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Managing Wide Range Of Topics: Drupal vs. WordPress MU?

While categories work reasonably well on WordPress to help you keep your content organized, it would really be good to have separate “contexts” or “sites” if you are going to post articles or wide ranging topics. For example, if you want to use the same blog to write about current events, as well as something like robotics, you would want to keep the contents easy to browse for your visitors. So, instead of just relying on WordPress categories for this purpose, I was tempted to take a look at WordPress MU, while I have been eagerly wanting to try Drupal.

I did install WordPress MU and create a few separate blogs to try out the idea. It seems to work quite well. I can easily see how it is a great blogging infrastructure for someone who wants to host and administer a large number of blogs. But I quickly realized that what I was really looking for was a content management system with a highly configurable taxonomy. That is where Drupal excels — at least based on what I have been trying out for a couple of weeks.

So I decided to go ahead with Drupal as a supplemental site where I can create more organized content — books, articles, and so on — and use this blog for more informal discussions. This way I can use URL links to my Drupal contents within this blog and get the best of both worlds.

Drupal also has the “Organic Groups” module with which you can create sub-groups that appear like separate Drupal sites. That is another thing that I am going to look at before deciding how exactly I am going to use Drupal.

To sum it up, if you are looking to host many blogs from the same installation, WordPress MU works quite well. If I ever need to host something like that, I will most likely use WordPress MU. But on the other hand, if you are looking for a highly customizable content management system as the backbone of your site, then I think Drupal is a better choice. Drupal is extremely customizable and extensible. That also means that there is a fairly steep learning curve — so be ready to spend some time figuring it out if you decide to use it.

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