WordPress & Drupal: Community and Contribution Differences and Lessons

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Mike Herchel @mikeherchel

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

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Perceptions

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Similarities

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Both are Tools to do a job

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Free Open Source Software FTW!

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Both use PHP

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

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Both have amazing and strong communities

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

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https://www.drupical.com/

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

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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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“Core Differences”

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• 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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• 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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• 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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WordPress and Drupal Economies

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Extension Ecosystem

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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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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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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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What can Drupal learn from WordPress?

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

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

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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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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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What can WordPress learn from Drupal?

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

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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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Special Thanks

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

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www.ﬂdrupal.camp

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` Questions / Comments?