What can WordPress and Drupal learn from each other? I put that question to Malcolm Peraltycolleague on Open Talk on Open Source, the show I cohosted on the Do the Woo network. Malcolm started with WordPress 0.72 and now works at Acquia, the company behind much of Drupal’s product work. So he sees both projects from the inside.
🎙️ Episode details
- Show: Open Talk on Open Source, on Do the Woo (now Open Channels FM)
- Host: me, Courtney Robertson. My cohost Robert Jacobicolleague wasn’t on this one.
- Guest: Malcolm Peralty, a technical account manager at Acquia at the time
- Released: August 28, 2024
- Listen and read along: the Malcolm Peralty episode page on Open Channels FM, with the audio and a full transcript. The original Do the Woo address no longer loads.
🧭 From a 0.72 blog to the Drupal “mothership”
First, Malcolm described building his first full site on WordPress before pages existed. His About page was a blog post he linked from the navigation. (Those of us who registered our first sidebar by hand remember the era.) He went on to blog about WordPress full time, cohost early WordPress podcasts, manage projects at 10up and support Gravity Forms.
His move to Acquia followed a company acquisition. He said he saw his role being consolidated, asked an old contact about Agile certification, and ended up interviewing at Acquia. He called Acquia the Drupal “mothership,” comparable to Automattic’s role in WordPress.
We’d last crossed paths, before that, at the first WordCamp Canada. I sat in on his talk about working remotely for American companies from Canada. I listened as an American with Canadian coworkers who wanted to understand what they deal with.
🧩 What is Starshot, and why did it remind Malcolm of Gutenberg?
Malcolm explained Starshot, the effort Drupal was renaming Drupal CMS. Its goal is a Drupal that site builders and marketers can run without deep developer knowledge. Installing Drupal today, he said, takes Composer and YAML knowledge, with no five minute install.
The feature he liked most is recipes. A recipe packages modules (Drupal’s word for plugins) together with their configuration. It can be as small as a password expiry rule or as large as a full site setup. You can stack recipes and share them.
He pictured the same idea in WordPress: a host or agency recipe that sets pretty permalinks and upload folders before anyone opens the settings screen. I compared that with the AI onboarding wizards hosts offer do it yourself site owners, including GoDaddy, where I worked then. Agencies, I said, usually don’t want AI in the way when they spin up a site. Recipes give them a repeatable starting point instead.
📦 Why Drupal and WordPress release pace depends on other projects
Malcolm said enterprise customers lament how fast Drupal versions now arrive. In his account, Drupal 10 to Drupal 11 took about a year and a half. That’s fast for a project where many sites still run Drupal 7.
He tied the pace to dependencies outside Drupal’s control: CKEditor 4 reaching end of life, Composer updates, PHP and MySQL. I raised PHP from the hosting side. When PHP moves faster, every PHP project’s customers absorb the upgrade work, whether they run WordPress or Drupal.
♿ Is WordPress or Drupal more accessible?
Malcolm said many people in the Drupal community believe Drupal is more accessible than WordPress. His answer: both cores are accessible, and that can change the moment you add a theme or module built without accessibility in mind.
I added a second split. A logged in editor’s experience can differ from a front end visitor’s, even with core alone. So “is it accessible?” needs a follow up: accessible for whom, on which screen?
🏅 How do the projects recognize contribution?
Next, I asked how Acquia supports contribution. Malcolm said technical account managers are encouraged to give time back to modules and projects. He also offered his opinion that open source has given ground to profitability in recent years, in both communities.
I shared what I was working on then: contributor dashboards for the WordPress project. By contrast, Drupal lets contributors log their work by hand. My idea was to automate what WordPress can measure, such as public Slack and GitHub activity. For work no metric captures, such as reading posts and researching project history, a manual log like Drupal’s could fill the gap.
🧪 What can you take from WordPress and Drupal?
Malcolm’s advice was to spend time in the other project. If you’ve worked in one PHP and MySQL CMS for years, he said, you can bring refinements back, spot dead ends early and find more room to contribute.
Here’s how I’d use the episode:
- Agency builders: compare Drupal recipes with your own WordPress starter setup. Which settings do you change on every new site?
- Contributors: ask what your team’s contribution record leaves out. Reading and research count, even when no dashboard shows them.
- Site owners: when someone says a CMS is accessible, ask about the theme, the plugins or modules, and the editing screen.
Malcolm also praised a command line tool he uses to audit Drupal sites and produce HTML reports. The publisher’s transcript spells it “Rooney.” His description of policies, profiles and HTML reports matches Drutiny, an open source Drupal site audit tool, so that’s my best reading of the name.
📚 Resources from the conversation
- Malcolm Peralty episode page and transcript on Open Channels FM
- Drutiny on GitHub
- WordPress.tv, where WordCamp session videos are published
Also, more conversations like this one live in my podcast and speaking archive.
🗓️ Archival note
I hosted this episode, released August 28, 2024. On November 9, 2026, I replaced this post’s earlier text. That version included three migration case studies with percentages, a sample configuration snippet and leftover instructions for a writing tool. None of it came from the episode, so I removed it. This version comes from the publisher’s episode page and its edited transcript. I reviewed that transcript, not the audio.