If you have several hours to compare what we consider the two leading Content Management Systems out there- this thread on the Drupal site has it all- but this short paragraph summed it up pretty well:

WordPress vs Drupal; what’s in a reputation? | drupal.org
And here is where I raise the usability/user experience issue.
Wordpress got it by the hand. Not only it validates out of the box, the experience for a non-tech user is great. It was actually FUN getting it to work. It wobbles when it comes to the categories (too simple but it works anyway for basic stuff), it doesn’t have half the functionality offers, but within its reduced scope, it is solid, and so very easy to use, to install, to understand.

Drupal, on the other hand, is a great, great tool, I appreciate the enormous effort from a lot of very bright and willing people and i’ll be damned before turning my back on it (not just because of the functionality, but because of the spirit behind i), but I have to confess it has frustrated me endlessly..

The reason we believe in WordPress is the “Fun” part of work- it makes putting content on your site so easy that it doesn’t feel like work. We’ve been able to get non-technical people to admin WordPress sites quite easily- can’t say that for Drupal, yet.

When we install WordPress for clients, we often include a nice selection of themes and some essential plugins. However, many people want to change the look of their site- by uploading new themes- or add new functionality to WordPress using Plugins. Here is how you update your WordPress install using FireFTP a free plug-in FTP for Firefox.

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol, and the FireFTP extension for Firefox is a free, open source solution- other programs that do the same thing on a Mac are Fetch and Transmit. On a PC, you can get SmartFTP or FTP Explorer. FireFTP will do everything you need- and it’s free.
First you have to have Firefox installed- go to www.getfirefox.com to download a copy (if you haven’t already). Install Firefox- and don’t worry, it can reside peacefully next to Internet Explorer or Safari- you can have multiple browsers on your machine. It’s our opinion that you should make it your primary browser- and import all settings from your current default browser- but that is up to you.

Once in Firefox- go to TOOLS>ADD ONS

This will take you to the page where all the extensions are listed. Find the Search box- and type in FIREFTP- it should take you to this page: https://addons.mozilla.org/search.php?q=Fireftp&type=E&app=firefox

Click on FIREFTP, and then the “Install now” button. Restart Firefox and you should now have a little seahorse in your tool bar- and “FireFTP” as an option in your TOOLS menu.

The icons: back, forward (dimmed), refresh, stop, FireFTP (the blue seahorse), Sage, autofill, new tab.

Now that you have FireFTP installed- you have to set it up for accessing your WordPress installation.

These are instructions for our server– using a standard Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP) running Cpanel.

First- click on the “Manage Accounts” text on the left side- create new account.

Main Tab: 

Account Name: What ever you want to call your site.

Host: url.tld (example: websitetology.com)

Login: your site login, will be different than your WordPress login

Password: your site login, may be different than your WordPress login

Connection type tab: 

Check “Passive mode”

Initial directories:

Local: a folder on your computer where you will keep your WordPress files.

Remote: www

Advanced tab:

No need to enter anything in these- although you can decide on how you want your file names to be structured- either Leave Case Alone, convert to lower case, or  CONVERT TO UPPER CASE (note- all files must not have spaces in them.)

Clicking on connect should open the connection- with your local folder on the left- and your www folder on the server on the right.

There will be a long list of files on the server- with a lot of them starting with WP – this is your WordPress install- the only, ONLY, folder you will move things in and out of is your wp-content folder.

Inside it you will find three folders,  Uploads, themes and plugins.

These are where you place your content- respectively.

Uploads is where the WordPress upload tool will place your files- using a year, month, date file hierarchy. Sometimes you may go in here to update a file, or check a link structure. Most of you will never have to access this folder.

The Themes folder is where you will copy the entire folder of a theme that you have downloaded to your computer from someplace like the WordPress Theme Viewer. To upload the file from your computer to the server- have the closed folder that contains your theme on the left, and the themes folder open on the right- select the theme on the left- and click the right arrow button in the center-FireFTP will begin the upload process.

To upload- select the file on left- Pool, click right arrow and it will move from your computer to the server.

Once the files are done the FTP process- you log into your WordPress admin panel- the Desktop, click on the presentation tab- and activate your new theme.

To upload Plugins- you do the same thing- only upload them into your Plugin folder.

If you have any questions- or run into problems with these instructions- please comment below- and I will update or clarify the instructions.

Good News! Forget all these steps- here is an easy way to get iWeb sites onto your own server!

Get “Easy iWeb publisher” for free from Plyxim, here is the link: http://www.plyxim.com/

I haven’t had a chance to test it- but, I’m sure it’s got to be easier than all these step by step proceedings!

If there is one thing I haven’t been happy with in Word Press is its ability to manage a page of photos- so, for Mac users, I put together this little step-by-step instructions on how to use iPhoto and iWeb from iLife 06 to build a gallery page.

If you are looking for one reason to buy a Mac instead of a PC- the way iPhoto handles importing, managing, working with pictures from a digital camera is it. with the addition of iWeb it also gives you a great tool to build a photo page.

Here is how to do it- starting with the basics:

1. Connect camera- or card reader.
2. iPhoto 06 should open automatically.
3. Before you hit import photos- name the roll- adding a roll description.
4. Crop and name photos- the title will appear under each photo.
5. To organize them for the site- you can use the “Batch change” for both titles and contents.
6. Click iWeb option- choose “Photo page”
7. Close the .mac page (it’s Apple’s hosting service- and you own your own domain)
8. Choose a template that you wish to use just for the photo page. As far as I can tell- once you select this template- the only way to switch templates is to delete the page and recreate it from iPhoto.
9. You can change and edit items on the template in iWeb. I suggest removing the “include page in navigation menu” from the page menu.
10. Make title link back to your post: select the title text (starts out as the name of the album from iPhoto)- select the text- pick the link icon in the inspector (the link icon is the last icon on the right- a little blue circle with the swooshed arrow in it).
11. Select “enable as a hyperlink”
12. Make this a link back to the url for the post (you find this by clicking on the headline- and copying the url for the post).
13. Choose publish- here is where it gets a little hinky- iWeb wants to publish to a .Mac account. Apple hasn’t provided a way to publish to your own hosting solution (BOOOO!)
14. Instead – save it to your sites folder on your hard drive. Note: Subscribe buttons work only if you specify the site’s URL (address) in the dialog that appears when you choose File > Publish to a Folder.
15. Continue when you are prompted about Content rights (it is your content- right?)
16. Then open Transmit– or use the handy dandy free extenison for Firefox, FireFTP, and this is a little goofy- your first folder has a page called index.html and a folder (the site name)- open the site name folder- and you will have another index.html page and another .html file (the short title of the original iPhoto album) plus 3 folders- “images” “SlideShow_assets” and “Name of alum_files”-copy all 3 folders and one of the two .html pages (I prefer the one NOT named index.html) into a folder with a short name- like gallery – on your stuff (the server) and then the address to your page will be www.yoursite.com/folder_name/name.html (Where folder_name is the name you gave the folder – mine is gallery and name.html is the name of the iPhoto album- mine is faves.html)
17. Now – make a link to this page in the post- that you have the link back to on your title from step 10.

I know it seems like a lot of steps- but once you are done- you will have a sweet gallery page to look at- like this:http://blogosopher.com/gallery/faves.html

Note- we’ve tried a couple of WordPress plug in’s like Gallery– with limited success. I would really like iWeb better if it took the iPhoto comment info and put it under each photo- and would allow for alt tagging the photos as well.

If anyone has any better suggestions on how to do this- please share. Thanks.

(See beginning!- new software makes this easy)