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Drupal vs Layers: What are the differences?
What is Drupal? Free, Open, Modular CMS written in PHP. Drupal is an open source content management platform powering millions of websites and applications. It’s built, used, and supported by an active and diverse community of people around the world.
What is Layers? A simple WordPress site builder. Layers is a WordPress Theme framework focused on extending the WordPress core functionality to include layout building through the WordPress Visual Customizer. A lightweight set of base options, widgets and theme templates provide a user-friendly, extensible tool for creating beautiful, WordPress-faithful websites.
Drupal and Layers can be primarily classified as "Self-Hosted Blogging / CMS" tools.
Some of the features offered by Drupal are:
- Categorize with taxonomy, automatically create friendly path urls, create custom lists, associate content with other content on your site, and create smart defaults for content creators
- Manage content with an easy-to-use web interface. Drupal's flexibility handles countless content types including video, text, blog, podcasts, and polls with robust user management, menu handling, real-time statistics and optional revision control.
- Users can be assigned one or more roles, and each role can be set up with fine-grained permissions allowing users view and create only what the administrator permits.
On the other hand, Layers provides the following key features:
- Preset layouts allow you to get a head start without the intimidation of a big blank canvas
- Create robust, responsive designs that look incredible on mobile phones and tablets
- Integration with WooCommerce means you can start selling right out of the box
Layers is an open source tool with 10 GitHub stars and 7 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Layers's open source repository on GitHub.
I usually take a slightly different tack because the technical level of people I usually am dealing with is lower. I tend to be pitching to decision makers and not tech people. A bit of my standard answer is below.
Wix and Squarespace are proprietary systems meant for unsophisticated users who want to build their own websites quickly and easily. While they are good for that specific use case, they do not offer any way to move beyond that if your needs arise. Since they are proprietary closed systems if you need something more advanced at some point your only option is to start over.
WordPress is an Open Source CMS that allows much more freedom. It is not quite as simple to setup and create a new site but if you are talking to me then you are not looking to build it yourself so that is really a non-issue. The main benefit of WordPress is freedom. You can host it on virtually any decent web hosting service and since it uses PHP and MySQL you can have virtually any developer take over a project without problem.
I believe in open source because of that freedom. It is good for me as a developer and it is good for my clients. If something were to happen to me or my company you would have no problem finding another qualified WordPress developer to take over the site in a totally seamless fashion. There would be no need to start from scratch.
Additionally the extensible nature of WordPress means that no matter what your future needs, WordPress can handle it. Adding things like e-commerce and custom quoting systems are just two examples of advanced solution's that I have added to WordPress sites years after they were first built.
WordPress is used by tiny one person businesses all the way up to major websites like the NY Times and I think it is right for this project as well.
10 Years ago I have started to check more about the online sphere and I have decided to make a website. There were a few CMS available at that time like WordPress or Joomla that you can use to have your website. At that point, I have decided to use WordPress as it was the easiest and I am glad I have made a good decision. Now WordPress is the most used CMS. Later I have created also a site about WordPress: https://www.wpdoze.com
Pros of Drupal
- Stable, highly functional cms75
- Great community60
- Easy cms to make websites44
- Highly customizable43
- Digital customer experience delivery platform22
- Really powerful17
- Customizable16
- Flexible11
- Good tool for prototyping10
- Enterprise proven over many years when others failed9
- Headless adds even more power/flexibility8
- Open source8
- Each version becomes more intuitive for clients to use7
- Well documented7
- Lego blocks methodology6
- Caching and performance4
- Built on Symfony3
- Powerful3
- Can build anything3
- Views2
- API-based CMS2
Pros of Layers
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Cons of Drupal
- DJango1
- Steep learning curve1
