Craft CMS – Ease of Use of WordPress; Power of Drupal

May 26, 2020 Web Design Comments

Tags

Business, Web Design,

There is more to having a website than just creating content. You need to package and manage your content in the best possible way. In light of this fact, site owners need to be clear about the nature of user experience that they offer. The key to getting online marketing right lies in choosing the best content management system (CMS). For starters, you have three worthy options to consider: Craft CMS, WordPress, and Drupal. These content management systems use the web stack to configure the applications. The web stack comprises of Html5, Css3, and JavaScript.

Choosing a CMS

WordPress has been around for a longer time than both Craft CMS and Drupal. But before you settle for any CMS, it is imperative to have an idea of the factors to consider when choosing one. Here is a list of parameters to consider when making a CMS decision.

  • Ease of use: A good CMS should make it easy for you to create, edit, and manage content.
  • Modularity: It is also essential that you look at the availability of plugins and extensions, which determine your customization options.
  • Scalability: Pay attention to the ease with which you add extra pages without a corresponding decline in performance.
  • Maintainability: Make sure that you are aware of the need for upgrades and maintenance, and the resulting costs.
  • Reliability: This is a measure of the CMS’ ability to safeguard both content and customer data against all manner of security breaches.
  • Integration: Make sure that the tool also works well with other systems.
  • Support: How well supported is the CMS and how big is the community behind it.

Craft CMS

This content management system stands out as a lean, scalable, and custom solution for developers who take pride in doing this right. Over the years, it has consistently enjoyed excellent adoption by knowledgeable developers. However, knowledge in HTML, CSS, and JS is essential to take full advantage of its functionality. This content management system is one of the best WordPress alternatives out there for developing with custom fields. Similar to the Advanced Custom Fields plugin for WordPress, the built-in Matrix field makes content management very simple and elegant. This is achieved by allowing content writers to use pre-existing content blocks, set up by the developer.

SEOmatic is the best plugin for optimizing your website for search engines. Out of all the content management systems out there, Moz favoured SEOmatic as their plugin of choice when leveraging SEO tools for their own purposes. Hosting with this platform requires php 7.2 or greater and typically is done with a virtual private server. Digital Ocean and Laravel Forge are excellent tools that can handle this.

Pros

  • Extremely customizable
  • Fast back-end speeds
  • Powerful and flexible software
  • Superb at content management
  • Solo version is free to use
  • Reliable
  • Secure
  • Easy to learn

Cons

  • Limited plugins available, but the existing ones are of a higher quality
  • Smaller community than WordPress and Drupal

WordPress

WordPress, arguably the most popular content management system, enjoys a massive audience among the blogging community. Initially designed for bloggers, wordpress.org has what it takes to cater to a range of website building needs, including commerce, mobile presentation, and social integrations. WordPress also has a very large ecosystem of plugins available for use that allows for this software to integrate well with other platforms. WordPress Yoast SEO Plugin is a powerful free SEO plugin that can analyze a blog post and offer very useful metrics on how to optimize the content for SEO. This makes Yoast SEO the best free WordPress SEO plugin.

Pros

  • Easy to use
  • Open source
  • Gentle learning curve
  • Compatible with thousands of plugins and resources
  • Big community of developers and content creators
  • Free content management system
  • One of the best ways to create a blog
  • Great starting point for startups
  • Easy to maintain
  • Free to use

Cons

  • Mostly used in sites that don’t require massive functionality
  • Security dependent on the number of plugins
  • Bloated software

Drupal

Drupal is a CMS platform that was assembled by a group of community developers. While it measures up exceptionally well in terms of user functions, it also enjoys a global market share of 2%, which is undoubtedly impressive, looking at its short stay in the market.

Pros

  • Extremely powerful content management system
  • Extremely powerful for ease of scalability
  • Large availability of plugins known as modules
  • Has a variety of integration modules
  • Secure

Cons

  • You need technical knowledge to get the best out of this platform
  • Its powerful nature makes it susceptible to breakdowns

Final Thoughts

  • If you have a medium sized budget are looking for a flexible solution that has excellent ease of use, and has a comfortable blogging experience with superb SEO, Craft CMS is your best bet.
  • For small to medium sized projects with smaller budgets, where time is of the essence, and integration is very important, WordPress is a good fit.
  • For large projects and big budgets, where you want to scale to high demands and also require heavy security and power, then Drupal is a good fit.