You’ve read about my operational plan and theorems in Part I of this series. Here’s why I chose Drupal to carry out the Asian Pacific Americans for Progress website instead of WordPress.
Drupal is very good at building complex websites that can vault a nonprofit past brochureware or a blog and into the position of being #1 on your subject matter. I’m sure Joomla can do the same but there are certain Drupal practices and modules that can fundamentally alter the balance of power between your nonprofit and the competition. If your nonprofit is interested in being the biggest and baddest Website on the block and in winning your vertical, I’m pretty convinced that Drupal is the technology that can take you there. Don’t get me wrong, I still love WordPress for smaller nonprofits but once your nonprofit has started to do multi-user blogging or if your nonprofit is very aggressive in the online space, you can’t really take WordPress in that direction. However, there are caveats. You WILL need dedicated staff or retain consultants to maintain the Drupal beast. It’s not cheap.
It’s important to note here that I support the use of Acquia Drupal instead of the regular Drupal distribution that you normally find. Acquia is the company that is dedicated full-time to Drupal development in much the same way Automattic supports WordPress development. They have created a customized distribution of Drupal called Acquia Drupal that bolsters Drupal’s ability to become a community website.
Here is a quick comparison of the feature sets between WordPress and Drupal that you should be aware of.
| Feature | WordPress | Drupal |
| Upgrade without techie | Yes | Hell No |
| Multi-user blog | No | Yes |
| Automated image formatting | No | Yes |
| Complex data manipulation and presentation |
No | Yes |
| Custom content types | No | Yes |
| High amount of training for new bloggers |
No | Yes |
| Can be easily designed with magazine layout |
No | Yes |
| Unassisted embedding of video and audio |
Yes | No |
| CRM integration | No | Yes |
Ok, here’s some typical information architecture nomenclature that you’ll need to learn in order to discuss these strategies with a Web designer. Note: if your consultancy’s designer doesn’t know what you’re talking about, ask to see an information architect. If they don’t have one, they’re probably not right for your nonprofit redesign.
The river
The river is that stream of posts that you normally see in blogs. You can see this in effect on this blog with the blog entries listed by date from newest to oldest.
The (endless) queue
This is derived from a Drupal module called “nodequeue”. It basically allows you to order articles at will in whatever order your editors so desire. You won’t need a user to go in and manually hack out some HTML to make headlines for all the other blog entries on your site. In other words, it’s a human-powered headline builder for your website.
The teaser
This is the first few lines of the article used by Drupal and by WordPress to entice users to click on a link to that article.
The teaser thumbnail
This is the picture that accompanies the teaser. I also use teaser thumbnail videos but that’s a much more advanced tactic that I’ll discuss in another article.
Your Strategies
Nonprofit strategies mentioned in Part I that fall underneath the purview of a Drupal installation include (listed in the order that it would be encountered by the average reader):
- Magazine-style layouts
- News aggregation
- Editorial filtering function
- Blogging community
Key modules we will be discussing will be blog, imagecache, nodequeue, Content Construction Kit (CCK) and Views. These modules constitute the core of any good Drupal community site as together they allow for a nearly infinite level of layout customization. CCK and Views are a profoundly powerful aspect of Drupal but they require a high level of technical knowledge to use properly. CCK allows you to create customized blog entries in which certain fields are used to specifically fill in portions of a magazine layout like the teaser thumbnail Views are a way in Drupal to customize the ordering and layout of specific pieces of content on your Web site. Those of you who have used report builders in Raiser’s Edge or Crystal Reports will be surprised that there is now the same capability in a CMS. Learn more about Views here. For those of you in Joomla world, CCK and Views don’t have any equivalents although there is something in beta that is rolling out.
Magazine-style layouts
Magazine-style layouts in Drupal are basically concerned with the layout of content comprised of a teaser, a teaser thumbnail, meta information like the name of the author and date, and the article itself. Let’s take a quick look at a typical “design pattern” for the headlines section of a web newsite.
