Yes, it’s true. I have abandoned my beloved Drupal and switched to Wordpress. There are many reasons why, of course, most involving just how frustrated I was at trying to Drupal to look decent.
It’s always been known that this is an anime blog and it’s always been known that I’ve had an amazingly hardcore interest into CMS software. Drupal, as a CMS, was amazing. It had nearly everything you could ever want out of a CMS. Flexibility, modular addons, extensive theming system, and more. The only problem was that, well, the flexibility was like taking wheat and running it through a pasta machine. It was hard. It was possible… but it was hard.
I’m not a man of originality, I can’t design a complete theme from scratch and integrate into software that has a reliance on certain CSS tags hardcoded in. I’m sure SOMEONE out there can tell me how or why I’m wrong with a giant long essay, but I’m sure they’d agree for a site that is just nothing more then a few static pages and discussion about new anime episodes that Wordpress is superior.
Actually, updating Drupal was a pain. Sure, it was simple. Create Content -> Add Story -> Type it out. The problem came with adding images, doing any kind of formating, or well yeah. I compare Wordpress vs. Drupal kind of like Pre-Commercial Invision Board and phpBB. Invision Board came with EVERYTHING out of the box you’d ever need, outside of the major mods. Easy to theme, easy to manage, and almost every feature vB had. phpBB came barebones, with only as many features as a forum should have, but was a framework for whatever you wanted (security problems aside).
I dreaded posting an update, only to know I’d have to fiddle with things for awhile to get it to work.
Now, let me stress this, these problems were mostly MY fault. I was using an already created theme with some heavy modifications on my end. Had I sat down and done my own theme from scratch with how I plan on my content to show up and had I sat down and set Drupal up from the ground up then yeah, I’d have no problems. Actually, if I didn’t get about 50-100 visitors a day compared to what Drupal is designed for (a few thousand) then yeah.
I want to give the Drupal team credit for one thing: making an awesome CMS that does exactly what a CMS should do, manage content. If I needed a large scale CMS, I’d defiantly go with Drupal. If I didn’t have such small needs, like just the ability to tinker with the theme or post Orange-kun screenshots, then I’d probably set out the time to mess with Drupal. As it is though, it’s too encompassing for my needs.
The backlash from the move is that most all content except the REALLY old stuff was moved over during the Drupal to Wordpress migration (move). I used RSS feeds to export the as many posts as I could get and manually moved a few things over. You’re going to get a few google 404s until they do few more crawls (and it’s probably going to DESTROY my rankings). I’ll accept this if it means it’s easier to add fresh content instead of sitting there all apathic about how the theme doesn’t look as good.
Since the ability to update the blog has been simplified, I should get back to adding more content quicker. Like covering new episodes of a few anime I like a lot, etc. The reviews of old series will continue, assuming I take the time out (lol 30 minutes) to write them.
