Are The CMS Wars About To Heat Up?

I had the chance to meet with Drupal CMS creator Dries Buytaert at the SXSW conference last week. After the chat with Buytaert, I started to wonder if a CMS war is on the horizon.WordPress has recently been pushing their platform hard and has also shown how their CMS can be used just like other micro-blogging and social aggregation tools growing in popularity including Posterous. WordPress has recently created Posterous and Vox importers for the hosted version of Wordpress. WordPress developer Brian Colinger also noted in the Posterous import announcement post that Wordpress can handle "post via email" which is the core functionality of Posterous.

InformationWeek's David Berlind took a look last summer at both WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg and Drupal creator Dries Buytaert and said they were, "probably separated at birth." Berlind notes how both Mullenweg and Buytaert have open-source systems, both have spam services and both have commercial enterprises built around their open-source systems.

I've attended "camps" for both WordPress and Drupal along with meetups for both CMS platforms across the U.S. There are very strong communities for both and I look forward to what comes next for the CMS industry. From my perspective, Drupal was always developer-focused while WordPress was user/writer-focused. You can see this clearly when you look at both systems. Drupal can be expanded further than WordPress and WordPress is prettier and easier-to-use for creating content.

But there are changes in the works at both companies that should move both platforms very, very close to each other. In my discussion with Buytaert, he talked about the upcoming launch of Drupal 7 which will apparently make the publishing side much easier. As part of Acquia, Buytaert is launching Drupal Gardens which is a hosted version of Drupal similar to WordPress.com offering a hosted version of WordPress. The Drupal team is also making lots of improvements for developers - including better APIs and better database abstraction layers. The Drupal 7 release is in alpha and they are hoping to launch the public release in the next few months.

As a side note, the main reason I moved my blogs from Drupal to Wordpress last year was because writing was frustrating in Drupal and is a pleasure in WordPress. I equally like both platforms from a developer perspective. I am looking forward to testing Drupal 7, especially from the viewpoint of a content publisher.

Here's the video of my brief discussion with Buytaert at the SXSW conference: