Is Drutopia right for you? Drutopia versus other low-cost options

This blog post is about Drutopia right now, not about all the ways we can improve it.

Daily use

Building your website on Drutopia has the advantage of allowing multiple people to create content of different defined types that can be clearly related to one another, listed and presented in different ways, and filtered. This is the super-power of structured content.

Drutopia's main disadvantages are that free-form changing how it looks is slow and takes specialized knowledge (unlike Wix or Squarespace which are primarily page builders), and it does not have many themes to choose from (which WordPress has).

The defined types of content available in Drutopia are:

• Article for time-sensitive content like news or press releases, where the perspective is representative of the whole organization.
• Blog for personal or journal-like posts, where authorship is more important.
• Person for featuring people on your site such as staff, volunteers, or contributors.
• Event Events have a date and time, an event type, and all the usual Drutopia fields (title, image, description, topic, and tags).
• Resource can be text and images like any content; an attached file, such as a PDF; or a link, such as a website URL; or an embedded video.
• Campaign: A campaign includes background information as well as ability to list demands and updates.
• Action: An action is a specific, single action a user can take.

All of these types of content can be connected by Topic, for site-wide curated categorization and by Tags for site-wide free-form categorization. Most content types can be further distinguished by type (article type, person role or type, event type etc).

Content is composed of sections, which can be the usual WYSIWYG text editor that allows insertion of images and other media, or more specialized sections for image, video, or file. This capability to mix different kinds of sections on pages is under-utilized at present in Drutopia but can be extended to be able to embed forms, including donation forms, or listings of other content.

Additional content types, which do not have the benefits of automatic listing pages with faceted search because they are meant for one-off or unique content, are:

• Basic page for static content such as an ‘About us’ page or the privacy policy.
• Landing page for custom pages, including potentially replacing the home page. Landing pages do not currently have a meaningful distinction from basic pages and are deprecated, but may be brought back with a special full-page free-form editor such as the Gutenberg editor developed by WordPress.

Long-term

A lot of the long-term advantage is having structured content you can make use of in ever-evolving ways, rather than having an undifferentiated mass of pages that can only be sorted through slowly and with difficulty.

But here we are taking a step back and looking at the platform more generally.

Drutopia is open source free software

In summary

Weebly, Wix, Squarespace, or inferior options bundled with other services such as Mailchimp Website Builder and GoDaddy Website Builder, do not allow creating content of carefully defined types, with relationships and connections between content. There are also usually limitations or extra costs associated with having multiple user accounts, or multiple people logged in at the same time. They let you change how the whole site and different pages look pretty easily. Moving your content to different hosting but keeping the software that runs the site is impossible, and switching to another platform and keeping your content is difficult.

WordPress allows some structured content and some customization of the look of the whole site pretty easily. WordPress can be hosted in different places (beware proprietary plugins though). WordPress content exports well if you want to change to a different software platform. Drutopia can import WordPress content.

Drutopia comes with a set of useful kinds of content already defined, complete with listing pages that can be filtered by cross-site topics and within-section types. Drutopia has limited visual customization currently available without knowing HTML, CSS, how to make templates, and how to work with a local development environment. Drutopia content exports well if you want to change to a different software platform, although to get the full benefit the other platform will need Drupal's capability to have structured content with rich relationships among content.