10 ms·

Acquia, my Drupal startup

48 points by taubek 3y ago

willcate 3y ago
(2007)
- gee_totes 3y ago
  "OMG, they are still working on drupal 7?" was my thought before I realized this was from 2007
  - solardev 3y ago
    Drupal 7 is gonna haunt us forever... I was working on it as late as 2021-22, and even then it kept getting extended: https://www.drupal.org/psa-2023-06-07 https://www.drupal.org/psa-2023-06-07 > On February 23, 2022, we announced that we would be extending the End-of-Life for Drupal 7 until at least November 1, 2023. Today, we are officially announcing that Drupal 7 will reach its end of life on January 5, 2025. There's also a whole cottage industry of Drupal 7 vendors/consultants who will provide support past end-of-life, or help you migrate to 9. I think it's a double-whammy because the kinds of organization drawn to something like Drupal (a powerful all-in-one monolith) are inevitably the same orgs who put everything into it and never want to care about maintaining or upgrading it afterward. They're in for a WORLD of hurt if they want to move to 8+... there's no upgrade path, it's just a rewrite.
  - PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
    I kept thinking I was confused because I remember Drupal 7 being released and it being very divisive due to how much of a change it was.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
whalesalad 3y ago
This is a trip down memory lane for sure. Has Drupal improved? Back when this was written it was the worst piece of CMS software I had ever used.
- robotomir 3y ago
  What are examples of good CMS software that you've used?
  - V__ 3y ago
    I can't remember the last project where I haven't used Craft CMS. Twig templating, no opinion on the data structure and easy to extend.
    - 1123581321 3y ago
      My thought as well. Craft is (inexpensively) commercial but it essentially starts where you’re fighting to get with Drupal for medium-sized projects. And authors like it. As a CMS with web framework features, it’s also built on top of a model/controller-based framework, using Yii instead of Symfony. Craft has thinned their abstractions over time to more directly match Yii’s methods.
  - jlahijani 3y ago
    ProcessWire CMS. Developer oriented but amazing for clients once set up. Been using it for 10 years straight.
- ksenzee 3y ago
  His little startup succeeded in getting many millions of dollars of VC money poured into Drupal, and it’s actually a really good way to build a serious website now, for a particular niche. It’s not for SPAs, and it’s not for non-developer hobbyists, but it’s the best way I know of to build a performant content-heavy multilingual website. You have to be willing to a) write code and b) learn an extensive framework. Lots of people only want to do one or the other of those things, so it’s not for them.
  - wbobeirne 3y ago
    > performant I've been away from Drupal for ~10 years, but I recently helped a friend spruce up a Drupal site he's working on and still found it's largely powered in production by heavy caching, and the page load speeds in development are a slog. I didn't know enough about how he built the site to know if that's still the case everywhere in Drupal or just his configuration, but my impression is still that it's absolutely not production ready without heavy caching in front of the site.
gijsnijholt1980 3y ago
There must be something good about Drupal, but I was unable to discover it during the 6 months I had to work with it in 2008. The code was messy and the UI unnecessarily complicated. The most unsettling observation though, was that all the people who seemed to believe in it had no idea what they were talking about. I learnt Python, Django and PostgreSQL and never looked back.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- MilStdJunkie 3y ago
  It was a very early instance of "WebCMS with a package manager / plugin architecture that's usable by Normal People". Then, of course, once adopted - like most CMS - it's very hard to migrate out, and it snowballs. People largely went for Drupal over WP or Plone or Django because they had zero leverage about 1) what comes in to the content system, 2) how they can build a content system, and 3) what comes out of the system. Also, in the aughts, don't forget that WP was extremely primitive compared to today. Lots of enterprise leadership said, "oh, you can't have Python, that's for engineers" combined with "you have to read and write all articles to this arcane XML schema only parseable to five academics in France". Thus the Drupal extensions ecosystem ended up with a TON of low level plugins . . like Drush, which probably shouldn't have existed. EDIT My God, Drush is still around.
