WordPress Vs Drupal - Practical Comparison

I keep watching discussions on the choice of frameworks and I find it fascinating how the discussions have shifted from "Which programming language should I use?" five years ago to "Should I use WordPress or Drupal?" today.

The simple truth is that you can build any site you want with any framework as longs as you know how to program. WordPress is great to get a simpler site going - but the downside is that it's all written with a "C" style philosophy meaning that it's not 100% object oriented = very flat design = pain to maintain for larger projects with a lot of functionality.

WordPress is procedural - Drupal is object oriented. With an object oriented framework you have cleaner code and better separation of concerns within the codebase. With a procedural framework you can easily customize the site without having to write a lot of boilerplate code for your classes. WordPress reminds me a little of how Quake was coded. Simple, procedural, callback based. But constrained in many ways since you can not subclass framework objects.

For a large site you want to have an object oriented base so that you can extend it in many more ways and have better overall structure in your code. WordPress is designed to be user friendly - Drupal is designed to be programmer friendly. Which one do you want is up to you. Although in the end you can build an object oriented site on top of WordPress just like you can with any other framework. In the end each one is just a framework designed to make certain programming tasks easier.

Although I think that you should look at your requirements and see what features each framework provides straight out of the box and how each framework fits with what you are looking for. Drupal was designed for large, functionally rich sites. WordPress was designed for content based sites. But you can still extend both with any custom functionality as long as you know how to program.

For sites I build for clients I use exclusively WordPress because it's so easy to customize and is very user friendly from the admin perspective (which is important if you are building a site for somebody who is not a programmer). But if you are developing a site that only you will be administering and where user friendliness on the admin side is not an issue, then any framework is fine as long as it provides as much of the functionality that you need straight out of the box.