What to Know: WordPress vs. Drupal vs. Ruby

If your company has a website, it certainly has a content management system, but how in touch are you with the bells and whistles of your CMS? Three of the most popular systems are WordPress, Ruby, and Drupal, and they all come with various pros and cons, and the team at PBJ Marketing is more than familiar with them.Is it time to take a hard look at your content management system and determine if it’s the best option for your brand?The Pros and Cons of WordPress, Drupal, and RubyWordPress Pros    

• Open source structure – Many WordPress developers openly share their code online, making it much easier (and faster) to develop a site by using existing code.
• Simplicity – Perhaps the biggest upside to WordPress is how easy it is to use. In fact, it’s so easy, you don’t even need a professional Webmaster to edit site layout and content. WordPress is also easy to install, so there’s no need for a high-level programmer for setup.
• Rapid construction – It takes almost no time at all to install WordPress on a hosting server, so you can start working on your site almost immediately.
• SEO friendly plugins – WordPress is compatible with numerous plugins to enhance your site’s SEO value.

WordPress Cons

• Reduced flexibility – WordPress is designed for small content sites, and as such more sophisticated sites, like e-commerce sites might find it limited. If you start out with WordPress and the site starts to scale, you’ll need to make numerous systematic changes that can be costly and time-consuming.
• Speed – Sites powered by WordPress have lots of generic code, but when it comes to websites, code is rarely one size fits all. Unnecessary generic code can slow a site down, resulting in a poor user experience.
• Constrained customization – WordPress sites are very similar to one another and tend to share the same look and feel. Companies that invest heavily in PR and image, and don’t want their sites to blend in with others may be put off by WordPress’ constrained customization.

Drupal Pros  

• Total customization – Drupal’s strongest plus is that it’s so customizable. Right from the start, your site is a blank slate, and you can define what you want it to be. Drupal’s content types allow even novice users to build complex sites in relatively short periods of time.
• Super secure – Drupal is open source, so its security team is working every day of the week to provide patches and fixes. Turnaround on security updates are fast, and its security notifications keep users in the loop.

Drupal Cons  

• Big learning curve – Drupal is a complex system that takes a long time to learn. To make it even more challenging, if you’re trying to learn it on your own, many of the methods and patterns are buried among countless pages of API documents. Utilizing Drupal for your site will either cost you time or money to hire a new developer.
• Finicky contributed module compatibility – As your site grows, if you use Drupal, you might run into a few compatibility issues. At some point, codes might conflict and result in slow speeds, errors, crashes, and poor user experience.

Ruby Pros

• Tooling – Ruby has a deep arsenal of great tooling that helps your site deliver more features. Ruby also provides a standard structure for web apps, so common patterns aren't a concern.
• Quality code – Ruby’s code is commonly found to be better quality than its PHP and NodeJS equivalents. Ruby encourages and facilitates the use of web standards like JSON, XML, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for both display and user interfacing.
• Site language of the future – More and more, Ruby appears to be the language of choice among webmaster, site developers, and online code schools. This is a trend that results in new talented developers in the marketplace in coming years.

Ruby Cons    

• Slow runtime – One of the most common arguments against Ruby is that it’s “slow” runtime.
• Lack of documentation – There are a lot of things to learn about Ruby, but a major complaint is the challenge to find proper documentation. Many experts say it's frustrating to dive into the code to understand behavior and identify issues when written documentation would be much quicker.