What’s good about Drupal:

• It’s open source, free and has a large enough community of developers
• It’s won the open source content management system award multiple times and came in #1 out of every other CMS in 2008; the 2010 results have not been released at the time of this writing
• It’s easy to change the look and feel of different site sections giving you more freedom for layouts and visual design

The downsides about Drupal:

As of the time of this writing, Drupal 5 and 6 are not nearly as user-friendly to administer as WordPress; However, Drupal is making great strides in this area for Drupal 7 and through the Acquia project. Because it has a steeper learning curve than WordPress and is significantly more complex, building and maintaining a Drupal site will likely be expensive than a simple WordPress site. However, the functionality and value you can add using Drupal can easily justify the price in most cases. Also, there are currently relatively few Drupal themes compared to the number of WordPress themes. There are, however, websites that use professional Drupal templates and you can have even have custom Drupal themes – but for that, you need it developed for you from scratch, and it will cost more and you’ll have a smaller selection than WordPress.

I believe one of the largest mistakes new website owners make in 2010 is to choose a basic and less powerful CMS like WordPress, simply because they don’t know or haven’t been exposed to Drupal.  You can create a better site with more visual design and make it a lot easier for your visitors to find content if you choose Drupal. For sites at the $2,000 level and above, I would build in Drupal over all other choices (except maybe Joomla. See my discussion on that below).

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