[TylerE]

I also spent a number of years doing Drupal work at a newspaper. A bit ealier..99.9% sure it was on D v5. I ended up actually re-writing large bits of the core content logic to make it not blow chunks. This is 2009-2015 time frame.

Wrote something called the "page module" that let them build out the various landing pages using extremely flexible criteria ... everything from tags to specofic articles to category - and probably more that I'm forgetting. I built specically because views just wasn't good enough. It was able to do a couple of very important things... It had what was essentially a materialized view that was maintained by the import scripts (All actual content editing was done in the propritary publishing software they used, then sent as XML to the web importer which ran constantly looking for new xml files in a directory).

The big upshot of this was that is that getting, saying, the articles for a given "page" (Which wasn't necessarily actually a page - there were also presentations like sidebar lists) was a SINGLE query with no joins. Very performant. We did millions of page views daily on one web server and one db server... both low end commodity boxes.

It was kinda fun, but when I left I made a promise to myself to never, ever, work with Drupal or PHP every again professionally, and I've been quite happy to stick to that.

[ceejayoz]

PHP's still my bread-and-butter via Laravel. Drupal's on my won't-touch list alongside Joomla and Magento.

[TylerE]

Hah, yes. The job before that one involved some Magento. I bailed after 6 months again.

I guess I wouldn’t say quite never on Drupal, but it would need to be like a 2x comp move to even consider.