Typical News Headline Design
It’s almost impossible to build this into a WordPress design consistently because WordPress has no built-in facility to automatically resize and crop images to fit into a specific size. WordPress is wonderful at one-blog-entry-at-a-time posting. However, a magazine style layout will require the ability to reformat and resize content into an existing template. WordPress doesn’t have that capability. By using CCK, Drupal allows developers to customize blog entries that a user fills out which can then be reformatted to fit an existing template. In essence, you can make a magazine lay-out composed of blog entries. In fact, the APAP web site is a perfect example of this, you’ll notice that an image is repurposed as a teaser thumbnail and as the lead image on many of the articles there. That’s only possible because of the imagecache module which allows for the dynamic resizing of your pictures depending on its position in a page. When you combine this all with Views, you have the groundwork for an automated news magazine website built entirely by your user community.
News aggregation
Your nonprofit will have to create personal blogging environments for its staff. This is where social media is remarkably useful and I wholly endorse THIS kind of use. Basically, you open up a Twitter account and start following other Twitterers who are in the same policy area as your nonprofit. You can also set up RSS feeds to do the same thing. Between Google Reader and Tweetdeck (I use Twhirl), you can have a fairly robust set of news items flowing into your desktop in real-time. Your editors can then pluck the necessary items from their feeds and write about it on the site. APAP has gotten a lot of hits using this process and has eventually gotten good search engine results page (SERP) rankings over time. This is crucial to building up your PageRank. When I started working with APAP, it was at three and now it’s at five. It’s moving up in the world. Also, it’s old Website Grader score was in the low 30s. It’s now at 95.5 indicating that we’re pushing up at the top of what’s available in terms of SEO but I still have a few tricks left up my sleeve to push that up higher.
Editorial filtering function
This strategy requires nonprofits to get their head wrapped around using their expert domain knowledge to filter out news items for their users. Once nonprofit management understands this, you need to implement this in Drupal. Here is the design pattern you should follow for this strategy.
Aggregate Your Headlines With a Nodequeue
What you are doing with an editorial filtering function is two things: your nonprofit is telling your users what it thinks is incredibly important to read with one big headline and your nonprofit is shaping content based on site traffic using your queue. Basically, your editors can see what is getting read by users in real-time and then adjust the queue accordingly. This is how the “Top Five” section gets reordered every day by editors on the Asian Pacific Americans for Progress site. If a post is in the river and starts getting traffic, we push it up to the Top Five to accelerate that process. The three modules you need for this is nodequeue, Views and imagecache. The nodequeue module should be installed so that your editors can reorder the queue to suit their taste but the Views module is how you present the queue to your users. Imagecache is useful to dynamically resize your pics to fit the different layout options you can give yourself.
Can you do this in WordPress? Oddly, before I even heard about what nodequeue and Views could do, I actually had a crude node queue running at asianamericansforobama.com. With the help of another techie volunteer, we wrote a nodequeue-like piece of code that reordered the WordPress loop so that it would highlight the ten headlines with different colors and points sizes. This is why you see the large Huffington Post-style headlines over at that site. It wasn’t an easy kludge either and was prone to a problem wherein users would add too many posts to the queue. I very much prefer nodequeue over our WordPress hack.
Blogging community
Multi-user blogging capabilites are available out of the box with Acquia Drupal and it’s fairly easy to simply turn on the blog module. This blog module is so attuned to a multi-user blog format that it has to be differently configured for single-user blogging. There’s even room to support distinct RSS feeds for every blog generated by every user. While Drupal can be extremely maddening at times, this is one of the things it gets incredibly and totally right.
In the end, your blogging workflow should look something like this:
Information Workflow
Basically, information from the outside world gets sliced and diced by your staff, which in turn, gets turned into user-generated content by your community.