  - cholmon 3y ago
    Drush (drupal shell) is just a command line interface to any given Drupal site, similar to Laravel's Artisan console, or Django's django-admin & manage.py, or Wordpress's wp-cli. Managing a Drupal site is much simpler when you can do certain things from the cli: run cron tasks, cache rebuild, import/export config, enable/disable modules, use the built-in REPL to troubleshoot stuff, not to mention the various commands that modules expose.
  - ksenzee 3y ago
    I’m pretty curious why you think Drupal shouldn’t have a command-line interface.
synergy20 3y ago
this brings back memories, drupal used to be my choice for my websites, but after drupal8, I moved to wordpress.
mrcwinn 3y ago
My wife always mistakenly called it Derpal, which I thought evoked the appropriate emotions.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
muppetman 3y ago
When I first moved to New Zealand, I started a diary (before the term blog existed!) using PHP-Nuke. After a while, PHP-Nuke imploded and so I migrated to PostNuke. After a while it imploded so I migrated to Drupal. I had a choice at that stage between Drupal (version 4 it was) and Wordpress. Wordpress still had that "holes, billions of holes" stigma, so I went with Drupal. Long story short, that's why my online diary (not linked anywhere) runs Drupal 10 to this day. It's now WAY overkill, but it still works well. I've looked at moving it to Wordpress, or to some static generator but I've got over 3000 entries now and the migration never works very well. I still find Drupal very easy to work with - my biggest gripe with it was when they just quietly started changing to not downloading .tar.gz but to using composer. And just assuming everyone knew what composer was and how it worked. In the end the friction it was causing me made me learn how to use it. Anyway my point of this rambling post is that as a USER of Drupal - it's great. I don't write any code, but I can shuffle my website around as I please very easily, adding widgets, changing what's exposed both in the UI and RSS etc. I didn't quite realise how uncool it was to still use Drupal until I read all these comments! :)
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  PHP-Nuke... now there's something I haven't thought about in a couple of decades. Still being updated, apparently! https://github.com/phpnuke/phpnuke/commit/96dbb962317c766f6b32ad73ee58782d00a5eae3 https://github.com/phpnuke/phpnuke/commit/96dbb962317c766f6b...
  - muppetman 3y ago
    Yeah I don't think they ever stopped, it's just the PostNuke fork had a better community behind it with a deeper focus on security. Then they stopped developing it and instead released a think called Xaria or a similar name, but it never had a strong community. PHp-Nuke when I installed it I couldn't believe. My own Slashdot!! With comments! It was amazing.
    - doublerabbit 3y ago
      Good days very so. Uploading in 56k. I miss being 13. Big fan of e107 for my CS:S clan websites. 0 : https://e107.org https://e107.org
diebillionaires 3y ago
Acquia is huge now and drupal is still awesome fyi
thinnerlizzy 3y ago
Any comments from folks who actually kinda like Drupal? I can cop to it almost driving me to tears until I got over the quite considerable learning curve, and once past that I could most any CRUD app with minimal, if any, new code. Once I got over that hump it was actually quite amazing for prototyping CRUD apps or selling small apps to clients that they never would have otherwise ordered given the cost and time of rolling your own.
- CitizenKane 3y ago
  Honestly Drupal is solid for a number of things, and in terms of getting a CRUD type app/site up it's probably still one of the fastest ways to do it for the non-technical. Actually pretty cool that you can get APIs straight out of the box this way. That being said, Drupal was initially a forum/blog and it definitely seems somewhat out of place in the modern web landscape. One of its Achilles Heels is that its rendering layer is notoriously slow and overall it's heavy. It's module system also doesn't mesh well with PHP's typical request/response execution model from a performance perspective (anyone who's spent time tuning PHP opcode caching for this knows what I mean). That being said, the content type and field system is still great and it would be great to see a more generalized version of this concept. This is another area where the implementation is pretty heavy on the Drupal side. Things like this have ultimately limited adoption and not having a clear migration path from D7 to D8 didn't help either.
- ksenzee 3y ago
