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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.
  - solardev 3y ago
    Drupal IS slow, but many "modern" sites in JS or Wordpress are pretty heavily cached too. There's just no beating "static HTML file served over CDN, with portions rehydrated". Whether you generate that HTML in Drupal, Wordpress, or some other system, having to run code to generate it is always going to be slower than caching. Drupal is plenty fast for internal previews (i.e. when the server is not overloaded), but at the end of the day it's still a PHP app, and LAMP/LEMP is generally harder to scale up and across vs plain files. And for what it's worth, a Drupal site cached behind Acquia/Pantheon/etc and their CDN can -- usually will -- be faster than an uncached JS site served from any single data center.
    - KaoruAoiShiho 3y ago
      So it's slow for any dynamic site? Like if I want to use it to serve a site with user generated content recommended by AI, like a reddit or twitter it's bad for that usecase?
      - solardev 3y ago
        Drupal? I think that would be very slow for that use case (if you want it to be real-time, as opposed to write-rarely-read-often, for a large number of users). I haven't tried to optimize it for that particular case, but out-of-the-box, the Acquia/Pantheon setups aren't really meant for something like that. You could, however, use Drupal (or any other CMS) to manage the relatively infrequently-changing parts of the website (static assets, the layout, introductory text, landing pages, much of the Javascript, etc.). And then use AJAX to dynamically fetch in the dynamic portions (the user content) from some other API. I doubt that's the best approach though... probably there are better systems for something like that. Not my specialty though, sorry =/ ------ edit: It's also very different if you're operating at reddit scale vs "small website with a few dozen comments a month" scale. If you're not expecting heavy, consistent real-time traffic, it'll probably be OK. Not as fast as it could be with better architecture, but fast enough that users will put up with it. Hell, we all did it for years with phpBB, the Drupal forums, etc.
solardev 3y ago
A few years ago, most of my job was maintaining a Drupal 7 installation for a mid-sized nonprofit. It's the most "built by engineers for engineers" CMS I'd ever used -- I don't mean that as a positive -- and the UX was atrocious. Everything was buried layers deep both in the UI and in the schema, a simple string change would take multiple functions (to go through the various localization and abstraction pathways), the plugin ecosystem was mostly abandonware that made NPM look like a well-manicured garden, etc.. The community was friendly enough, but overall it just felt like I was working with very old technology and ideology. Reminded me of the Perl days. Eventually I was tasked with upgrading it to Drupal 8/9 (a new generation, with no backward compatibility with 7.x). It was basically a full rewrite. Well, I built a prototype in the new version, but it was still a convoluted mess -- slightly better, but nowhere near "modern". The whole thing is just way more complicated than it needs to be, and reminds me of 90s-style data management, and a web UI reminiscent of cheap wifi router dashboards: ugly, very slow (much of it wasn't ajax yet), and in general just total drudgery to work with. After I built that prototype, I swore to myself, "This is the last time I'll ever use Drupal. Ugh." As a proof of concept, I also built that same prototype in several other CMSes: Wordpress with Advanced Custom Fields, Ghost, DatoCMS, Strapi, Contentful, GraphCMS (now Hygraph), Storyblok, Grav, etc. ALL of them were way more usable than Drupal, and each one took like 1/10th the time or less to make. It was especially fast with the headless CMSes + Next.js Wordpress with ACF was probably the closest direct comparison, and that provided a much better editor experience, but still had poor DX (cuz you had to either work in Wordpress/PHP, or else shim ACF with other plugins to make it act headlessly). It took me a few months to upsell the team, IT, and management to switch to a proper headless CMS instead, completely detaching the editor experience (managed by the CMS) and the DX (we were now free to develop the frontend however we wanted to, fetching content via GraphQL). It made everyone happier in the end, and it's much more maintainable. Editors never have to care about forced upgrades, web technology changes, etc., anymore, and devs don't have to worry about accidentally breaking the editor experience while working. And a modern Jamstack (or anything else, really) is way way easier to work in than Drupal or Wordpress templates, especially since they don't share the same server as the database & editor and can be independently hosted, developed, tested, deployed, etc. I still would never touch Drupal again. I've never used a technology I was so annoyed by (and that's coming from someone who grew up writing AT commands for their 14.4k modem, made websites in Perl, had to use Applescript to shim Filemaker into a web CMS... ugh.) Drupal is by far the most traumatic software I've ever had to use. --------- Side note: Drupal itself aside, companies like Acquia and Pantheon do make the experience much nicer though. They basically manage hosting, forking, dev environments, backups, visual diffing etc. for you, like a bespoke cloud tailor-made for Drupal and Wordpress. I would definitely host at one of those companies (I prefer Pantheon, personally, but both are great compared to non-Drupal-specific hosting).
jehb 3y ago
Drupal is a great CMS framework. With Drupal and a capable development team, you can use Drupal to build an awesome CMS, and if you want to, also an awesome website on top of the CMS. Drupal is not a great piece of software to try to use out of the box as both a CMS and a website front-end. Drupal doesn't have the same kind of ecosystem as WordPress. Many of the best themes and modules are really there to assist your development of your own features, as opposed to being plug-and-play solutions.
- solardev 3y ago
  What, in your opinion, would be an advantage of Drupal over a headless CMS?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - thinnerlizzy 3y ago
    Drupal basically is a headless CMS plus a CMS front end if you expose the web service module.
    - solardev 3y ago
      So... does that make a headful CMS? :) "Recapitated"?
  - jehb 3y ago
    I'm not sure I understand the question. Drupal is a headless CMS if you want it to be. Do you mean what would be a reason for using Drupal's front-end over developing your own? I came to Drupal from managing community sites with lots of different user roles that each need complex permission sets, and I'd say it really excels over other CMS front-ends for that. Drupal.org is itself an example of this kind of site: thousands of different users (including untrusted users) logging in and creating and editing and moderating content in real-time. Sure, you could rebuild all of this functionality with the exposed APIs, but that'd be a ton of work.
  - 3y ago
fs_tab 3y ago
Drupal 8+ is an improvement over 7/6, especially for developers. It's more aligned with Symfony, which makes it much easier to write maintainable modules. You can also use it as a headless CMS if you have your own frontend (eg: mobile apps) For editors, you have a slightly better default UX (Claro/Olivero), views builder, workflows, etc.
antoniojtorres 3y ago
Cut my teeth with drupal back in the day. I walked away after 5 years feeling like I stifled my growth as a programmer because all I ended up doing was hacking away at this behemoth of a framework to try and overcome all of it’s idiosyncrasies.

