Drupal 8 Won't Be Wordpress And That's A Good Thing

Just as a prefix to this whole conversation, I must admit that I am a bit Drupal bias. I've used it for years and find it to be my CMS of choice when establishing a new site.

There has been alot of talk about Drupal 8 and the anticipation of a new chapter in the world of the Drupal-cons. The biggest take away is that the new Drupal will be less proprietary and more of a generalized PHP platform. This is a great turn of events for one of the more acute specialized platforms out on the web.

Talk to any media company who has Drupal sites and they'll tell you how hard it is to find Drupal developers. More often, they hire PHP developers and morph them into being Drupal proficient.

It's one of the reasons people choose Wordpress, to avoid the learning curve.

Because of this big change in 8, everyone is wondering if Drupal 8 is going to morph it's way towards the universal appeal of Wordpress. The short answer is no. Sure, the UI will be more intuitive and it is being designed to give more flexibility to the administrators without having to access the raw server files.

But importantly, Drupal will stick to what it knows best. Offering complex functionality within a usable interface. It will be so much more than a fancy blog with social share buttons.

Back when Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress were all vying for market share, they were all about managing the content of a website. And whereas Wordpress began to pull away from the pack for the every-fashion-blogger, Drupal evolved into a highly useful architecture for complex websites.

Basically, if you want a fully customized website with complex technologies built in and you don't want to start from scratch, you choose Drupal. That isn't going to change.

Now let's not forget that Drupal doesn't have the best reputation. Most developers used it early on and then moved on to other things like Ruby or Python. In addition, Drupal still suffers from being sluggish (mostly from an over abundance of built-in features).

However, Drupal 8 aims to change perceptions and remain the solution for those with big ideas. By fixing some of the issues that plague it's persona, Drupal is poised to re-emerge as a major player again.

Or at the very least, change a few perceptions. Looking for great wordpress books? Check out here