There’s been some growing chatter lately about what’s in store with Drupal 7. Curious to learn more, I was reading up on the Drupal 7 User Experience Project and as I scanned through the pages, I noticed something: the Drupal 7 User Experience Project site is using WordPress! This may seem innocuous at first, but it signals something that is becoming a growing trend, a move away from earlier days when developers in different corners of the open source community would duke it out and take jabs at one another – we’re starting to see decisions made based on the sound judgement of common sense. And when it comes to selecting an open source tool, for example deciding between Drupal and WordPress, we’re seeing that you don’t always have to draw a hard line in the sand.

I’ve been a long-time advocate for using the right tools for the right purposes. In my world lately this has meant deciding or providing advice on what and when to use different social media channels and open source tools. Conversations will often flow from a question along the lines of: “We want to build this site with X-Y-Z features, it needs to have A-B-C, and 1-2-3…How should we do this? What should we use to build it?” Sometimes I’m lucky and the decision is clear and simple. But most often, as with many things when it comes to the web and digital media, the answer is usually: “It depends.”

In the real life material world, it’s almost a tautology to say that the best tool for a particular job is the right tool for that job. You hammer nails with a hammer. You screw in screws with a screwdriver. It’s all pretty self-evident. But take it one step further and say you’re building a house. Now you’ll come to a decision like what materials should you use to build the house? Concrete? Wood? Well….it depends.

It depends on things like your budget – your initial budget for building the house, and the savings you’re tucking away to throw at the maintenance costs you’ll be facing down the years. This, in turn, would also depend on things like whether you have the skills to do this maintenance yourself or whether you’ll be hiring out a professional. You could write a whole book of metaphors and analogies on how building a website is like building a house. (Hmmm….)

Taking “it depends” to the digital world, for example deciding between WordPress or Drupal, what does it depend on?

In part, it will depend on your budget and the access you have to the right people who can help you build and manage a WordPress or Drupal based site. But imagining you have the budget and expertise to handle either (which is a growing trend): When would you use WordPress and when would you use Drupal? Here are some suggestions to help you decide:

When to Use WordPress

Use WordPress when:

• you need to set up a blog or a simple website that’s easy to update
• your primary goal is to communicate news-like content
• you have a limited and controllable number of content contributors (think: Newspaper writers and editors)
• you want to easily integrate social media tools like Flickr, Twitter, and YouTube
• you want a very professional-looking site but, to keep costs low, you’re ok that your professional-looking site might look exactly the same as many others

When to Use Drupal

Use Drupal when:

• you need to create an online community (i.e. you want to provide features like member profiles, online forums, discussion threads, file-sharing, connecting or “be-friending” members, make announcements to an internal community)
• you need to create what is essentially an intranet
• you have layers of information with a more complex hierarchy and taxonomy
• you need to set up various roles and permissions, to give your users varying rights to carry out specific tasks within your site
• you have a potentially unlimited and uncontrollable number of content contributors
• you have the budget, time, and talent to create a look and feel that is very customized to the nuances of your online community

This is really just a starting list – there are a lot more things to consider when it comes to selecting an open source tool. A growing number of organizations need everything listed above, and yet are often advised (quite often by people like me) to select one or the other and accept that you can’t have it all. Without a doubt, you change the complexity of the landscape when you start adopting more than one of these tools (trust me, I know the challenges of this firsthand).

But after seeing the Drupal 7 User Experience Project using WordPress (which, when you think about it is a real tip fo the hat to the UX of WordPress), I’m becoming more and more inclined to think that as long as you have a clear and thorough understanding of the purpose you’re using each tool for, and provided you have the capacity to not only launch them but more importantly maintain them in the long-run, you don’t always have to pick just one.

Drupal or WordPress? Why not both?