Wim Mostrey Engaging Drupal

*Update Sep 18, 2008* In my progress on writing a multi-user blogging installation profile for Drupal, I launched drupalmu.org as a showcase.

On October 23 2006 Wordpress released Wordpresss MU. From their release statement: "WordPress MU is an official branch of WordPress that is designed for managing and hosting thousands of blogs instead of just one. It?s the software that powers WordPress.com, for example." Now, with a couple of modules Drupal could be made to act just the same way. Or could it?

1. Installation
Wordpress MU set-up is pretty straight-forward. You unzip the files and follow the instructions on your browser. You only need to create a database and after initial set-up, you have your site production-ready.

Installation Drupal itself is just as easy. To get it to act as an MU Blog however, you need to download and install some extra modules: blog, blog_theme, pathauto, tinyMCE and perhaps taxonomy_access. You also need to configure the user and role permissions.

Winner: Wordpress MU

2. Features
Wordpress MU basically has all the features a normal Wordpress set-up features. Nothing more and nothing less. One of the big plusses is it's user-friendliness, both in the way of navigation your site through the few options, as wel actually writing and publishing a piece of content making use of the built-in wysiwyg. All is created with easy of use in mind and it shows.

Most features are handled just as easily in Drupal. There are some things though that Drupal just does not do without at least some moderate alteration of the code:

• A blog owner can not moderate and/or approve comments posted on his blog
• A user can not to do a search on a specific blog, only on all the content
• There is no easy way to create 1 block per site that can be managed only by the blog owner

Winner: Wordpress MU

3. Customizability
The lack of customizability of Wordpress MU frankly shocked me. If you want to have something done even remotely different then how WPMU acts out-of-the-box, you're stuck unless you have at least moderate skills in PHP.

For instance, any user can create as many blogs as he likes, with the following explenation: "There is no limit to the number of blogs you can have, so create to your heart's content, but blog responsibly." This is an abusers paradise. This is fixed in the code by replacing `signup_another_blog($blog_id);` in wp-signup.php by an echo line, but that creates a new issue: a user can create an account without creating a blog, to comment on other peoples blogs for instance. There is now no way for this user to create a blog with that same username.

Also, you can disable the main blog, in case you're not using it for instance, but when you do this, you just locked yourself out of the whole system and can not do any administration at all. If you're no developer, you're just stuck as this is documented nowhere. I found you can reactive the blog, and thus the admin panel for the whole set-up, by executing the following MySQL command:


UPDATE wp_blogs SET deleted='0' WHERE blog_id='1';


Drupal is a lot easier on this. Most of the options you'd like already have a module or are customizable in the admin interface. You can easily add BBCode support, spam filters, freetagging, ..

Winner: Drupal

4. Behind the scenes
Wordpress MU is an ugly duck behind the scenes. Each new users creates 8 new tables in the form of wp_$uid_table. On MySQL this creates 3 files per new table, that is 24 files for each new user. On some linux distributions this might cause issues. If you allow uploads for your users (enabled by default), you're also limiting yourself to 32000 blogs on a Linux system, the default maximum of files a directory can contain and still be handled correctly. Wordpress.com itself, running 230000 blogs, solves it like this:

"There are multiple database servers, and between them the user database is split between 4096 MySQL databases. Slave servers are used to distribute reads."

This is something different than what the homepage of WPMU promisses:

"Ever dream of running hundreds of thousands of blogs with a single install of WordPress?"

Drupal, working around nodes, does not have these issues. There is no semi-built-in limit to the amount of users or blogs and no ugly database schemes: it scales easily.

Winner: Drupal

5. Conclusion
After testing both set-ups for 2 weeks now, I'm not certain if there is a winner in this race. Wordpress offers most of the features one expects from a MU blogging application, but lacks customization and certainly a solid technical base. If you're not planning to have tens of thousands of blogs, this is certainly the way to go. If you do however, you might want to consider going through the hard work of customizing Drupal and writing your own modules.

Keeping in mind that WPMU was designed as a MU blogging application, I find it lacking the professionalism Drupal excels in. If only there is a way to cross the bridge between the two platforms. In the future, who knows..