![]() ![]() Resources, management, and community implicationsīoth platform choices have costs associated with them for planning, design, development, implementation, hosting, and maintenance. Communities that are seeking a new website redesign should perform careful and comprehensive due diligence to outline the pros, cons, and resources needed to support a platform preference. It’s very common to see Drupal as the selected framework, but not all of the Drupal build preferences make sense. For example, agencies and internal IT teams request Drupal simply because “everyone else is using it” is a fallacy, as not all agencies use it (only about 25% of public agencies). Oftentimes, these recommendations are based on pop culture and layman’s knowledge of the CMS while being unaware of the economic impact that decision will make on their community. Drupal, as a professional-only platform, requires a heavy investment for a branded, fully-featured construction (e.g., from $45k - $100k+) with maintenance costs easily exceeding $30k every year. This is in opposition to WordPress, a mainstream and popular CMS, where both skilled and unskilled teams have derived methods of creating sites that cover a wider gamut of uses. In this instance, while WordPress can be just as flexible and secure as Drupal, it can be the most misused and ill-programmed framework in the hands of amateurs feigning to be experienced professionals. WordPress has been hijacked by theme and plugin developers over the years, turning it into a Wix or Squarespace clone with bloated drag-and-drop interfaces that threaten the stability and security of the platform. In the hands of experienced WordPress developers, this framework is used as a hybrid software delivery platform with an avoidance of canned themes and plugins, keeping it nimble, flexible, and secure. WordPress has been successfully used with low to mid-level government projects (such as Tacoma Public Utilities), e-commerce applications, and commercial projects. ![]() ![]() Drupal and WordPress are similar in nature but different in scopeīoth platforms are used for content management, but each platform has its own culture, maintenance schedule, complexities, and intended use that shouldn’t be taken lightly. Drupal, for example, is a matured and trusted platform that’s predominantly used to manage content for larger government and commercial sites, including e-commerce applications (such as Tesla). The framework for this platform is not oriented for beginners and is bare-bones, requiring most features to be coded in PHP by a skilled team. Drupal is very secure in this sense, as its stability and security are rarely compromised due to this “code only” culture. It’s not as open to exploitation and platform modifications via third-party plugins and canned, unvetted themes. Our hope that this article is useful for government buyers, and teams supported by those buyers, to demystify these two choices so that public agencies can better serve their communities. While this is not an overly detailed and comprehensive overview, we may expand on these topics in a future white paper or e-book. ![]() Additionally, organizational and community needs must be translated to aligned requirements with the chosen platform, which we have rarely seen in the proposals we’ve participated in and reviewed thus far. Two predominant platforms we see debated frequently in the public sector are Drupal and WordPress, along with justifications for their use by the requesting public agencies and the contracting firms responding to the proposals. This is an area of concern for us, as we have identified a pattern of selection that entails consumer pop-culture rather than a holistic, fact-based justification for selecting one platform over the other, and we’d like to change that. Our agency does not feel that it’s sound to make such heavy decisions on web infrastructure without evaluating both the short and long-term community impact in terms of resources, security, content, usability, and sustainability. ![]()
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