Starting a blog, seeking questions about transition from Wordpress to Drupal (ish)

[biolithic]

Hi!
I am going to be starting a new blog tutorial basically on how to start a brand website with Zurb Foundation 5 if you are coming from a Wordpress background and thinking about Drupal, and questions/issues you may have had about getting started with Zurb or Drupal (didn’t understand X, hard to set up Y, etc).

Well, not exactly Drupal 7 or 8, to a fork of Drupal. I am a major initial contributor to a fork of Drupal https://backdropcms.org/ of which the goal is to make it more user friendly like Wordpress. It has (a simplified version of) Panels, Views, and soon-to-be WYSIWIG in core for easier UI layout building, at the expense of extreme flexibility and configurability.

Although a few of us just work on it in our spare time, I would be interested in your experiences in setting it up and using it, especially at https://dashboard.pantheon.io/products/backdrop/spinup .

This is not a product endorsement or overt spam – I am making no money from this free open-source software (yet?) It may not “make it”, but I develop in Drupal 7 and Angular/Javascript for my day job anyway. For me, it is an interesting experiment to fuse the speed/usage of Wordpress and the power of Drupal to see if there is a middle market. This blog will not be for those that consider Symfony framework easy or wonder why they don’t just code up their own CMS and overtake Laravel, but more for beginner/intermediate developers or marketers who have used Wordpress and thought about other systems. I worked on core Drupal 8, did some sprints, reviews, patches, coding, but although Drupal 8 is wonderful in many aspects and I will probably work in it, I didn’t believe it was very fast to develop in and the release date is TBD, so I’m not going to blog on an Alpha/Beta project with Alpha/Beta plugin/module status with a slow review process. In 2016, Drupal 8 may be the best CMS, who knows? Maybe Wordpress is the best?

Thank you for your opinions, comments, and questions good or bad and the blog will be starting next week as I work people’s questions into my current content!

[chrisrcooper]

First day. Two posts. Both talk about your product. Your title asks a question but I’m pretty sure your post didn’t. Most of it explains your product.

I don’t think this is contributing to the conversation and while you’re disclaiming it as spam…are you sure?

[biolithic]

Hi Chris!
Thanks for posting.
Ok, here are some questions since you asked:

Wordpress users, what are the pain points in working with Drupal?
Wordpress creators, what your the roadmap of development for the next year or two?
Drupal users, do you get smaller projects done faster with Wordpress?
Drupal creators, did you get into Drupal to not do Java/Zend/Symphony type writing software architecture (because the version of Drupal coming out soon is built on them)?
CMS users, do you wish that Wordpress/Drupal should be thrown out and rebuilt on Laravel so that there is a consistent software understanding among all (OOP, REST/JSON first, etc)?
What is your opinion on backwards compatibility in CMS versions?
Should major products be forked or split into two to serve different markets?

Let’s say Wordpress decides this summer, “Well, we bought Woocommerce, and TechCrunch and these larger sites want to pay us to do X. So we will split Wordpress into Wordpress (for TechCrunch and related, putting the top 50 plugins into core and developing towards their needs), and VintagePress, which will serve the needs of bloggers and be backwards compatible with the current Wordpress.” Are the needs of Dow Jones and CNN the same as my client needs enough not to split over? Should someone say, “Well, I have more money and therefore more influence on what Wordpress should be than chrisrcooper, so Wordpress will be built in my image”. “Open source”…or not really open. Keep in mind that a capitalist view like this is not all wrong, but it could be a topic of conversation. This is a fantasy, but inspired by current technology news.

We are web developers.
We use CMS’s at times.
We talk about web developing with CMS’s on Sitepoint, the community for web people.

We use Joomla…or is it Mambo? One codebase…now two products?
We Expression Engine/CodeIgniter…or is it Kohana? One codebase…now two products?
We use the “Mean” Stack. Node and Angular…or is it IO.JS and Angular2, not compatible. Two codebases…now four products?
Wordpress is our blog…or is Ghost or Medium our blog because Wordpress wants to be bigger?
We use Drupal…or is it Symfony CMS (Drupal 8)? Or is it Backdrop CMS (backwards compatible Drupal)?

Most all CMS’s change radically over time or produce forks, so I am writing a blog series about the fork/change. Good, bad, needed, not-needed, bad divisive, needed for growth, why?

Thanks for the post!