Patrick, in the first comment, makes a lot of sense. The D-word could address a lot of issues here.

The use of conditional logic for sidebar widgets (in Drupal-ese: blocks) is core functionality. Blocks can be shown/hidden based on url path, user role, type of content, etc, etc, etc.

RE: “I can, for example, show a navigation menu of pages in the sidebar, that expands and collapses based on where I am on the site. But as soon as I jump out to a post, I lose that context and the navigation stops making sense. What would be nice is if pages could belong to categories!”

In Drupal, you can do this using the core menu functionality, the core book module, or via core taxonomy.

RE: “Oh, and WP really needs a way for users to easily reorder pages without having to use the ridiculous page IDs.”

In Drupal, pages can be reordered within a book or menu navigation structure via drag and drop. If you want to use a contributed module, the Views module allows you to create specific ways of ordering content. With views, once you set up your ordering rules, new content gets handled/organized automatically, without any additional interventions needed by end users or site admins.

In looking at Wordpress and Drupal side by side (which isn’t an easy thing, as they really are apples and oranges — both sweet, juicy, and tasty, but different) Drupal requires more work up front. You need to know your architecture, your user stories, your use cases, your logic, and then you build your site. The flexibility is best leveraged as part of a plan. With WP, on the other hand, you have more flexibility to build it as you go.

Cheers,

Bill

As a user, I just want to say “Thank you.”

Of course, I hightailed it out of there just after implementation, so who knows how it’s going.

I also had a failure with running a WP based document/CMS site some years back. But I think a lot of it was I wasn’t aggressive enough with people to say, “look, we are seeing this through and going to make it work, and I’ll help you but retreat is not an option.” It was viewed as “yet another tool” and while there were tech problems with it, I think the biggest barriers were cultural.

Which is great, of course, because cultural problems are the worst to have. But I guess I’m saying I’m not sure it would have gone any differntly if we had used Drupal or Sharepoint.

I actually have a longer, more focused post brewing in my head about this topic. It’s taking a while because I’m trying to avoid talking about my perceptions of these applications from a “gut” perspective. I want to be rigorous.

In this particular case, however, the parties involved didn’t want to add yet another environment to the landscape. And there was a big emphasis on making sure people would be as comfortable as possible (read: familiar) with the tool(s). Whether or not we’re achieving that remains to be seen.

But, more importantly, you did not comment on the video, so I must ask you to try again. Really, this whole post was just a device for posting that little blast from the past. The WP-CMS thing was just to lure people in.

If only ……. nah….. I wouldn’t want to use the “D” word.

But seriously, I really am starting to worry that 1) we’re doing faculty an injustice with the position that Drupal’s interface is “too hard” (picture pulling the string on the back of “Faculty Barbie” and it saying “Drupal is hard!”). I hear little to nothing about the interface being the problem with the Drupal installations I handle — I hear a lot about how to best take advantage of all it does. 2) we expect too little of them by saying “just use umwblogs because many already know it”. We don’t expect the students to stick to one, familiar tool that they already know (like Blackboard? Like MS Word?), do we? Why do that with the faculty? (Okay, I know some of the answers to that one, but still….)