- Advanced URL Control — Unlike WordPress, Drupal gives you precise control over URL structure. Each item of content in Drupal (called a node) can be given a custom URL (called a URL alias). In WordPress you are generally limited to one type of permalink The Global Redirect Module will automatically 301 redirect the internal Drupal URL to the custom URL alias. Unlike many other content management systems, Drupal's content pages have nice clean URLs.
- Custom Content Types and Views — You can use the Content Construction Kit (CCK) and Views Modules to create new content types and create advanced custom views for them without writing any code. A few examples of "content types" are "blog posts", "news stories", "forum posts", "tutorials", "classified ads", "podcasts". Most content management systems would require writing code to accomplish these tasks, but there is no programming knowledge required to do them in Drupal.
- Revision Control — you can configure Drupal to save a new version of your pages every time they are editing. That means that you can go back to view or revert old revisions if you want.
- Taxonomy — Drupal has a powerful taxonomy (category) system that allows you to organize and tag content. Each Drupal "vocabulary" (set of categories) can be limited to certain content types. You can also have hierarchical categories, with single or multiple parent categories. Drupal's advanced taxonomy features, combined with CCK and Views; allow you to easily target all of those long-tail keywords that you researched in Wordtracker.
- User Management — Drupal was designed for community-based Web sites and has strong user role and access control functionality. You can create as many custom user roles with custom access levels as you need. For example you could create the following roles, each with different levels of access to your features: "anonymous visitor", "authenticated user", "moderator", "editor", "webmaster", "admin". You can keep the advanced user management features (like multiple blogs) turned off if you don't want them, enabling them later if your site grows to a point where you would like to add more community features.
- Page Titles and Meta Tags — Drupal's Page Title Module gives you custom control of your HTML <title> elements, while the Meta Tags Module gives you control over your pages' individual Meta description tags. This is difficult in some content management systems, but it's easy with Drupal.
- Excellent Documentation — Documentation includes the official handbooks, the massive API Reference, numerous tutorials, blogs, videos, and podcasts, and the excellent new book Pro Drupal Development.
- PHP Template — Drupal uses the PHP Template theme engine by default. Theming in Drupal is easier than theming in WordPress and doesn't necessarily require any PHP knowledge.
- Drupal Cookbooks — if you want a feature that is not built into Drupal by default, chances are that someone has already written a code snippet for it and posted it in the code snippets section of Drupal.org.
- Large and Friendly Community — The Drupal forum is highly active and are a great place to get your Drupal questions answered.
There are other open-source alternatives to Drupal, but here are a few reasons that Drupal is better:
- Joomla - It's not as search engine friendly out of the box as Drupal.
- Plone - It''s powerful, but Plone is written in Python and has certain server requirements. It is not as easy to extend as Drupal, and it's harder to find people who know Python than who know PHP.
- WordPress - WordPress is excellent, but if you need something more heavy-duty or are building a site that you might want to extend in the future you should be considering Drupal.
