WordPress Developer’s experience learning Drupal Development!!

Defining Drupal, it is a pre-defined collection of data types (Fields) that relate to each other by an informational context.

By default, WordPress offers 2 data sets “posts” and “pages” and for custom field, one has to install custom code or plugins, however, we can do the same without any custom modules in the Drupal.

When I attempted to add complex fields like Date and references to other content that required some modules such as cTools, Date API and References modules, it becomes difficult. However, using them was like a piece of cake.

Drupal’s ability to control how and what people can access on your site – it’s a remarkable feature that I loved the most. Developers can set permissions for these “users” by defining who can do what for Drupal core features and contributed modules.

With Drupal, setting up any number of different kinds of users or ‘Roles’ is easy. There are many sites having editor and site administrator roles through which they can make content updates and site admins to install new modules and make larger configuration changes.

If you want to add functionalities in WordPress, it becomes difficult, as one has to install plug-ins. Experience this one excellent feature/functionality I think that it would save me hours of work if I start development in Drupal instead of WordPress.

Another feature I delved deeper is in to ‘Blocks’. Admin > Structure > Blocks, a simple link “Demonstrate Block Regions” that showed location of each region in theme. As a newbie in Drupal, I found that this is very helpful, as I got an idea about what can be put where and picture the same in my mind just by looking at this page.

By default, WordPress doesn’t offer any Caching or Aggregation features. It requires extra plugins to be installed, whereas Drupal enables JS and CSS Aggregation is as simple as flipping a switch. Drupal allows developers to control cache in many different ways.

Drupal offers a maintenance mode feature that enable developers to make the site offline for updates/upgrades. It’s boon for developers.