  I’ve been writing Drupal code as my day job since 2009, and honestly I think it’s fabulous. It serves a narrow niche very well. People try to use it outside that niche, and they suffer. I feel for them. It’s not the right tool for everyone. You really have to be willing (and have the time and resources) to learn the entire framework, and figure out the Drupal way to do whatever it is you’re trying to do. The learning curve is indeed quite considerable. But it is a formidable toolkit, once you’ve learned it, and you can do really great work with it, really quickly.
easywood 3y ago
This reminds me of the time I used Drupal for a hobby project of mine (10+ years ago). I wanted to upgrade it to a new Drupal version, and one of the first steps was "Backup your database". It'll be fine I thought. After the upgrade I was presented with a brand new, empty system. One of the final steps was: now get your backup and load the system with it. Fun times. Also my last adventure with Drupal.
takinola 3y ago
I used Drupal to build my first real CRUD app. I was a beginner programmer and needed the hand-holding that the framework provided. As my knowledge grew, I found myself relying more on custom modules that I wrote rather than those in the framework. Eventually, I was fighting against the framework more than it was helping. When Drupal 8 rolled around, it was not worth the effort to make the switch. I don't ever see myself using Drupal again but I will always say thanks for providing the training wheels when I needed it most.
timetraveller26 3y ago
Back at my first web dev job the idea behind Drupal sounded appealing for my inexperienced self. Luckily eventually I learned how to program properly, but I wonder if eventually the LLM's will make Drupal-esque solutions emerge once again?
- solardev 3y ago
  What's the connection between LLMs and Drupal (or any CMS) here?
  - eaton 3y ago
    The belief that somewhere, someone else will do the hard stuff?
cattown 3y ago
I miss Drupal a lot. I sure wish it had won out in the CMS battle with Wordpress. I remember making little custom CRUD apps with almost no code all the way back when Drupal 5 was the thing. Like a lot of other ppl it seems I left off when they switched to composer. That didn't fit too well into the workflow I had at the time using cheap web hosting services where I didn't get a shell as dev environments. Also the upgrade treadmill was brutal. A few nice little web apps I made got totally left behind by security updates and such and were also too hard to upgrade to newer versions of Drupal. I remember that also being a major motivator to make the big jump to Python and other things. More code but also easier to manage over long periods of time. Lots of good lessons in Drupal for other frameworks. I haven't tried it in a while, but it's still in my mind one of the best low-code custom fields, forms, and views systems out there.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  In my opinion, Drupal is a much better platform than WP, except that it has always had a much higher geek factor, and I think that's what has stunted it. I feel that the engineering behind Drupal has always been top-notch. I wrote a couple of Drupal plugins and themes, BitD (Back in the Day), but that was a long time ago. I'm sure that big changes have come, since then. What I liked, was being able to completely customize both the frontend and the backend of a Drupal site. WP doesn't really give you much, in the way of making its backend much simpler. During that time, WP has improved its engineering and architecture significantly, so it's still a tough call.
- geek_at 3y ago
  Very true I have been working with a webdev company that only makes sites in Drupal and it was very nice how fast they could implement things but the updates were lengthy and often took way more hours than any small version jump upgrade should take. And because of the release cycles it's hard (or expensive) to keep a site running for 10+ years. In the end we opted for a plugin called "tome" that would just render the page as a static site and we'd just push the HTML files
- mitaphane 3y ago
