I completely finished my site conversion (from Drupal to WordPress), and am pretty happy with how it all went, and how relatively easy it was. With some very minor exceptions (mostly gallery-related), everything is running smoothly. I’m also pleased with how user-friendly WordPress is to the system admin: Plugins can be installed, configured, and even edited on the fly. No need to fire up an FTP client. In addition, everything just works. I can’t tell you how many tweaks I had to make in Drupal to get stuff (like a workable RTE) to function properly.

Just for fun, I fired my old Drupal site back up for an apples-to-apples performance comparison, and it wasn’t even close. Each site has the appropriate “super-caching” mechanisms enabled, and even with that, WordPress still beat Drupal in the ‘snappiness’ contest by a mile.

I should point out that this is nowhere near a fair comparison: Drupal is a full-blown, highly customizable and complex WCMS, whereas WordPress is very focused on just being a blog. But I think it’s still worthwhile to point out that if your needs are simple, you can be up-and-running with WordPress with less pain than other options.

Speaking of which, I took Joomla for a spin too – it installed easily, but I have to admit I was completely confused by its totally foreign (at least to me) metaphor. I know I didn’t give it enough time (and I do plan on continuing to play with it), but it’s definitely not the drop-dead-easy WCMS I was expecting. It’s certainly attractive enough, but it doesn’t look like you can just hop in.

Here’s a pretty good article that goes into the strengths and weaknesses of each platform.

Well, somehow, I think my GoDaddy account has been updated or moved, because I didn’t do anything special (no patches), and this site is now pretty much flying. As I reported a couple of weeks ago, I had isolated some speed issues to the fact that I was on a GoDaddy hosted account with ~3500 other domains.

As one of my friends pointed out, this is not a high-traffic site, so I doubt GoDaddy took a personal  interest in me, or my front-page complaining. It might have just been regularly scheduled server maintenance. Of course, it also could be that no one is actually using their accounts right now, at 5:30ish on a Sunday morning.

Anyway, I hope this keeps up.

It may be that my site speed issues were related to some performance problems with Drupal 6.1. I updated the site to Drupal 6.2, and it seems to be running a bit better, now. It’s still not as fast as I’d like, but I’ll keep checking the updates page to see if other fixes are published.

So, my site is crawling with Drupal and I’m not sure why. I’ve installed the Devel module and that’s given me some good information, but the only thing I know for sure right now is that my MySQL queries appear to be running fast, my graphics, CSS, and JS are pretty optimized according to yslow, and that PHP execution times are freakin’ abysmal.

I’ve shut off pretty much all non-essential modules, and have turned caching up to its max settings (in administer/performance), but my page execution time is still through the roof.

I’m trying some PHP optimization techniques like increasing memory and ensuring register_globals is off (it was), but so far my success has been minimal.

I’ll keep hacking away at this. I wonder if it could be related to my host, Godaddy.

I finally got around to redoing my old blog in Drupal. I decided to use the latest stable version, v6.1. So far, it’s pretty good, although I’m still surprised that certain functionality (such as a Rich Text Editor) needs to be added and configured manually.

Also, certain key plugins in Drupal 5x aren’t working in v6 yet.. CCK, Views, etc.

However, it does look like the work that’s been done with Themes is pretty good – they’re MUCH easier to configure in v6 than they were previously.

I plan on messing around with a frame-like theme at some point. Hah, like I have time for that.. maybe I’ll surprise myself though.