WordPress is better than Drupal: developers take note.

Nice, provocative name :) Go, Jen!

Very nice :) this should be an interesting session to say the least.

HAA, I love this session title Jen. I'm there.

I'll bring you a plastic poncho for the fruit and eggs flying out of the audience :)

I've just open my drupal's blog http://blog.archizone.fr/ build in Wordpress! I have so much work, and so much to learn on Drupal, that wordpress simplicity pleased me a lot.
You are right, we should see what's going on in the wordpress world, and inspire our self of the spirit of simplicity that this CMS illustrate so well and which is for me the main reason of its sucess.
Drupal should definitevely learn this from wordpress without of course getting rid of its powerful possibilities.

What about MediaWiki? If measured by content created, MediaWiki probably has been used to manage somewhere near the scope of content managed in WordPress, which has been used 10 times as much as Drupal.

Problem with MediaWiki, of course, is open access. It is a purpose-built system that doesn't adapt well to other purposes, due in large part to a developer community determined to maintain a radically open user-generation philosophy. But forget all that. Forget developer issues -- how long to install, how well made the software. What about when it comes down to actually making content? What does better. Then, by far, the MediaWiki system has proven itself. Click "edit" and edit. Wordpress isn't that far off, but unlike MediaWiki or Drupal -- it best handles content one page at a time -- it doesn't do a great job of "transcluding" content the way MediaWIki does, or of letting users include blocks, pages, nodes or whatever it is the way Drupal does.

Therein lies my problem with Drupal. In MediaWiki, if I want to make content to be included on some other page, I make a template, put a tag on a page where I want the template transcluded and I'm done. With Drupal, I navigate to an admin section where I navigate through the morass of modules I've added to figure out where are is the code for this particular bit of content. Here's the content, there's the style, maybe over somewhere else there's another part of the code. If I develop a Drupal knowledge base, I can do better, but there is a learning curve. I can climb the curve, if I want to take time and make that the focus of my development work, but I'd rather be building HTML pages where the code is all a click or two away.

I learned to prefer Mediawiki-style content management working in a newsroom, where I shared content creation with other non-developer types. I needed to be able to create and modify content fast -- while I was on the phone doing another job, I needed to be able to create a new page, and start adding notes from information I was gathering as I spoke. I needed to be able to toggle the pages for private viewing by select users or groups of users, or toggle pages open to a readable URL that could be posted on the front page. I needed to be able to train coworkers in the newsroom how to add content in a WYSIWYG editor while at the same time, using HTML skills to add forms to pages so I could process and render complex data I was rendering outside the system.

I came close to creating a system that could do what I wanted. But I still had to develop security, lost-password systems, maybe a comment section -- a host of other functions that have already been built, time and again.

So what's the point? Drupal remains the best content system for some purposes. I turn to Drupal when I want to build a store (I'm now a full time Web developer) on a site with other rich content. But I find myself discouraged at having to navigate such a complex, though robust, system of adminstrative functions. I still prefer my system where I can click an icon to edit a page, another icon to access style instructions for that part of the page, and other icons to edit transcluded content - what we call "blocks" in Drupal. It all happens in a TinyMCE-based editor that appears over the page, Thickbox style. I can toggle items to change access permission or check and revise old versions all within a click of the page I'm working on.

What I'd like to have is the on-the-surface access to code I enjoy in a well-regulated Mediawiki-type system (which I spent way too many hours building) -- without the severely nested tangle of styled Divs typical of so much Drupal theming. I'd like to see more of the control over content on the surface in Drupal -- on screen, one-click away and without the "View edit Track tabs breaking page layouts."

my 2c
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Hmm. Good luck!

cool, everybody will provide some usefully suggestion

Yo! Cross-system thinking. Wordpress is our prime competitor, so we better know it well.
Did I say I love wordpress? I love it...

Looking forward to it .. loved the title ;) .... can you teach me how to build a wordpress site :D

I went to this at Drupal Camp NYC, it's a must attend. Especially for anyone saying to themselves, Drupal isn't all that hard to use...

Hey I do agree with "Build a basic WP site faster than you floss your teeth" but then trouble is that the plugins make WordPress crash a little too often. And that's not all its really hard to find the what went wrong where unlike Drupal.
However, I do agree thats there's a lot that Drupal can learn from Word Press . Its interesting that the community is open to learning this :)

This session's recording is at:
http://www.archive.org/details/WordpressIsBetterThanDrupalDevelopersTake...

Superb! crazy topic and thanks for the video upload! :)