  The Drupal community made a pivotable decision that ensured it would never "win" a CMS battle with WP. Wordpress has always been a more product-focused blog/site-builder that works out of the box and simplifies code concepts for an average user who doesn't need to know much PHP to get everything they want to be done. It has always focused on open-source PHP CMS as a product. Drupal has always been an engineer-first CMS; D8 doubled down on that: focus on long-term maintainability with OOP/Symphony/Composer/etc. That decision caused the casual site-builder who knew little PHP code to say "no thanks". It has always focused on open-source PHP CMS as a framework. Backdrop happened for those who wanted a good off-ramp for those who were happy to keep the current Drupalisms of D7 and didn't need more PHP-web-dev tools. Unsurprisingly, it became more WP-like as it tilted more toward PHP CMS as a product. The current community of the Drupal world has kept focusing on improving the UX of the site builder/maintainer role with its current initiatives (auto-updates, project browser) to self-correct. Ultimately, Drupal focused more on its core strength. That's not a bad thing, that's just product differentiation. It turns out the average website doesn't need to maintain a lot of custom CMS code/workflow/logic they just need to track a handful of blobs of text/image content.
esher 3y ago
Thanks HN for bringing this up again. I never fully understood what Acquia does and might never will. But it seems to go well, which is hopefully good for Dries. I respect when the open source project and the business behind it are clearly separated.
davidgerard 3y ago
(2007)
robador 3y ago
I've was a Drupal developer for about 15 years, then moved into management, eventually changed to a company that works with a 'modern' stack. I really miss Drupal. When I started out my career I basically was a one man web design agency, tailoring to small local businesses. When looking for a CMS I quickly found that Drupal allowed me the ease and flexibility to configure and customize websites for my customers. It was a perfect fit for me because I had enough skills to install and host sites, and to customize those things with code that I couldn't find a ready made module for. Over time Drupal changed a lot, and my skills grew. My focus shifted more and more to the technical side. As Drupal became more professional, so did I, and with it, the customers became a lot bigger too. I started to manage a team of developers, and then multiple. Finally I made a move to a big Corp in which Drupal was not used. I like the people that I work with a lot, all extremely capable and talented people. But I feel we're constantly reinventing the wheel. Things that I feel have long been solved in Drupal are somewhat half-assed due to the chosen tech stack and the time constraints. Drupal may not be perfect, but it did have an evolution of more than 20 years, and that shows. A very strong entity system, fields, taxonomy, user management, roles/permissions, i18n, asset handling (media), slugs, redirects, breadcrumbs, workflows, revisions, and perhaps the cherry on top: JsonApi (a porcelain if you ask me). A strong community and reasonable documentation means that it's possible to switch vendors, as everybody works with the same API's (mileage may vary a bit). The situation now with where I'm at couldn't be further from that. Everything JavaScript and microservices based, build on a (imho) dreadful SaaS 'CMS' (Contentful). The so called 'enterprise' CMS is severely lacking, it's a usability a nightmare, I can't stress how bad it is. It's basically a glorified database, which means that everything else needed is being built completely from scratch. That simply doesn't compete with the 20+ years of evolution Drupal has had. So yeah, I miss Drupal.
- solardev 3y ago
  I think that's a great point: that Drupal gave you a whole car, while today's JS gives you five incompatible wheels, thirteen colors of duct tape, and three fragile shells to put over them. Drupal had a lot of really strong (as in idiomatic and enforced) patterns that didn't let you take dirty shortcuts. As much as I hated it, it was solid engineering. (I'd consider it overengineered, but that's only cuz I'm coming from the opposite extreme... Frontpage and Dreamweaver). That was probably also its downfall. It had a huge learning curve (same as Angular's downfall). And it didn't make for easy division of labor, and there was no quick and dirty way to do anything. The reason why there are so many Drupal consultants is because it takes so much manpower and brainspace to understand how Drupal is architected. With a headless CMS, the schema admin, the content editors, and frontend devs could each do their jobs independently without stepping on everyone else's toes. It's not as complete as a majestic monolith but each person's job was a lot easier, and way more isolated and safe. Drupal tried to be everything for everyone, and in the end it was just too much for any one normal person. It's what happens when engineers design products for people who aren't like them.
rumblestrut 3y ago
Maybe I'm wrong here, but I feel like a lot of the comments are referencing the Drupal of the past, not today's Drupal. Drupal 8, 9, 10 and beyond is quite different than what came before it.

