Last week I needed to upgrade a couple of items on my server which caused a cascading effect of upgrades.  In the end, one of the sub-systems (Gallery 2) I depended on to provide photo galleries for www.adineswatercolors.com stopped working due to incompatibilities with modern PHP.   That left me with a few choices.

• Ignore it and stop having galleries — Not really an option as Adine depends on the photo galleries.
• Find some other old Drupal plugin compatible with drupal 6.xx to replace gallery 2 — Also did not seem to be worth the effort as Drupal 6.xx is close to end of life.
• Upgrade to Drupal 7.xx — Seemed like the obvious first thought.
• Move to WordPress 3.xx — No. Say it’s not so.

In reality, only the last two options seem viable.  Upgrade to Drupal 7.xx or move to WordPress 3.xx.

At first I really wanted to stay with Drupal, mostly because I started using Drupal years ago in the 5.xx days.  Back then I attended multiple Drupal conferences, user groups, and even helped organize the South West Drupal Summit.  But I’ve been out of the Drupal scene for a couple of years due to spending time with Rails, iOS, and Roller Derby.  The steep Drupal learning curve was back.  It was not obvious to me which modules were required, suggested, or even well accepted.

After spending several hours on the project, I decided to look at WordPress (multi-site) to see if it would be easier to create basic sites for Adine and I.  I was surprised at how easy it was to get WordPress to do what I was wanting to do.  The best part, it took almost no effort to get WordPress to hook into flickr so Adine only has one place to manage her images.  

While I’m  convinced there is much more power under the Drupal engine, I don’t think I will be needing to make use of that power.  And with less power comes and an easier to use system.  I am looking forward to teaching Adine how to update her content via the wordpress, something she never got a handle of with Drupal.