Drupal Commons vs Wordpress+BuddyPress for a social network

Question

I lead a team of 4 PHP developers and we have been tasked with developing a custom social network site/portal. By social I mean Facebook-like social - activity streams, comments, popularity, various kinds of content, etc. We don't have years to develop it from scratch so I'm thinking about building on top of the existing CMS - either Wordpress with BuddyPress or Drupal. The choice between the two is a tough one for me. My team is very proficient in PHP but has no significant experience with neither of the CMSes. Both platforms provide similar end-user features but I wonder how easy it is to hack BuddyPress (if we need to, which is very likely) vs something (likely Commons modules) on Drupal.

The problem with Drupal is that D7 is there but Commons modules haven't been portedto it yet. Developing on D6 doesn't make a lot of sense to me as I've read it will be problematic to migrate to D7 in the future.

The social network site we have to develop is not really centered around a blog. What would you recommend?

Answer 1

You never want to "hack" a CMS. Changing the CMS's code introduces security vulnerability. What I recommend will be not to use any kind of CMS, but use a framework (if you must) such as symfony.

Answer 2

WordPress has a rich architecture for plugins to extend the system, and you can similarly extend BuddyPress. You can also extend Drupal Commons.

The primary thing that Drupal Commons has that BuddyPress doesn't is commercial support.

(BTW, WordPress isn't necessarily centered around a blog either. One radio button selected in its settings changes its default view to CMS (Static Front Page), and the "blog" features can be hidden entirely if desired.)

The decision is going to be driven by the requirements you haven't yet specified. For instance, if you expect users to generate a lot of content, this will probably be easier with BuddyPress. But if you need the commercial support, then you have to go with Drupal Commons despite any potential drawbacks.

If you can be more specific about the features/requirements for your new site, it will be easier to determine whether one of the packages meets those requirements and to what extent.

Answer 3

I think it depends entirely on which features you are likely to use. If you like the feature set of Drupal Commons and don't necessarily need too much outside of that, then I would recommend Commons as it is professionally-supported and very well done. However, if you need an extremely customized community, you may want to opt for BuddyPress which has 412 plugins available for the platform currently and more being added every day. The quality of these extensions range from excellent to very poor. Some developers don't have the time to support their plugins past the initial version and others make a living from their plugin and make sure it's always ready for the latest releases of WordPress and BuddyPress. I wrote a basic comparison between the two platforms that you might find to be useful:

Open Source Social Networking Matchup: BuddyPress vs. Drupal Commons