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.
- solardev 3y ago
  Drupal IS slow, but many "modern" sites in JS or Wordpress are pretty heavily cached too. There's just no beating "static HTML file served over CDN, with portions rehydrated". Whether you generate that HTML in Drupal, Wordpress, or some other system, having to run code to generate it is always going to be slower than caching. Drupal is plenty fast for internal previews (i.e. when the server is not overloaded), but at the end of the day it's still a PHP app, and LAMP/LEMP is generally harder to scale up and across vs plain files. And for what it's worth, a Drupal site cached behind Acquia/Pantheon/etc and their CDN can -- usually will -- be faster than an uncached JS site served from any single data center.
  - KaoruAoiShiho 3y ago
    So it's slow for any dynamic site? Like if I want to use it to serve a site with user generated content recommended by AI, like a reddit or twitter it's bad for that usecase?
    - solardev 3y ago
      Drupal? I think that would be very slow for that use case (if you want it to be real-time, as opposed to write-rarely-read-often, for a large number of users). I haven't tried to optimize it for that particular case, but out-of-the-box, the Acquia/Pantheon setups aren't really meant for something like that. You could, however, use Drupal (or any other CMS) to manage the relatively infrequently-changing parts of the website (static assets, the layout, introductory text, landing pages, much of the Javascript, etc.). And then use AJAX to dynamically fetch in the dynamic portions (the user content) from some other API. I doubt that's the best approach though... probably there are better systems for something like that. Not my specialty though, sorry =/ ------ edit: It's also very different if you're operating at reddit scale vs "small website with a few dozen comments a month" scale. If you're not expecting heavy, consistent real-time traffic, it'll probably be OK. Not as fast as it could be with better architecture, but fast enough that users will put up with it. Hell, we all did it for years with phpBB, the Drupal forums, etc.

