Moving to WordPress

The Reasons for MyLabBook Moving from Drupal to WordPress

The major reasons for moving from the Drupal CMS to the WordPress CMS can be summarized in the following points.

• Significantly larger market share of WordPress – The market share of WordPress is about 20X of Drupal as of 2023. The large market share better suits the Sustainability criteria of being a S.A.F.E. ELN Research Platform.
• The robust ecosystem of premium plugins for WordPress – Unlike WordPress and Joomla, Drupal has very few if any extensions (modules) that require payment. The disadvantage to Drupal’s approach is that individual developers or development teams are less incentivized to support a module beyond what it might contribute to their consulting practice or unless it is a key component of their support (e.g., for Open Social).
• The Drupal code base is much more complex to work with – Drupal’s approach to custom content types from a site builder perspective is elegant and powerful. However, it has added to the complexity and made modules and extensions more difficult to build and to use.
• BuddyBoss – The turning point came when we found that BuddyBoss was much easier to use and integrate with than Drupal’s Open Social. We see this as a consequence of the availability of premium extensions mentioned above.

We have enjoyed the development with Drupal for the last decade or so, but the experience with WordPress has given us greater flexibility and sustainability. Those qualities have made WordPress the obvious choice for the future of the MyLabBook approach for building ELNs and research platforms .