48 points by taubek 3y ago

willcate 3y ago

(2007)

gee_totes 3y ago
"OMG, they are still working on drupal 7?" was my thought before I realized this was from 2007
- solardev 3y ago
  Drupal 7 is gonna haunt us forever... I was working on it as late as 2021-22, and even then it kept getting extended: https://www.drupal.org/psa-2023-06-07 https://www.drupal.org/psa-2023-06-07 > On February 23, 2022, we announced that we would be extending the End-of-Life for Drupal 7 until at least November 1, 2023. Today, we are officially announcing that Drupal 7 will reach its end of life on January 5, 2025. There's also a whole cottage industry of Drupal 7 vendors/consultants who will provide support past end-of-life, or help you migrate to 9. I think it's a double-whammy because the kinds of organization drawn to something like Drupal (a powerful all-in-one monolith) are inevitably the same orgs who put everything into it and never want to care about maintaining or upgrading it afterward. They're in for a WORLD of hurt if they want to move to 8+... there's no upgrade path, it's just a rewrite.
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
  I kept thinking I was confused because I remember Drupal 7 being released and it being very divisive due to how much of a change it was.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

whalesalad 3y ago

This is a trip down memory lane for sure. Has Drupal improved? Back when this was written it was the worst piece of CMS software I had ever used.

robotomir 3y ago
What are examples of good CMS software that you've used?
- V__ 3y ago
  I can't remember the last project where I haven't used Craft CMS. Twig templating, no opinion on the data structure and easy to extend.
  - 1123581321 3y ago
    My thought as well. Craft is (inexpensively) commercial but it essentially starts where you’re fighting to get with Drupal for medium-sized projects. And authors like it. As a CMS with web framework features, it’s also built on top of a model/controller-based framework, using Yii instead of Symfony. Craft has thinned their abstractions over time to more directly match Yii’s methods.
- jlahijani 3y ago
  ProcessWire CMS. Developer oriented but amazing for clients once set up. Been using it for 10 years straight.
ksenzee 3y ago
His little startup succeeded in getting many millions of dollars of VC money poured into Drupal, and it’s actually a really good way to build a serious website now, for a particular niche. It’s not for SPAs, and it’s not for non-developer hobbyists, but it’s the best way I know of to build a performant content-heavy multilingual website. You have to be willing to a) write code and b) learn an extensive framework. Lots of people only want to do one or the other of those things, so it’s not for them.
- wbobeirne 3y ago
  > performant I've been away from Drupal for ~10 years, but I recently helped a friend spruce up a Drupal site he's working on and still found it's largely powered in production by heavy caching, and the page load speeds in development are a slog. I didn't know enough about how he built the site to know if that's still the case everywhere in Drupal or just his configuration, but my impression is still that it's absolutely not production ready without heavy caching in front of the site.

gijsnijholt1980 3y ago

There must be something good about Drupal, but I was unable to discover it during the 6 months I had to work with it in 2008. The code was messy and the UI unnecessarily complicated. The most unsettling observation though, was that all the people who seemed to believe in it had no idea what they were talking about. I learnt Python, Django and PostgreSQL and never looked back.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
MilStdJunkie 3y ago
It was a very early instance of "WebCMS with a package manager / plugin architecture that's usable by Normal People". Then, of course, once adopted - like most CMS - it's very hard to migrate out, and it snowballs. People largely went for Drupal over WP or Plone or Django because they had zero leverage about 1) what comes in to the content system, 2) how they can build a content system, and 3) what comes out of the system. Also, in the aughts, don't forget that WP was extremely primitive compared to today. Lots of enterprise leadership said, "oh, you can't have Python, that's for engineers" combined with "you have to read and write all articles to this arcane XML schema only parseable to five academics in France". Thus the Drupal extensions ecosystem ended up with a TON of low level plugins . . like Drush, which probably shouldn't have existed. EDIT My God, Drush is still around.
- cholmon 3y ago
  Drush (drupal shell) is just a command line interface to any given Drupal site, similar to Laravel's Artisan console, or Django's django-admin & manage.py, or Wordpress's wp-cli. Managing a Drupal site is much simpler when you can do certain things from the cli: run cron tasks, cache rebuild, import/export config, enable/disable modules, use the built-in REPL to troubleshoot stuff, not to mention the various commands that modules expose.
- ksenzee 3y ago
  I’m pretty curious why you think Drupal shouldn’t have a command-line interface.

