(A caveat: I have more experience, especially with larger sites, in Drupal than in WordPress, so there are things that I may be missing. Feel free to make comments on what I got wrong.)

WordPress started out with a focus on ease of use for bloggers and content creators, and secondarily providing a platform for developers to build plug-ins and such. WordPress was born as a blogging tool, primarily, and has expanded outside of that realm, to encompass different kinds of content management use cases. Drupal started out primarily as a web content development platform, with a strength in community features. A focus on ease of use didn’t come about until Drupal 7.

At this point, both Drupal 7 and WordPress are pretty easy for end users to add and edit content, and do pretty simple administrative tasks (moderate comments, etc.) They both have a very nice array of canned themes available to use, and they both have some customizable themes (themes that make it easy to customize without needing to know much HTML or PHP – like Thesis) available. Getting a site up and running in both platforms is pretty easy, although neither are really ready for non-techies to take on. That said, most good webhosts have one-click installs of both CMS platforms.

WordPress still has only two content types: Blog Posts and Pages. You can’t have different kinds of pages, or different kinds of blog posts, or some other content type (news, events, etc.) that aren’t one or the other. That is a deal-breaker for many kinds of sites. There are plug-ins that allow you to create custom content types – I haven’t tried these, so I can’t comment, but it seems a big deal that this is core for Drupal, and an add-on for WordPress. And it seems that this, and the absence in WordPress of a way to easily control the way that lists of content are presented and viewed are the major platform differentiators. That said, many, many websites need neither of these features.

And if you want to get more deeply under the hood, both platforms require some understanding of the respective platforms (how plug-ins work in WP, how modules work in Drupal), and probably a bit of PHP, HTML, or AJAX to add bells and whistles to the theme. Given some big changes in the core of Drupal, such as adding fields to nodes, as well as image handling in core, some things are much easier dealt with in Drupal  7 than previous versions, getting close to the ease of use of WordPress in that regard.

Kinds of sites probably best done in WordPress:

• Blogs
• Community Blogs
• Simple brochureware websites

Kinds of sites best done in Drupal:

• Large community sites where you need different kinds of content generated by users (blogs, wikis, job postings, etc.)
• Complex, document-heavy library sites, or sites that need document management
• Sites where you want complex control over multiple content types – how they are created and viewed
• Magazine/Newspaper like sites where you want to control how lists of content are displayed and ordered
• eCommerce sites
• Sites with deep integrations to CRM platforms and web services

Kinds of sites where it’s a tossup:

• Medium or large websites with lots of content, but relatively simple organization
• Community blogs with many authors and identified, authenticated users

Bottom line: They are both such amazing, solid platforms, with rich, deep ecosystems of plug-in/module developers, implementors, designers, etc. that it’s hard to go wrong picking either platform, as long as you are clear on the feature set needed.  They have rock-solid core development teams, security updates, and over all good code, which you could hardly say about either platform 4 years ago.

Also, I have to say, as much as I have respect for other Open Source CMS platforms, IMHO, 98% of websites can be served by either of these platforms. That’s what’s true right at this moment. 3 or so years down the pike, I’m going to be looking at platforms based on Ruby on Rails – as Rails gets more mainstream, and solid CMS platforms start to mature, that will be the space to watch for. But that’s another blog entry, isn’t it?

And, it’s her birthday! A big bunch of us are blogging today to talk about what she’s contributed, and also to let people know about the charity she’s been working with for a while, now, the Sharing Foundation. She’d like folks to donate in honor of her birthday.

Beth, thanks for the expertise and intelligence you’ve lent to the nonprofit sector for quite some time now! And thanks in advance for all the great upcoming posts in 2010 and beyond that will help me sound intelligent when I talk about social media. :-)

’nuff said.

I was only vaguely following the brou-ha-ha over Causes leaving Myspace. Only vaguely because I don’t really keep close track of the goings on in the Social Networking space: it’s not my passion. I use them a lot, both for work as well as for personal use. I know they are becoming an increasingly important tool for nonprofits in communicating with their constituents, and so I do keep them in my peripheral vision, for sure.

Anyway, in reading the varied reactions to this news, I had to just sigh, and then get annoyed. Sigh because of what feels to me to be the wasted energy that the nonprofit sector has spent over many years, using, hawking, and supporting proprietary tools and companies. Annoyed because it seems the nptech community hasn’t figured this out, even being hit over the head with this over, and over, and over again.