solardev 3y ago

A few years ago, most of my job was maintaining a Drupal 7 installation for a mid-sized nonprofit. It's the most "built by engineers for engineers" CMS I'd ever used -- I don't mean that as a positive -- and the UX was atrocious. Everything was buried layers deep both in the UI and in the schema, a simple string change would take multiple functions (to go through the various localization and abstraction pathways), the plugin ecosystem was mostly abandonware that made NPM look like a well-manicured garden, etc.. The community was friendly enough, but overall it just felt like I was working with very old technology and ideology. Reminded me of the Perl days. Eventually I was tasked with upgrading it to Drupal 8/9 (a new generation, with no backward compatibility with 7.x). It was basically a full rewrite. Well, I built a prototype in the new version, but it was still a convoluted mess -- slightly better, but nowhere near "modern". The whole thing is just way more complicated than it needs to be, and reminds me of 90s-style data management, and a web UI reminiscent of cheap wifi router dashboards: ugly, very slow (much of it wasn't ajax yet), and in general just total drudgery to work with. After I built that prototype, I swore to myself, "This is the last time I'll ever use Drupal. Ugh." As a proof of concept, I also built that same prototype in several other CMSes: Wordpress with Advanced Custom Fields, Ghost, DatoCMS, Strapi, Contentful, GraphCMS (now Hygraph), Storyblok, Grav, etc. ALL of them were way more usable than Drupal, and each one took like 1/10th the time or less to make. It was especially fast with the headless CMSes + Next.js Wordpress with ACF was probably the closest direct comparison, and that provided a much better editor experience, but still had poor DX (cuz you had to either work in Wordpress/PHP, or else shim ACF with other plugins to make it act headlessly). It took me a few months to upsell the team, IT, and management to switch to a proper headless CMS instead, completely detaching the editor experience (managed by the CMS) and the DX (we were now free to develop the frontend however we wanted to, fetching content via GraphQL). It made everyone happier in the end, and it's much more maintainable. Editors never have to care about forced upgrades, web technology changes, etc., anymore, and devs don't have to worry about accidentally breaking the editor experience while working. And a modern Jamstack (or anything else, really) is way way easier to work in than Drupal or Wordpress templates, especially since they don't share the same server as the database & editor and can be independently hosted, developed, tested, deployed, etc. I still would never touch Drupal again. I've never used a technology I was so annoyed by (and that's coming from someone who grew up writing AT commands for their 14.4k modem, made websites in Perl, had to use Applescript to shim Filemaker into a web CMS... ugh.) Drupal is by far the most traumatic software I've ever had to use. --------- Side note: Drupal itself aside, companies like Acquia and Pantheon do make the experience much nicer though. They basically manage hosting, forking, dev environments, backups, visual diffing etc. for you, like a bespoke cloud tailor-made for Drupal and Wordpress. I would definitely host at one of those companies (I prefer Pantheon, personally, but both are great compared to non-Drupal-specific hosting).

jehb 3y ago

Drupal is a great CMS framework. With Drupal and a capable development team, you can use Drupal to build an awesome CMS, and if you want to, also an awesome website on top of the CMS. Drupal is not a great piece of software to try to use out of the box as both a CMS and a website front-end. Drupal doesn't have the same kind of ecosystem as WordPress. Many of the best themes and modules are really there to assist your development of your own features, as opposed to being plug-and-play solutions.

solardev 3y ago
What, in your opinion, would be an advantage of Drupal over a headless CMS?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- thinnerlizzy 3y ago
  Drupal basically is a headless CMS plus a CMS front end if you expose the web service module.
  - solardev 3y ago
    So... does that make a headful CMS? :) "Recapitated"?
- jehb 3y ago
  I'm not sure I understand the question. Drupal is a headless CMS if you want it to be. Do you mean what would be a reason for using Drupal's front-end over developing your own? I came to Drupal from managing community sites with lots of different user roles that each need complex permission sets, and I'd say it really excels over other CMS front-ends for that. Drupal.org is itself an example of this kind of site: thousands of different users (including untrusted users) logging in and creating and editing and moderating content in real-time. Sure, you could rebuild all of this functionality with the exposed APIs, but that'd be a ton of work.
- 3y ago

fs_tab 3y ago

Drupal 8+ is an improvement over 7/6, especially for developers. It's more aligned with Symfony, which makes it much easier to write maintainable modules. You can also use it as a headless CMS if you have your own frontend (eg: mobile apps) For editors, you have a slightly better default UX (Claro/Olivero), views builder, workflows, etc.

antoniojtorres 3y ago

Cut my teeth with drupal back in the day. I walked away after 5 years feeling like I stifled my growth as a programmer because all I ended up doing was hacking away at this behemoth of a framework to try and overcome all of it’s idiosyncrasies.