synergy20 3y ago

this brings back memories, drupal used to be my choice for my websites, but after drupal8, I moved to wordpress.

mrcwinn 3y ago

My wife always mistakenly called it Derpal, which I thought evoked the appropriate emotions.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

muppetman 3y ago

When I first moved to New Zealand, I started a diary (before the term blog existed!) using PHP-Nuke. After a while, PHP-Nuke imploded and so I migrated to PostNuke. After a while it imploded so I migrated to Drupal. I had a choice at that stage between Drupal (version 4 it was) and Wordpress. Wordpress still had that "holes, billions of holes" stigma, so I went with Drupal. Long story short, that's why my online diary (not linked anywhere) runs Drupal 10 to this day. It's now WAY overkill, but it still works well. I've looked at moving it to Wordpress, or to some static generator but I've got over 3000 entries now and the migration never works very well. I still find Drupal very easy to work with - my biggest gripe with it was when they just quietly started changing to not downloading .tar.gz but to using composer. And just assuming everyone knew what composer was and how it worked. In the end the friction it was causing me made me learn how to use it. Anyway my point of this rambling post is that as a USER of Drupal - it's great. I don't write any code, but I can shuffle my website around as I please very easily, adding widgets, changing what's exposed both in the UI and RSS etc. I didn't quite realise how uncool it was to still use Drupal until I read all these comments! :)

ceejayoz 3y ago
PHP-Nuke... now there's something I haven't thought about in a couple of decades. Still being updated, apparently! https://github.com/phpnuke/phpnuke/commit/96dbb962317c766f6b32ad73ee58782d00a5eae3 https://github.com/phpnuke/phpnuke/commit/96dbb962317c766f6b...
- muppetman 3y ago
  Yeah I don't think they ever stopped, it's just the PostNuke fork had a better community behind it with a deeper focus on security. Then they stopped developing it and instead released a think called Xaria or a similar name, but it never had a strong community. PHp-Nuke when I installed it I couldn't believe. My own Slashdot!! With comments! It was amazing.
  - doublerabbit 3y ago
    Good days very so. Uploading in 56k. I miss being 13. Big fan of e107 for my CS:S clan websites. 0 : https://e107.org https://e107.org

diebillionaires 3y ago

Acquia is huge now and drupal is still awesome fyi

thinnerlizzy 3y ago

Any comments from folks who actually kinda like Drupal? I can cop to it almost driving me to tears until I got over the quite considerable learning curve, and once past that I could most any CRUD app with minimal, if any, new code. Once I got over that hump it was actually quite amazing for prototyping CRUD apps or selling small apps to clients that they never would have otherwise ordered given the cost and time of rolling your own.

CitizenKane 3y ago
Honestly Drupal is solid for a number of things, and in terms of getting a CRUD type app/site up it's probably still one of the fastest ways to do it for the non-technical. Actually pretty cool that you can get APIs straight out of the box this way. That being said, Drupal was initially a forum/blog and it definitely seems somewhat out of place in the modern web landscape. One of its Achilles Heels is that its rendering layer is notoriously slow and overall it's heavy. It's module system also doesn't mesh well with PHP's typical request/response execution model from a performance perspective (anyone who's spent time tuning PHP opcode caching for this knows what I mean). That being said, the content type and field system is still great and it would be great to see a more generalized version of this concept. This is another area where the implementation is pretty heavy on the Drupal side. Things like this have ultimately limited adoption and not having a clear migration path from D7 to D8 didn't help either.
ksenzee 3y ago
I’ve been writing Drupal code as my day job since 2009, and honestly I think it’s fabulous. It serves a narrow niche very well. People try to use it outside that niche, and they suffer. I feel for them. It’s not the right tool for everyone. You really have to be willing (and have the time and resources) to learn the entire framework, and figure out the Drupal way to do whatever it is you’re trying to do. The learning curve is indeed quite considerable. But it is a formidable toolkit, once you’ve learned it, and you can do really great work with it, really quickly.

