The WGBH.org Development Blog

What better way to warm up for Thanksgiving then with some blogging tools talk! Always puts me in the holiday mood.

Anyway, so far as public broadcasters go, WGBH is one of the biggest, in terms of production, people, departments, projects, etc. and etc. This means that, in addition to our main web site, WGBH.org, there are any number of other related web sites out there floating around. The involvement of our group, WGBH Online, in these related web ventures ranges from full fledged ownership and support, to technical consulting, to completely hands off.

While the ongoing redesign of WGBH.org continues to trudge along and hang over our heads, there are a number of these other related projects which are coming on to our plate, to one degree or another. Many times, we are finding, these small web properties can really just be handled as blogs, whether the request is framed that way or not.

Of course, now that we have a Drupal production site up and running, supporting these related sites should be simple, no? If somebody here needs a blog, well, no problemo! Drupal can easily support multiple blogs, all under one code base, making for easy maintenance, theme sharing, logins and on and on, so that should be that, right?

Well, maybe. But maybe not. At least not always.

Recently, we have been tasked with supporting at least two new blogs. While our initial impulse (and general preference) is to build them in Drupal under the existing code base, further reflection has made us think that WordPress might, in some situations be the more practical choice.

Much as we love Drupal - and we do love Drupal so - when it comes to stand alone, easy to use blog-authoring tools WordPress is hard to beat. From it’s slick and user friendly administration tools, to its wide choice of plugins and themes to its ease of installation and maintenance, there is much to like!

Personally, I use WordPress for several blogs and we even use WordPress for this here blog!

WordPress also has the advantage of already being familiar to many folks, of both the technical and (very) non-technical variety, so the learning curve is even smaller.

Drupal or WordPress for our global blogging needs is not a clear cut choice and so we are picking and choosing between them on a case-by-case basis. In each case there are several criteria that come into play:

Integration with WGBH.org

The first question is just how tightly the proposed blog is to be integrated with WGBH.org. Does it need to look and feel like the rest of the site? Does it need to pull/display/reference content from the main WGBH site? Should its content show up in searches on WGBH.org? Basically, the more tightly integrated it needs to be, the more we lean towards Drupal, since everything would be in the same content management system.

Development Needs

Does the WGBH Development (fundraising) department have requirements for the blog, such as being able to capture site visitor information and interactions (e.g. email addresses, comments, etc.)? Will the site require a login? Since our Drupal site will eventually be integrated with our CRM and membership applications (and support single sign on across these apps), Drupal is more attractive if Development imposes such needs.

Degree of Ownership

Does WGBH Online truly own this blog, as in is responsible for look and feel, content, and technical support and maintenance? Or is the blog really owned by a separate group with WGBH and WGBH Online is mainly providing technical support? In the former case we would go with Drupal; in the latter we may go with WordPress, depending on some of the other criteria mentioned here.

Flexibility

How flexible are the requirements, particularly pertaining to look and feel? Does the blog need a custom theme? Or can it use an existing, off the shelf theme? Are there special (and rigid) requirements outside traditional blog functionality? Essentially the more custom coding work that my group will have do the more likely we are to use Drupal. If we are going to use WordPress, we don’t want to spend much time writing custom code or themes for it. Any heavy technical lifting should remain in the Drupal realm.

Time to launch

How quickly does it need to be up and running? If it has to be ready to go soon - and assuming the type of flexibility mentioned above - WordPress is more attractive. The set up time can be quicker and the user learning curve smaller, in general. But, then again, we try not to let time constraints dictate everything, if we feel a little more time will lead to a better solution (like implementing in Drupal).

These are just some of the questions that we are starting to ask when approached with projects tangential to WGBH.org. We’re still trying to figure this out as we go along. As always we reserve the right to change our minds in the future…

Anybody else wrestling with this sort of dilemma? Please share…

Hope everyone has (or had) a great Thanksgiving!

Tags: blogs, Thanksgiving!.