I’m currently working on several Drupal 6.x web sites, but to broaden my knowledge, I decided to use Wordpress for my personal/professional web site. I don’t want to get tied to just one way of doing things or thinking, and I’d also like to be able to recommend the right CMS for a project.

Drupal was actually easier to install than Wordpress  3.0.1, which sounds funny, but I was really surprised that Wordpress didn’t let you set up the database from a PHP page instead of from a configuration file. Not a big deal for me, but it seems like that’s the norm for PHP CMS installs these days.

The out of the box Wordpress Post creation UI is much, much cleaner than the out of the box Drupal 6.x Post Creation UI. Partly this is because Wordpress is more focused, but there is a lot you have to do to Drupal just to get a WYSIWYG editor in place with image uploads - try it and see. And even when you do get that set up for a content creator, the UI is complicated and difficult to understand.

So far I also like the Wordpress Admin dashboard - Drupal 6.x needs something similar out of the box, where modules can register alerts or notifications of things that need to be done. I had something similar in a Ruby on Rails web application that I built a few years ago, but it was all custom code.

I’m still exploring Wordpress, but I don’t intend to do a lot to this site with plugins or themes, so I probably won’t get to see a lot of the differences between Drupal and Wordpress with extensibility.