Since 2007 I have been checking for a Drupal alternative because of several reasons. One main reason for the switch was that Drupal was too expensive to maintain. If you want to maintain a cutting edge website design and if your site needs some basic social features, then your drupal site needs a somewhat continuous big investment.

In case that you are a serious developer and you have a lot of spare time for your site, then you might not have that issue. With the release of drupal 7, I knew that I would not benefit from upgrading on the long run. Drupal’s future and roadmap is way off on how I expect my content to be managed.

Nevertheless I am thanking Drupal for its existence and for managing my sites for the last 6 years. The time with drupal was not always easy but we mostly achieved what we were looking for.

The switch has been basically already shown by others. So I just followed this migration tutorial and everything was set pretty fast. You can see the new website here.

So my path for the last decade or more went from phpnuke, postnuke (now Zirkula), typo3, drupal and finally to wordpress. On the way I have also gained a lot of experience with forum software such as UBB, Simple Machines Forum, vBulletin and IP.Board. I was in charge of administering Linux Servers and websites. Working with different cms solutions meant also knowing how to transform basic design changes and also knowing your way around  with drupal modules like cck.

Ease of use is really a game changer and wordpress and xenforo (forum) are really great software packages which have shown that the user and the administrator cares about software which is easy to navigate.

As an administrator, I do not care if I work with open source software or with proprietary software solutions because open source software is not necessarily cheaper just because the software itself was for free. Maintaining and developing will also cost you money and that is why I have my favorite packages on both sides.