Make no mistake about it – Causes is a for profit company, and they are making what is, I’d bet, a decision based entirely on economics. If you’ve read any of the gloomy news from Silicon Valley, this is just the beginning. Social ventures will not be immune to the blowing winds of economic distress.

If we keep building our nonprofit toolsets on proprietary software and for-profit web services, even if they are free (for now) we are going to be bit by this over and over again. The only way we’re going to get out of this cycle is to channel this energy and resources into open software (including “open” source apps for proprietary web services), open standards, and open networks – things no one can take away.

I love to write blog entries about successful open source efforts – like CiviCRM, or the amazing stuff people are doing in the mobile space. Writing blog entries about for-profit web vendors that make economic decisions that hurt nonprofits because we depend on them too much is just not fun.

• Wireframes Magazine – I’ve been doing Information Architecture for a very long time, now, but it’s great to learn new tricks and tools.
• Flowing Data – OK, I’ll fess up, I’m a data geek. And I love data visualizations, and ways to make data easily accessible. I am so envious of people with graphics skills who can do that well. There are a whole lot of really cool things here.
• RoughType by Nicholas Carr – really smart dude, really interesting stuff.
• ONE/Blog – ONE/Northwest never ceases to amaze me
• The Open Road – Matt Asay has some interesting insights from the Open Source biz world

So, a few things to say about what I’m looking forward to from April 25th to April 30th:

• April 25: Penguin Day SF! It’s happening the day before NTC this year, not the day after. Gather with folks and spend an exciting day peer-sharing about free and open source software in nonprofit organizations. Any level of background in the topic is welcome, and everyone learns.
• April 26-28: NTC. Another jam packed year full of great panels and expertise sharing. I’ll be involved in two panels this year. (And lots of conversations on the side.)
• April 29-30: Hopefully, there will be a CiviCRM developer camp. Yay! I’ve been using CiviCRM for a year or so, and have begun to get involved in implementation. Looking forward to digging deeper in.

And email me if you want to have coffee, or lunch, or a side conversation in the Science Fair.

And, you can help folks get to NTC!

• Appirio releases their top 10 predictions for cloud computing in 2009. One of the more interesting ones is that “a major SaaS 1.0 company will fail.” I kind of wonder about some of the early nonprofit-focused SaaS offerings, and how long they might have to live, given the strength of Salesforce.com
• Third Sector New England, a Boston-based nonprofit capacity-building organization launched a series of “FAQ” videos for nonprofits. Useful stuff.
• NARAL Pro-choice America launched an innovative ad campaign. Very neat stuff, and a great use of video and YouTube.

These are two fairly small, fairly low-profile services (although SoapBlox is considered an extremely important part of the progressive blogosphere.) They hosted a small percentage of the blogs out there (in comparison to, say, TypePad or Blogger.) However, this is, of course, devastating to those who had their blogs there.

Lessons to learn:

• Always have your own backup of your data/content
• Remember when setting up a website or blog that if you use a service, the data is not in your hands, but in someone elses
• Always have a disaster recovery plan

For Firefox, it means, “open source, community-powered.” And I realized that they had an interesting point. In my mind, it harks back to the arguments that Yochai Benkler made in his book “The Wealth of Networks,” that a ecosystem full of open source, community-powered software was, in a sense, more sustainable, and promoted more, not less innovation than the proprietary software ecosystem.

So now I think I agree with the Mozilla Foundation that a good metaphor for open source as any is that it is to software what “organic” and probably “fair trade” is to food. Too bad the metaphor doesn’t go both ways, because then organic and fair trade food would be free, too.

And, like both of those labels are complex and not entirely easy to nail down with food, so it is with software. But I think it works.

So if you want to start adding content to your new site, and you need a little formatting, or a picture, etc., well, unless you know a bit of HTML, you are S.O.L.

On the other hand, this is actually, from my perspective, a really good thing (can you tell I’m becoming a Drupalista?) There are several to choose from, and they differ both in difficulty to get installed and working, as well as features. Want something barebones? There’s one for you. Want something with all of the bells and whistles? There’s one for you, too.

There is a great review of five of the major ones.

I’ve been getting to know a few of them (and, yes, they can be a pain to install, and they depend, generally, on other libraries that you have to install as well.) I don’t have a favorite yet, but I’m thinking I don’t need to have one – just to know which ones are well-maintained, and what the differences are in feature set. Then I can choose the one that makes the most sense.