Your Mission Should You Choose to Accept It
I don’t think you should go out and set up a Drupal site tomorrow. In fact, if you already have a Joomla site, there’s a good chance you can do this as well. What I do think is that nonprofit managers and techies should work together to iron out these sorts of information architecture issues. Simply by improving the ability of the user to focus on important headlines, APAP generated a 10.73% increase in time on site while simultaneously seeing a 19.62% increase in absolute unique visitors during the month immediately after these changes were rolled out. To grow in site traffic yet improving the length of each reader’s engagement with a web site is pretty hard to do. Generally speaking, any growth in site traffic tends to mean a decrease in average time on site. However, we were able to forestall that from occurring with the new information architecture redesign.
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Huffiington Post is based not on Drupal, but Movable Type.
Yes, I know. Can you point out where in the article I made that claim?
Almost everything you put as a "no" with WordPress can be done! You just have to dig in a bit.
agree, those NO are fake.
Have at it, Matt! Which nos do you think are inaccurate? And by dig in a bit, do you mean writing code or do you mean using existing plugins. And why didn't you introduce yourself? Photomatt is Matt Mullenweg, the guy who runs Automattic and the guy who helped craft WordPress from it's origins in another CMS project, B2.
And to help us to avoid yet another platform "war", let's preface this by saying that I'm a long-time user of WordPress but I also believe in not saddling nonprofits with a lot of custom code. I believe that if WordPress wanted to solve some of the issues I wanted to solve for nonprofits that it would require custom code. Matt, I'd love for you to list specific plug-ins that you think can resolve those issues. I'd also love to know if there was a WordPress equivalent to the CCK, Views, nodequeue and imagecache Drupal modules and I will gladly rewrite the article with those findings in mind.
Again, please list the "nos" that you object to and specific plugins that you think will resolve those issues.
Multi-user blog
wordpress comes with ability to setup multiple users, simply add them in the admin panel
Automated image formatting
you can setup defined sizes (thumbnail and "medium" size) this since wordpress 2.6
Complex data manipulation
and presentation
dont know what you mean, but many things can be done with "1 click install" plugins.
Custom content types
jpg, txt, mp3, swf… what else do you need?
High amount of training for
new bloggers
Wordpress features a whole website based on training wordpress.org they also made the wordpress.tv full of video tutorials
Can be easily designed with
On 06.26.09 Allan Benamer said:
magazine layout
lol! just install the right template! (example:
righini, thank you for following up! Let me try to answer your comments one at a time.
1. I'm discussing WordPress not WordPress MU which is an entirely different beast altogether. I think WordPress MU (with the addition of Buddypress) has improved greatly in the last few months but from what I understand, it's still iffy in that there isn't a 1 to 1 correspondence between WordPress plugins and WordPress MU. Has this been resolved yet? I started working on the APAP website in January of this year and many of those issues were still in the air. Until April of this year, SEO and Sitemap plugins that I normally used weren't fully compatible with WordPress MU and in fact, there were numerous caveats on WordPress MU about those support issues.
2. Automated image formatting — there's a big difference between the way Drupal imagecache module does formatting vs. the way WordPress does it. In WordPress 2.8, you only can use three thumbnail sizes and it's assuming that the user will manually insert the thumbnails into each post as they see fit. Drupal is superior in that you can actually change the context and thumbnail sizes in three separate contexts: when the user posts, when only a teaser is being shown and most importantly, when the content is being shown as part of a view. And more significantly, the user need only insert the image once.
3. Complex data manipulation and presentation — seriously , righini, you should try out Drupal Views. It's basically a SQL query builder that allows you to slice and dice your content (and even use relationships between content types) to your heart's content. You can certainly write this in PHP code in WordPress but productivity gains are enabled because it's a point and click interface. Writing custom SQL queries and PHP code is just out of the question for most users.