easywood 3y ago

This reminds me of the time I used Drupal for a hobby project of mine (10+ years ago). I wanted to upgrade it to a new Drupal version, and one of the first steps was "Backup your database". It'll be fine I thought. After the upgrade I was presented with a brand new, empty system. One of the final steps was: now get your backup and load the system with it. Fun times. Also my last adventure with Drupal.

takinola 3y ago

I used Drupal to build my first real CRUD app. I was a beginner programmer and needed the hand-holding that the framework provided. As my knowledge grew, I found myself relying more on custom modules that I wrote rather than those in the framework. Eventually, I was fighting against the framework more than it was helping. When Drupal 8 rolled around, it was not worth the effort to make the switch. I don't ever see myself using Drupal again but I will always say thanks for providing the training wheels when I needed it most.

timetraveller26 3y ago

Back at my first web dev job the idea behind Drupal sounded appealing for my inexperienced self. Luckily eventually I learned how to program properly, but I wonder if eventually the LLM's will make Drupal-esque solutions emerge once again?

solardev 3y ago
What's the connection between LLMs and Drupal (or any CMS) here?
- eaton 3y ago
  The belief that somewhere, someone else will do the hard stuff?

cattown 3y ago

I miss Drupal a lot. I sure wish it had won out in the CMS battle with Wordpress. I remember making little custom CRUD apps with almost no code all the way back when Drupal 5 was the thing. Like a lot of other ppl it seems I left off when they switched to composer. That didn't fit too well into the workflow I had at the time using cheap web hosting services where I didn't get a shell as dev environments. Also the upgrade treadmill was brutal. A few nice little web apps I made got totally left behind by security updates and such and were also too hard to upgrade to newer versions of Drupal. I remember that also being a major motivator to make the big jump to Python and other things. More code but also easier to manage over long periods of time. Lots of good lessons in Drupal for other frameworks. I haven't tried it in a while, but it's still in my mind one of the best low-code custom fields, forms, and views systems out there.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
In my opinion, Drupal is a much better platform than WP, except that it has always had a much higher geek factor, and I think that's what has stunted it. I feel that the engineering behind Drupal has always been top-notch. I wrote a couple of Drupal plugins and themes, BitD (Back in the Day), but that was a long time ago. I'm sure that big changes have come, since then. What I liked, was being able to completely customize both the frontend and the backend of a Drupal site. WP doesn't really give you much, in the way of making its backend much simpler. During that time, WP has improved its engineering and architecture significantly, so it's still a tough call.
geek_at 3y ago
Very true I have been working with a webdev company that only makes sites in Drupal and it was very nice how fast they could implement things but the updates were lengthy and often took way more hours than any small version jump upgrade should take. And because of the release cycles it's hard (or expensive) to keep a site running for 10+ years. In the end we opted for a plugin called "tome" that would just render the page as a static site and we'd just push the HTML files
mitaphane 3y ago
The Drupal community made a pivotable decision that ensured it would never "win" a CMS battle with WP. Wordpress has always been a more product-focused blog/site-builder that works out of the box and simplifies code concepts for an average user who doesn't need to know much PHP to get everything they want to be done. It has always focused on open-source PHP CMS as a product. Drupal has always been an engineer-first CMS; D8 doubled down on that: focus on long-term maintainability with OOP/Symphony/Composer/etc. That decision caused the casual site-builder who knew little PHP code to say "no thanks". It has always focused on open-source PHP CMS as a framework. Backdrop happened for those who wanted a good off-ramp for those who were happy to keep the current Drupalisms of D7 and didn't need more PHP-web-dev tools. Unsurprisingly, it became more WP-like as it tilted more toward PHP CMS as a product. The current community of the Drupal world has kept focusing on improving the UX of the site builder/maintainer role with its current initiatives (auto-updates, project browser) to self-correct. Ultimately, Drupal focused more on its core strength. That's not a bad thing, that's just product differentiation. It turns out the average website doesn't need to maintain a lot of custom CMS code/workflow/logic they just need to track a handful of blobs of text/image content.

