Todd Cochrane of Geek News Central has recently used his blog and podcast to rail against WordPress and Drupal. The Drupal rant occurred on his March 4th podcast where he announced his surprise at the funding of Acquia. A couple of days ago Todd took aim at WordPress in a blog post about his preference for Movable Type.

Cochrane’s beefs with WordPress and Drupal are very similar. On WordPress he states, “Wordpress is nearly impossible to work with in the templating department.” On the podcast Todd makes the charge (at the 43:45 mark in the audio)that, “It is the most unwieldly (sic), hard to skin, pain in the butt content management system I have ever used.” As a result Todd doesn’t use either platform and only gives a lukewarm endorsement for WordPress via a note in the footer of his post.

I understand that people have preferences for their favorite content management systems. I happen to use all three of these systems on a regular basis. I prefer to use Drupal for community building and WordPress for blogging sites. I use Movable Type to manage my family blogs, but I personally prefer Drupal and WordPress over Movable Type.

I do want to directly address Todd’s charges that WordPress and Drupal are difficult to theme. He is 100% wrong. I know this because I have used and altered a wide variety of themes for both platforms. I’m not a graphic artist or a programmer and I’ve managed to figure out how to alter themes on both systems to create the exact look that I want. Here are a few reasons why theming WordPress and Drupal are easier than Todd states.

1. Both systems rely heavily on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). If you’re willing to learn some basic CSS then you can start changing layouts, fonts and colors for your site in minutes. I’ve learned a lot about basic CSS here.
2. Both systems have lots of great base themes to work with. So you can start with a theme that is close to the look and feel of what you want and then edit the CSS and replace a few images to create a custom look. Start here for WordPress and here for Drupal.
3. Both systems are well documented. There are many tutorials available to show users the basics of the theming systems. Start here for Drupal and here for WordPress.
4. Independent theme designers are creating better themes than ever. You can find many free and some premium developers that create really nice, unique looking themes. Theme Artists and Roople Theme are two great examples for Drupal. Solostream, Shifter and Graph Paper Press show examples of excellent themes you can find for WordPress.

It’s also worth noting that every new release of these platforms includes tools that make it easier to customize your site. The information that anyone needs to work with the themes on these systems is out there for free. And in addition to the resources I’ve mentioned there are many free tutorials and some books for purchase which explain what needs to be done. Drupal Dojo recently released a Drupal 6 Theme Screencast.

Those that claim Drupal and WordPress can’t be themed by the average web user probably haven’t tried or at least haven’t invested any effort into learning how to do it. Like everything else that you want to learn to do, open source web systems require that you have enough time and patience to learn the basics of the system before you can expect to achieve what you desire. And if you don’t have the time you can find many people providing services who can achieve what you want with either of these systems.

Todd’s claims that WordPress and Drupal are extremely difficult to theme are ridiculous. The documentation is out there. The community support is out there. The tools are becoming easier to use with each new release. And there are people that you can pay to help you if you don’t have the time or inclination to do it yourself.