4. Custom content types — righini you're talking about file types not content types. In WordPress, there are only blogs entries and pages. In Drupal, you can make ANY kind of content type by building a form out of any custom fields you want to make. On the APAP site, we created a content type called "jobs" that allows admins to post jobs to the site in a particular format that couldn't be easily encapsulated within a blog entry. There is no equivalent in WordPress.
5. High amount of training for new bloggers — actually, this is a big PLUS for WordPress. What I mean was that is was actually easy for new bloggers to maniuplate WordPress and start making blog entries on their own. Unfortunately, Drupal falls down in the user experience surrounding blog entries. Drupal definitely requires more training for users.
6. I evaluated lots of magazine layouts for WordPress and even looked at a magazine layout (called magazeen) that was available both as a Drupal theme AND a WordPress theme. However, maintaining the integrity of a WordPress theme over time is difficult and requires that each user always remember a set of content formatting rules in order to keep the look the same. This is because WordPress assumes that a user will only post the content once and present it once. Drupal doesn't assume that. It assumes that content is a set of data fields that can be manipulated to be shown in different contexts. That's what makes magazine layouts work. The abilty to present the same content in different contexts is all important. You can actually "force" consistent design on the part of the user using Drupal.
7. Unassisted embedding of video and audio – Yes, we are in agreement here. WordPress is better at it than Drupal. Drupal is getting better but still behind WordPress on that score.
8. CRM integration with Drupal is mostly done through CiviCRM. My guess is that the level of integration between CivICRM and Drupal is greater than that you can reach with existing integration between WordPress and CRM. CivICRM can do user membership syncs and pass on permissions rules to Drupal so that users can be locked out from seeing content based on their membership status. It also does single-sign on between CiviCRM and Drupal. I don't think you can do this in WordPress without a ton of custom work. I think you assume that CRM integration is fairly simple like an email signup where you just plop some javascript on a page and voila "crm integration complete!". This is an incomplete solution for nonprofits as their business logic is quite a bit more sophisticated than that.
Would love to hear your replies but I might just expand this into a blog post later on down the line.
Multi-user blog
wordpress comes with ability to setup multiple users, simply add them in the admin panel
Automated image formatting
you can setup defined sizes (thumbnail and "medium" size) this since wordpress 2.6
Complex data manipulation
and presentation
dont know what you mean, but many things can be done with "1 click install" plugins.
Custom content types
jpg, txt, mp3, swf… what else do you need?
High amount of training for
new bloggers
Wordpress features a whole website based on training wordpress.org they also made the wordpress.tv full of video tutorials. if you dont want to read, simply do the "5 minutes install" and you are ready to publish (the important part here is not the time required to learn, but the multiple levels of support that the community can give)
Can be easily designed with
magazine layout
lol! just install the right template! (example: <a href="http://themeplayground.com/2007/observations/the-…” target=”_blank”>http://themeplayground.com/2007/observations/the-…
Unassisted embedding of video
also
and audio
go to HTML view in post edit mode and paste youtube code… it works
there are plugins for that, and they can be installed with 1 click.
CRM integration
depends on CRM.
conclusion: most of them are yes, the other can be set up without problems.
The screenshot with "Nodequeue" under it looks like Huffington Post.
Yes, it is HuffPo. I never made the claim that HuffPo is run on Drupal. It's on Movable Type. I was talking about the "design pattern" behind HuffPo. That design pattern is pretty prevalent all over the Web. That's why I also used the MSN News site as another example and also pointed out Drudge Report as another example. In this case, you need to distinguish the difference between the technology (Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, etc) from the design patterns that are part of the user experience on news websites.
Drupal should be a 'yes' for "Unassisted embedding of video and audio"
Embedded media field does this pretty easily: http://drupal.org/project/emfield
Just put in the url of a video or audio hosted on dozens of service providers (ie youtube, hulu and the like).
Yo. sorry for my late reply.
I checked all your points and I think you are referring to a deeper level of software usage.
please forgive my simpleness, i'll try to reply anyway:
1: still don't get it. WordPress has users with different privileges. you don't need to get to MU for that feat. If you need a multiple blog software that's MU.