esher 3y ago

Thanks HN for bringing this up again. I never fully understood what Acquia does and might never will. But it seems to go well, which is hopefully good for Dries. I respect when the open source project and the business behind it are clearly separated.

davidgerard 3y ago

(2007)

robador 3y ago

I've was a Drupal developer for about 15 years, then moved into management, eventually changed to a company that works with a 'modern' stack. I really miss Drupal. When I started out my career I basically was a one man web design agency, tailoring to small local businesses. When looking for a CMS I quickly found that Drupal allowed me the ease and flexibility to configure and customize websites for my customers. It was a perfect fit for me because I had enough skills to install and host sites, and to customize those things with code that I couldn't find a ready made module for. Over time Drupal changed a lot, and my skills grew. My focus shifted more and more to the technical side. As Drupal became more professional, so did I, and with it, the customers became a lot bigger too. I started to manage a team of developers, and then multiple. Finally I made a move to a big Corp in which Drupal was not used. I like the people that I work with a lot, all extremely capable and talented people. But I feel we're constantly reinventing the wheel. Things that I feel have long been solved in Drupal are somewhat half-assed due to the chosen tech stack and the time constraints. Drupal may not be perfect, but it did have an evolution of more than 20 years, and that shows. A very strong entity system, fields, taxonomy, user management, roles/permissions, i18n, asset handling (media), slugs, redirects, breadcrumbs, workflows, revisions, and perhaps the cherry on top: JsonApi (a porcelain if you ask me). A strong community and reasonable documentation means that it's possible to switch vendors, as everybody works with the same API's (mileage may vary a bit). The situation now with where I'm at couldn't be further from that. Everything JavaScript and microservices based, build on a (imho) dreadful SaaS 'CMS' (Contentful). The so called 'enterprise' CMS is severely lacking, it's a usability a nightmare, I can't stress how bad it is. It's basically a glorified database, which means that everything else needed is being built completely from scratch. That simply doesn't compete with the 20+ years of evolution Drupal has had. So yeah, I miss Drupal.

solardev 3y ago
I think that's a great point: that Drupal gave you a whole car, while today's JS gives you five incompatible wheels, thirteen colors of duct tape, and three fragile shells to put over them. Drupal had a lot of really strong (as in idiomatic and enforced) patterns that didn't let you take dirty shortcuts. As much as I hated it, it was solid engineering. (I'd consider it overengineered, but that's only cuz I'm coming from the opposite extreme... Frontpage and Dreamweaver). That was probably also its downfall. It had a huge learning curve (same as Angular's downfall). And it didn't make for easy division of labor, and there was no quick and dirty way to do anything. The reason why there are so many Drupal consultants is because it takes so much manpower and brainspace to understand how Drupal is architected. With a headless CMS, the schema admin, the content editors, and frontend devs could each do their jobs independently without stepping on everyone else's toes. It's not as complete as a majestic monolith but each person's job was a lot easier, and way more isolated and safe. Drupal tried to be everything for everyone, and in the end it was just too much for any one normal person. It's what happens when engineers design products for people who aren't like them.

rumblestrut 3y ago

Maybe I'm wrong here, but I feel like a lot of the comments are referencing the Drupal of the past, not today's Drupal. Drupal 8, 9, 10 and beyond is quite different than what came before it.