[solardev]

Personal opinion: Even as someone who used and loved PHP for a decade, Drupal is just awful. It's overengineered and bloated and the documentation is pretty sparse, not to mention it's hard to scale up. Its admin and editor UX is decades being modern headless CMSes. It is extremely powerful, but seemingly built to handle the most extreme edge cases rather than the most common use cases, and a lot of the power is just confusing and unnecessary for your typical website. In like 10% of the time it takes to get a Drupal system up and running well, you can do the same thing with Wordpress and Advanced Custom Forms and end up with an infinitely better UX, DX, and EX.

Drupal suffers tremendously from "by engineers, for engineers" and it's just an incredibly poor experience if you don't fit that mold. It's non-stop pain for no reward.

Having used it for a major project (both in daily use and in a big migration from D7 to D8/9), I will NEVER take another job that uses Drupal again... it is the second most dreaded web framework for a reason (above only Angular): https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-most-loved-dre...

Halfway through our Drupal "upgrade" (rewrite, because D7 had no upgrade path), we just gave up on it and went to Next.js + a headless CMS instead. Everyone was massively happier after that... the devs, the editors, IT, marketing, content writers, analytics... Drupal was just soooo bad that even its newest version was years if not decades behind modern experiences.

Sorry I feel so strongly about this... the mere word makes my blood boil. I've never HATED a technology the way I hate Drupal, before or since. If you're considering it for a project for the first time, don't walk, SPRINT as far away as it as you possibly could.

[jobsdone]

You're not alone.

I ran a team at a weekend hackathon event for non-profits. We needed to finish building their new site on the latest version of Drupal. I had SEVEN devs working on a 5 page brochure site with a page to manage events and we couldn't get it done! I felt terrible leaving it incomplete at the event, but honestly, with Drupal as the tech stack—my hands were tied. Luckily the developer who started the work was able to finish it a few months later.

To do it all over again, I would have convinced them to throw away what they had and use a different platform. If we used any other tech stack, we could have finished and launched the site during the event.

That was the first, and last time I touched Drupal.

[IYasha]

Wow. I was seriously considering Drupal as an option for an lod-style minimal-JS site (with mainly news+comments, gallery, wiki, statistics and stuff). Previous CMS I used was quite allright, but maintainers dropped it :( Can you suggest something besides Dripal and WP? (pls not JS)

[solardev]

What is lod? If you limit yourself to non JS, do you care what language the CMS is written in? Does it have to have all the features built in or just support plug-ins? Self hosted or vendor hosted in the cloud?

[IYasha]

Sorry, I was typing "old" :) And yes, I care about language to be able to support it and manage resources (PHP, CPP is fine). Self-hosted, bare metal. I used PostNuke-based CMS (LAMP) and was very satisfied with it. I was also thinking about basing site on nextcloud (I tried it for storage for friends, would be nice to integrate it with CMS), but it's a huge thing in itself I don't really know how to approach )

[solardev]

Oh wow, when you said old, you really meant it lol. Haven't heard of the Nukes in decades now.

Honestly, I hate to say this, but if you really want that level of server-side all in one power... maybe Drupal IS worth considering after all. Most modern sites aren't built that way anymore, instead opting to compose a site out of many services (eg a CMS for marketing pages, Discourse for a forum, an auth provider linking them all together, etc.)

A monolithic community on a single engine is in fact the kind of (rare) use case that Drupal actually fits... making its complexity possibly worthwhile. It's just overkill for most sites that aren't like that.

WordPress might also be able to get there eventually, with a lot of plug-ins, but at that point it would be so bloated that Drupal might actually be cleaner. Might also be worth checking to see if any of the older PHP CMSes (Joomla, etc.) are still being maintained.

Sorry, I haven't looked at this sort of use in years and wouldn't be able to provide more details than that :/

[porker]

> I've never HATED a technology the way I hate Drupal, before or since.

Did you ever work with Magento 1? :)

[solardev]

Lol, we briefly evaluated it and noped outta there quick as we could... phew, bullet dodged :)