Drupal Equivalents to the Most Popular WordPress Modules

January 12, 2013

While I’m a Drupal advocate for sites that require a content management system, I recognize that WordPress still holds the crown for most popular CMS. Through talking to others that work exclusively with WordPress, I’ve come across some of WordPress’s most popular modules.

I know this list isn’t going to convert WordPress developers to Drupal (or vice versa hopefully), but I just thought it might be interesting to take a look at some of the similar modules. This isn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, a comprehensive list, just a quick recap of some of the most popular WordPress plugins and their Drupal module counterparts.

Custom Content Types

The ease of which you can create a custom content type has long been one of Drupal’s greatest strengths. In fact, this is the reason I fell in love with Drupal in the first place!

It has been possible for WordPress, at least for the last several versions, to create custom content types, but always at the expense of tedious coding practices. WordPress has since played catch-up, in a way, making this a plugin that can be added to grant administrators a user interface for creating, modifying, and deleting these custom types.

Advanced Custom Fields

The second biggest reason I adopted Drupal when I did is the ability to easily create fields that site users can complete to create custom content. Giving any individual piece of content fields for body text, photo galleries, or file uploads makes the developers life much easier.

Again, WordPress had to play catch-up, but a plugin now exists that allows developers the same field options.

E-Commerce Solutions

Ubercart for Drupal 6 and 7
Drupal Commerce for Drupal 7

In all honesty, I’m not familiar enough with any of the WordPress commerce packages to give them any sort of review, rather wanted to offer Drupal alternatives.

Ubercart is stable and has been the de facto choice for Drupal e-commerce for many years. With the introduction of Drupal 7, Drupal Commerce has evolved to be praised as the Drupal e-commerce platform of the future.

SEO + Google Services

There’s no denying that Google is the go-to place for web tech services and plugins. From web fonts to maps to analytics, there’s no escaping having at least one of these services running on your site.

The plugins and modules here are truly counterparts of each other, with the exception being @font-your-face, which adds the ability to use several web font services, not just Google fonts.

Contact (or Any Other Kind of) Forms

Again, I have to be up front and admit that I don’t have any experience with the WordPress form plugins, but I’ve never used a form builder that was easier than Webform (and also native to the CMS). Simply define the type of field – text, textarea, select list, etc – adjust a few parameters, and you’ve got a form that will save information to the database and email it to any number of email addresses!

Page Caching

Basic included in Drupal Core
Enhanced by Boost

Caching websites on the web opens a whole can of worms, so I won’t go into detail here. The bottom line is just that both CMSs have great page caching tools to go along with gzipping, serving media from a CDN, and so forth.

Spam Control

Spam sucks. I even wrote an article on the best way for developers to prevent it. But if you don’t follow my best practices method, you’re likely to choose a captcha of some kind.

The basic captcha system is available for both WordPress and Drupal, but both have less obtrusive softwares for controlling spam as well. WordPress’s Akismet scans and blocks spam in the background, while Drupal’s Mollom adds a small captcha-esque textbox, but still filters entries for spam content. The best Drupal equivalent to Akismet is the AntiSpam module which, itself, can use the Akismet service.

Wanna chat about this article or any others? Feel free to DM me or mention me on Twitter @marcusdburnette to start a conversation!

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