Drupal community but WordPress Blogs
I use Drupal on this site – Drishtikone – and WordPress on Businessmusings.com and BIMusings.com. One reason why I dread this decision is because drupal puts a lot of load on the server while wordpress is easy on that front. Plus there are more themes for WP than for Drupal. For a person who does not know much programming and does not have the time to keep messing with the themes – Drupal themes pose a challenge.. as some work in Firefox but not in IE or vice versa! After a long search I have found one that I like for now – denver. But that is not really a whole lot of choice!
However, Drupal is a powerhouse for community features and functionality. No other OS CMS comes close. Its flexibility and scalability is great! However, it is also a fact that too much functionality activated can slow it down a bit. So you see it is a tough decision. When you start a blog (for the time being) hoping to take it to the level of a community – then Drupal is a great option.. but that may happen in the distant future. So, until then you will have to live with a lot of load and power.
Now I will not have to regret this decision – for we have the ultimate solution – a Drupal/WP plugin. The features include:
* Single sign on, once you logged in to Drupal, you also logged in to WordPress. And also when you logged out
* Synchronize user profile data between Drupal and WordPress
I think if you have a community on Drupal – and want to offer blogs to your community members, then it might be an option to include WP as the blogging solution and Drupal for the rest of it! The reason is pretty simple: While the blog page in WP for a user can be much easily configured and made to look like a blog page – its kinda tough to have a similar thing done for a blog page for the user in Drupal.
I think this is a good solution to have for a community site offering blogs.