Toe to Toe with WordPress

Track: 
Business and Strategy
Experience: 
Intermediate

Of the more than 100 million domains crawled by Acquia, over 7.5 million (7.5%) of them host a CMS. Of these domains, WordPress is by far the behemoth with 53.3% of coverage. Drupal clocks in at 5.6% of domains with a CMS.

With a 10 fold lead in usage, WordPress is the biggest competitor for mindshare that Drupal faces. WordPress enjoys a reputation as a user-friendly, easy-to-theme platform. As WordPress deepens in complexity, so too does the required expertise of its developers. And whereas it was once a platform for bloggers, the 3.0 release shifts its strategic focus in the direction of enterprise level support. In the session we will compare the 3.0 release of WordPress to Drupal 7 and compare their respective features in terms of level of effort required to utilize them effectively.

As the major developers and advocates of Drupal, we must take stock of WordPress' success, learn from its innovations and fight the outdated reputation that Drupal has little to offer to designers and themers. This session will offer specific talking points that you can adopt to convince clients that Drupal is the ideal platform.

Intended audience: 

Freelance Drupal developers and shops who specialize in Drupal theming.

Questions answered by this session
Question 1: 
WordPress 3.0 was release in June 2010. What exactly was introduced on their platform in this major release?
Question 2: 
Feature to feature, theme to theme, how does Wordpress 3.0 differ from Drupal 7?
Question 3: 
I want to set up a site that both WordPress 3.0 and Drupal 7 can do - what is Drupal's edge?
Question 4: 
Theming in Drupal 7 is not yet an effortless undertaking. What can we as drivers of the Drupal platform learn from WordPress' most successful features?
Question 5: 
Drupal has a reputation as a complex platform for themers and site builders. This reputation does not reflect the current state of Drupal. What specific actions can we take as evangelists of this platform to dislodge this reputation from the common opinion?
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