Drupal Beats WordPress for Single Blog: DIYthemes Thesis Twenty Eleven

Over the past few months, I have used three themes for this blog. Two used WordPress and one Drupal. Of the three, I prefer the current theme which is a child theme of Zen running in Drupal 7.14. The other two were both WordPress 3.4 themes. A child theme of the default Twenty Eleven and a Responsive skin using DIYthemes Thesis 1.8.4. Why do I prefer the Drupal theme for a single user blog site? In contrast to what many others have written?

To make a comparison between them, I need a list of the required or preferred characteristics of a website blog theme.

1. Security
2. Responsive
3. Child Theme
4. Stability and Reliability
5. Composition
6. SEO
7. Screen Display
8. Cache and Page Load Speed
9. Subscribers

1. Security

Nothing is hacker proof. So backup is essential. That said, Drupal is probably more resilient than WordPress.

I do not intend to allow user login on my site. If I did, the controls on access that Drupal has knock the socks of anything WordPress can do.

Both WordPress and Drupal have plugins and modules (respectively) that block users who try to hack in as the administrator on the login in screen. There is little difference between them.

The same is true for preventing, or at least controlling, spam in comments. The Drupal Mollum module may be slightly better, but not by much.

2. Responsive

There is no doubt that the move towards viewing websites on tablets and smart phones will continue and gather momentum. A theme that is not responsive has past its use by date. All three satisfied this. But, the latest version of Thesis, 1.8.5 is not a responsive theme. And the previous version that is has an error that prevents Google from accurately capturing the RSS feed in some situations.

The load time on smart phones is important. Which basically means that the page size must not be too large. That is more up to me than it is to the theme. So it does not distinguish between the themes.

3. Child Theme

I am going to want to modify any theme I use with either CSS or php code. Obviously it is essential that a new version of the theme or the background software must not break my website. Which is why a child theme is essential. Twenty Eleven and Zen allow child themes.

I thought DIYthemes Thesis responsive skin was a child theme when it first came out. But in this I was misled by DIYthemes. It is actually a skin not a child theme and it only works with Thesis 1.84.

4. Stability and Reliability

The theme must be stable and must work reliably. All three meet this.

It must be future proof, at least if that is possible. Twenty Eleven is obviously future proof as it is the default WordPress theme.

The situation with Thesis is unclear. As I have said the the responsive skin just does not work on their latest update. Who knows if it will work on Thesis 2.0 which is due out in August sometime.

Personally I doubt it will. And there currently is no information available about how Thesis 2.0 will be responsive. So right now Thesis fails.

Zen will definitely work with any of the minor upgrades to Drupal. It will probably work in Drupal 8 as well, although that is quite a while off. Drupal being what it is, I do not anticipate changing to Drupal 8 for a couple of years at least.

5. Composition

Spell check as I write is a must for me. WordPress comes with a good editor for composition out of the box. The Drupal module CKEditor is possibly better.

I need to be able to insert images although I actually do so sparingly. Twenty Eleven is the best for this. Thesis essentially uses the WordPress sytem, but has to be modified to do so (at least in the version I was using). Drupal 7 is satisfactory but does not allow image captions. A negative point for Drupal.

All three allow a preview of what you have written. Drupal 7 does this on the same browser page whereas the other use a separate page. A small difference but it is more convenient.

6. SEO

A lot of rubbish has been written about this. Obviously you must be able to send the article automatically to search engines. All three can be set up this way. I want to be able to use Google Analytics, and all three have this capacity as well.

Nowadays, the words used in the title of the article are what determines whether people will search for it or find it. The title either contains keywords that people are using or it does not. And if it does not, or if it contains very common keywords, people just wont find the article. Additional things, such as WordPress tags and the SEO type of Drupal tag that you can add if you want to, probably count for nothing much.

I do want to be able to change the title tag so that the brief abbreviation that appears on a Google search can be modified, although in practice I do not use it all that much. I can however do it in all three.

7. Screen Display

All three enable the use of different fonts and background colors. Thesis is probably the easiest to use for this.

I want to be able to adapt what appears on display depending on what is being read – the type of article for example. It is here that Zen and Drupal come into their own. The combination of Views, Context and Blocks allows limitless combinations of displays. Different sidebars for different topic groups (using Drupal tags for example) is quite simple in Drupal.

DIYthemes claim that their Thesis hooks are innovative. And they are right. Twenty Eleven comes nowhere near Thesis in this area. But Thesis does not allow as much flexibility as Drupal does.

For those not used to Drupal, Views is a module that allows the creation of lists. Just about anything that is in the SQL data base can be converted into a sorted list.

Context is a module that allows simple rules to be applied to the Views list. Well and to other aspects of the SQL data base as well. If one or a number of rules apply, the output will occur in a selected part of the screen display.

Blocks are segments of the screen display. Different themes in Drupal have a different number of Block positions available up front. In a way this is similar to Thesis hooks. Twenty Eleven does not provide this function other than the header, the sidebar and the footer. Although you can modify it a bit.

Drupal also allows the grouping of sets of articles into books. This additional type of display does not have an exact equivalent in WordPress

Finally Drupal has panels which allows for a whole variety of display types. I do not use it at present, but it is available.

8. Cache and Page Load Speed

Drupal has caching out of the box but there are excellent WordPress plugins that provide good caching. All three are very fast providing you do not load up the page with images.

I regularly check page loading speed using Pingdom Tools.

9. Subscribers

This is one area in which Drupal 7 largely fails. There is an error which is not likely to be fixed soon which causes notification emails to fail. So building a subscriber list with for example the WordPress plugins Subscribe2 currently has no equivalent in Drupal. You can use MailChimp for things like newsletter, but that is normally not required for a blog.

Instead with Drupal you need to put effort into encouraging readers to subscribe to the RSS feed.

Finally, I have not commented at all on Drupal's so called steep learning curve. In my view there is just as much to learn to adapt WordPress as there is in Drupal. The documentation for both is pretty good.