Despite the propagandistic title, I must admit that I'm very impressed by Drupal. I knew it was a wonderful content management platform before, but I wasn't very sure how good it will perform as a blog.

I spent most of the weekend being a real geek and fiddling around with Wordpress and Drupal. Wordpress was the second choice and for a few hours - even the first choice, but I still had the same opinion about it. I really wanted to know what was happening under the hood, like when the platform sends data to wordpress.com or to various ping servers, but everything was limited to a few settings. I was also a bit unsure of the quality of code, both in the core and in plugins, especially after reading a few articles about this - and after trying out some themes (which even though were very popular) still used an ugly PHP syntax (escaping PHP code with tags such as <? ... >).

On the other end, Drupal seems to impose some standards over the quality of plugins and also of the core. I know there are many critics to the Drupal hook-like architecture and to the lack of object oriented concepts, but there's also a very interesting response article which suggests quite the opposite. The main thing that concerns me about Drupal is its performance, but on my test machine there didn't seem to be a huge difference between Wordpress and Drupal - both out of the box, with no performance tweaks (no caching for Drupal).

Hopefully I'll be happy with the switch from Mephisto. I did miss a few features of Mephisto, like the ease of enabling syntax highlighting for code snippets, the ability to add custom excerpts out of the box and text filters such as Textile and Markdown (there are some modules for Drupal that implement this, but I want to read a bit more about them).