There are a lot of blogging software on the market — some free and open source, some commercial — but no one comes close to WordPress in terms of popularity and user base in the blogging community. Its famous 5-minute install has sealed its reputation as an easy-to-use platform for publishing a website without the technical know-how required by other blogging software. Undoubtedly, WordPress is the first choice of bloggers, but there is another open source alternative that has built in blogging capabilities and packs more options out of the box — Drupal.
No thanks in part to its unusual name, Drupal is not a byword in the blogging community in the same level as WordPress, but it has been gaining a lot of followers among bloggers who see their websites growing beyond a blog as they build a community around their readers.
Because Drupal was built primarily as a web software for online communities, with its built-in Forum and Profile modules, it has the potential of taking a blog to an entirely different level — allowing it to accept members as bloggers and forum members each with their own profiles and blogs.
Drupal comes with a Blog module out of the box, and this module supports multi-user blogging. Unlike WordPress which can only accept multiple authors blogging on a single blog, Drupal gives users their own blogs each with its own RSS feed.
Drupal also has a Ping module that can turned on to alert services such as Pingomatic, Weblogs and Newsgator whenever a new content is posted — much like WordPress.
However, Drupal does not have a built-in trackback feature. It would require the installation of a third party module called Trackback module. A trackback is a method for a blogs to notify another blog that has linked to one of its posts. In return, the linked blog would add a link on the post linking back to other blog. Trackback comes out of the box in WordPress and it has encouraged interaction WordPress bloggers to link to each others post thereby exchanging traffic in the process.
Because Drupal wasn’t built as a dedicated blogging software like WordPress, it would take a lot more customization to achieve the same function and backend behavior of WordPress, and this could be a major discouraging factor for ordinary publishers who don’t want to be bothered by highly technical modifications.
But they should fear not, because once you go past Drupal’s installation — which can also take as short as 5 minutes, it’s all just a matter of activating the built-in Blog and Ping modules, and you can have a blog in minutes. And thanks to Drupal’s helpful community and excellent documentation, your blog can be customized with image galleries, video galleries, a forum for your readers, user groups, and even a shopping cart if you decide to sell products or memberships as your blogs expands with more sections and features.