    9.0.0 should be as easy as updating between
    minor versions of Drupal 8.
    — Dries Buytaert in 2017
    

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35. What can WordPress learn from Drupal?
    

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37. More & Better APIs
    • FormAPI / RenderAPI
    • Ability to manage content types and fields though
    GUI (FieldAPI)
    • API for plugins to depend on another which would
    enable building off one another
    

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38. More Developer Friendly
    • Robust caching
    • Configuration management
    • More / better code sprints
    

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39. Security Improvements
    • Brute force detection / Flood control
    • Set WP’s min PHP requirement to supported PHP
    version
    • Official mailing list for all security issues
    

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40. Special Thanks
    

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41. – Me (and a bunch of other people)
    Competition is
    Healthy!
    

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42. www.fldrupal.camp
    

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43. `
    Questions / Comments?
    

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