Hi dev buddies, need some help, need some feedback... What’s you’re feelings on Drupal? I’ve never used it but have been asked to look for a CMS for the company I work for. It’s a newspaper company looking to get its first CMS and ‘managed’, templated websites. There’s more expensive CMS options on the market, but feel Drupal might be a good place to start?

What is drupal?

If you are going to develop parts of it, maybe I can recommend "Bedrock" to you. It's WordPress but made in to a nice stack. https://github.com/roots/bedrock

TYPO3 TYPO3 TYPO3!
If you have the choice to use whatever CMS you want, use TYPO3, it's great for both developers and users.

I like Drupal, but it can get really messy if you don't plan well how you'll organize your website. It's very easy to fall in a craze of installing module after module for whatever little thing you can imagine and end up with a slow, bloated, unmaintainable mess.

For most websites you can just create new content types, create some views for them, maybe some webforms if you need and be done with it. Views can be a bit daunting at first, but they're not that hard to use.

Finally, try to alter the HTML structure from the templates as little as possible, create a subtemplate for your changes and you won't have problems when updating the base template.

I’ve used drupal 7 for a corporate website. Because the old one is based on drupal 6. If you learn a little, that’s a good cms. It’s work from 10y now without any issue.

OH MY GOD NO. I have so much grip with Drupal. Not just "I'm pissed because it's a CMS and I'm a developer", I mean actual issues with Drupal itself for having to support a legacy Drupal site with lots of custom code.

A rant comment isn't enough to cover it all, but here is a glimpse of what awaits you:

- piss-poor modules documentation. Doc is confusing, often written for users who don't code. Even the main project documentation is not great.

- confusing naming. Drupal just doesn't use common name, it has its own jargon for everything. The "services" module (for API) is especially guilty, not using "GET", "POST", but it's own jargon instead.

- dicts with magic string keys everywhere. Because OOP is overrated (sarcasm)

- it's slow as hell. Even for simple things. Even with the built-in cache. Speaking of which, prepare to clear the cache often, even for changing a single line of code

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- you are supposed to use hooks to code, which are functions named with a pattern. Clusterfuck of hard to search things

- lots of modules like to put blobs in DB, instead of properly creating columns. When shit hit the fan, you'll curse the fcktard who did that, because blobs cannot be queried properly and are a pain to modify

- the DB is a clusterfuck. Since a lot of things are configured via GUI and this configuration is saved in DB (and not in a pretty format, more like a student would dump everything how he pleases)

- logs are shitty. Again, when shit hit the fan, you'll curse at the guy who did not think a file and line was useful

And I left out a lot of more specific things.

@Fradow I didn't have the chance of working with Drupal 8, but as far as I know they refactored almost all of it. It's now rewritten using OOP, revamped the module configuration storage system and other enhancements.

@ethernetzero that's good to hear. Unfortunately for me, project is stuck to Drupal 7, won't get an upgrade (I already lobbied to replace it using a framework, not a CMS, since our use-case is not a great fit for a CMS anyway).

After all that bullshit, unfortunately I'm not going to give it a try again, given the choice.

On another hand, for simple project, I like Wordpress. It's not going to win cleanliness contests, but it gets the job down without too much fuss, docs are OK, and it's not too much of a mess, provided modules count is kept low enough.

@Fradow Funnily enough, I did have to take on the internals of Wordpress in the past and to me it's horrifying. 🤣

Tastes are like buttholes, right?

@ethernetzero I didn't have the displeasure of having to go into Wordpress internals, luckily.

But yeah, it's pretty normal to have different opinion on that. Anyway we all agree on the baseline: big CMS are generally not examples of good code.

@Fradow Agreed wholeheartedly.

I started using Grav a while ago for a personal site and it's pretty cool and simple. It looks to me like a much better option for most of the websites you see around.