Blind Information Technology Specialists

I get a lot of emails and comments about my "WordPress is better than Drupal" talks, presentations, videos, slide-shares, and rants. But believe it or not, I'm on Drupal's side! This post started out as a reply to one of those emails, but I feel it would be better to say this once to the world, rather than over and over again privately, in email.

The biggest difference between WordPress and Drupal, is that Drupal is a Content Management System, and WordPress is a blog engine. This means Drupal assumes that there will be many different kinds of users with various levels of control who are administering a website, and WordPress assumes there will be only one. This should be the deciding factor when choosing between WordPress and Drupal (or moving from one platform to the other).

Yes, WordPress is trying to move into the CMS space, because most people who started off as simply bloggers have realized that they need more than just a blog, but they love WordPress already - so why try something new? But the truth is, the more you try to do with a WordPress site, the more brittle it gets. The permission system is not very sophisticated, it doesn't scale very well, the theme system is a huge security hole, all content entered is treated in exactly the same way, database abstraction is weak, etc, etc, etc.

Similarly, Drupal would be complete overkill if all you wanted was a blog. The user 1 account will see way too many options on every page making the user interface overwhelming. Additional modules would need to be installed and configured to get exactly the same functionality as a WordPress blog, and considerable time would need to go into set up and configuration. And don't even get me started on looks - there are a limited number of beautiful themes for Drupal, most of which are already being used on thousands of other sites.

WordPress is a free and open source blogging tool and a dynamic content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL. It has many features including a plug-in architecture and a template system. WordPress is currently one of the most popular CMS in use on the Internet.

If you are new to WordPress, or want to expand your knowledge, here are two excellent resources that you will want to keep handy for future reference.

New To WordPress - Where to Start « WordPress Codex
http://codex.wordpress.org/New_To_WordPress_-_Where_to_Start

Top 10 Resources for Getting Started with WordPress Themes
http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/wordpress-tutorials/top-10-resources...

Drupal is a free, open-source web development platform for online content and user communities. Drupal powers some of the busiest sites on the web, and can be adapted to virtually any visual design. Drupal runs over a million sites, including WhiteHouse.gov, World Economic Forum, Stanford University, and Examiner.com.

Drupal was created over ten years ago and released as open-source software under the GNU Public License. That means it’s completely free to download, use, and modify: There are no purchase, license, or maintenance fees.

Drupal runs millions of web sites, including many of the world’s biggest. It’s especially strong among major governments and industry-leading enterprises, but is easy enough to be the platform of choice for individuals and small companies.

Drupal’s default installation is a database-backed web platform with file maintenance tools and a high level of security. Many developers take advantage of Drupal’s extensible architecture to go far beyond the “core” package.

Drupal is a multi-user system, letting site visitors log in (as “authenticated” users) or browse the site without doing so (as “anonymous” users). You control their access levels, and can also assign “roles” for multiple permission levels.

Maria Rios, 66, woke up at 6am. She got out of bed in her little second floor apartment on the north side of Central Park, and checked her iPhone for the weather. Then she felt around in her closet, where she had marked her navy blue garments with safety pins, to tell them apart from her black ones. In the adjacent room, her roommate Lynette Tatum, 49, picked out a white sweater and dark denim slacks. She used her VizWiz iPhone app to take a photograph and send it to a customer-service rep who lets her know what color the item is.

For the visually impaired community, the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 seemed at first like a disaster -- the standard-bearer of a new generation of smartphones was based on touch screens that had no physical differentiation. It was a flat piece of glass. But soon enough, word started to spread: The iPhone came with a built-in accessibility feature. Still, members of the community were hesitant.

But no more. For its fans and advocates in the visually-impaired community, the iPhone has turned out to be one of the most revolutionary developments since the invention of Braille. That the iPhone and its world of apps have transformed the lives of its visually impaired users may seem counter-intuitive -- but their impact is striking.

by Michael Malver

Over the past year, I have watched blind or visually impaired friends and acquaintances struggle to use three services with various forms of technology: Xm Radio on an iPhone, Pandora with a pc computer, and Skype, also with a pc-computer. All three products presented challenges either because they were highly inaccessible, or completely unusable. Enterprising individuals came up with work-arounds to make these services usable by the blind. An enterprising young college student was able to take programming tools provided by Pandora, and build an interface around them so that blind people can now use Pandora on a pc with his program, called Hope. GW Micro was able to take components provided by Skype and put an interface around them so that now blind people can use Skype. Users of Xm Radio on the iPhone found that the program provided by Sirius was inaccessible, but available from the app store was an app called “Music Doc.” It doesn’t include all the channels, and has some streaming issues, but it does allow access to Xm. I have not used Hope, GW Skype, or Music Doc. I am happy they exist, and commend the people who created them. Without them, we either wouldn’t be able to use the services which they render accessible, or we would have extreme challenges.