The woes of platform switching or choosing the wrong platform

byjohnwai

416 followers

9 years ago

My love/hate relationship with Drupal

I built a Drupal site prior to joining WA. After going through some training here I found out that using Drupal was not ideal, in particular with link cloaking. I am surprised there were still no plugins for this.

However it's advantages include but not limited to:

• Faster performance,
• Less resource intensive,
• Full front end customisation.

Having found out the hard way, although a great learning experience, the disadvantages include:

• Lots of configuring required before you create the content,
• Plugins can often run into errors,
• Same errors may not have the same fixes,
• Not entirely affiliate marketing friendly

Here's a snapshot with my previous site:

Even getting to that layout took quite some time. For example there were no default options to input tags used in posts. I ended up having to design the user interface in order to achieve that. Then I had to figure out how to make tags appear in the posts. Things like that were time consuming and I could have made better use of time creating more content as well as progressing with the training at WA.

The return to Wordpress

Since a week and a bit ago I have reverted back wordpress, and that was the best decision ever made. For a blogging site, I guess Drupal was too much as I didn't need half of its functions.

Here is a snapshot of the new site:

It took me a week and a bit to fully migrate over, as I had 29 posts and 4 pages to rebuild. There were no straight forward export and import functions.

I was surprised how far Wordpress has advanced over the years. It makes Drupal irrelevant. In particular plugins like visual composer, they never existed back in 2013 when I last had a WP site.

It didn't take long to familiarise myself with wordpress again. What took time was learning how my new premium theme worked. I had to go back and forth with the developer to get my site looking the way I wanted. That took a few days.

For those who has not used visual composer one amazing feature is that you can create site templates. Otherwise there will be lots of dragging and dropping. Imagine doing that for 29 posts and 4 pages ?

I realised there were lots of spelling and grammar mistakes too. So going over each of the posts was not such a bad thing.

So now I am back on track ready to make progress with the course and make my site affiliate marketing friendly.