2: from 2.6 you can insert an automated image gallery. That's not the state of the art, but it's an alternative to manual thumb insertion.
3: sorry for me even writing custom php is out of question. I simply install plugins and themes… (i'm not that cool)
4: I get it: you can do it using "custom fields template plugin" and building page templates. Then when you'll create a new page you can choose the template page that you need. (some coding is required here, i asked a friend)
5: we agree
6: this is true in most cases. anyway you can set up custom excerpts display and with a minimum of editing formatting you'll get to nice results (example: image must be at the beginning of the post it's enough to build custom homepage views for the posts)
7:
8: understand. agree. i'm doing what you describe with newsletter plugin, comments plugin, custom user management plugins and so on. (but never wrote a line of code, i think that's a plus)
Actually, I disagree on this one and I have installed and deployed emfield. Right out of the box, Drupal doesn't support unassisted embedding of video and audio. In fact, I had to install emfield because many of APAP's bloggers had problems with embeds in Drupal. It's definitely not as easy as WordPress to use. It's a sore point with me that Drupalistas sometimes have a tin ear when it comes to usability issues and this is one of them.
Hey righini, thanks for your reply. I'm just going to address on where we differ. Remember, I came into Drupal as a past Joomla and WordPress user so I'm not totally always in lockstep with what Drupalistas tend to say about Drupal. That said, WordPress could learn a LOT from Drupal (and vice versa).
1. I don't think you quite understand the difference between a multi-blogger community and a blog with multiple users. WordPress is only good for the latter. WordPress MU is good for the former.
2. Automated image galleries is not the same as context-sensitive resizing of images. Both Drupal and WordPress have automated image galleries. However, only Drupal has context-sensitive resizing. You probably could do it in WordPress if you took the time to code but it still wouldn't be integrated in a SQL query builder like it can be done in Drupal. Drupal is a couple of intuitive leaps ahead of WordPress on this issue.
3. I strongly urge you to do an install of Drupal 6 and play around with CCK and Views. It will blow your mind.
4. Hmm I can't really evaluate this plugin as much of the homepage for it is in Japanese. However, the "some coding is required" issue is a problem for many nonprofits. They don't have custom coding resources.
6. Custom excerpts in WordPress are nice but that assumes users are going to write them in. Drupal does not. You don't have to ask bloggers to write a custom excerpt. Drupal (most of the time) just figures it out.
8. I doubt you could do a magazine layout in the context of a multi-user blogging community with WordPress alone. You would need WordPress MU and then you'd have to check if your custom plugins work properly with WPMU. That's a big issue. If you ever do a migration from WP to WPMU — come back here and tell how many of your plugins survived the migration.
[...] thoughtful, interesting example of where Drupal can work better over [...]
great post!! thank!!:D
hello Allan, i got a little deeper in 4)
it's possible to use a plugin called "custom field template" that gives the ability to store some kind of metadata, retrivable via wordpress functions (get_post_meta). You can manually build some template pages that extract only the meta-data that fit the content type request. I'm stuck on wordpress admin manipulation in order to have different sets of "custom fields" to complete the need
please let me know if you got something on this subject
Ah, also for 8) there are now some nice wordpress theme frameworks that enables this kind of need (some of them are also non-tech user friendly)
http://themeshaper.com/thematic/
http://themehybrid.com/themes/hybrid
http://carringtontheme.com/
Ah, also for 8) there are now some nice wordpress theme frameworks that enable this kind of need (some of them are also non-tech user friendly)
I like very much your way of presentation.I got more useful information on this blog.All your giving tips are so much useful.Thanks to sharing the useful information….Keep posting such great post.
This blog module is so attuned to a multi-user blog format that it has to be differently configured for single-user blogging.
CCK allows you to create customized blog entries in which certain fields are used to specifically fill in portions of a magazine layout like the teaser thumbnail Views are a way
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