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Comment by fabian2k | Hacker News Reader

The part about Drupal I really liked was the ability to handle structured content, not just a bunch of posts of free text written in some WYSIWYG editor. It required a bunch of modules, but later was part of the core CMS. This was really powerful to create specific workflows and ensure consistency.

But for a small site Drupal got far too complex with later versions, and upgrading was pretty much impossible. Especially if you used any modules, it got very messy very quickly. Not sure how much better the other CMS are at this.

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Dozens of headless CMS systems have far better content models than Drupal.

Often Drupal is used because it has been used for x years and change is hard, non-technical managers are hired on account of their years of experience “building with Drupal”, and everything is shit.

It's hard to agree with you but I won't argue. I worked with many CMS and I've not seen anything better in terms of the compound metric architecture + code-quality + support. Time will tell what users love more.

Don't think that there are many headless CMS that has better content models than Drupal. Basically Drupal has entities, bundles, fields, all can be stored in yml configs and it can be easy extended. Could you please provide examples?

Better is relative, but from Strapi and DatoCMS on the lower end to Contentful on the higher end, there's a whole lot of possibility outside of a first-generation, monolithic CMS like Drupal.

Drupal can do things, and in the hands of a developer who really knows the platform it can do things well. But I've been Drupal-adjacent for a decade and the vast majority of teams I've encountered landed on Drupal because a consultant they can no longer afford convinced them that it was the answer to all of their web publishing dreams and left them with hot mess. Especially in the civic and non-profit space the fact that Drupal powered the Obama campaign's web site kicked off a long era of cargo culting.

I'm not familiar with all CMSs you mentioned but aren't they also monolithic (compared to microservices)?

Self-hosted Drupal is an open source, community run project, that is free as in beer. A lot of headless CMS are SaaS products, it seems. Apples and oranges.

Is there a good resource listing/comparing the headless CMS options that are equally open and free as Drupal?

To my knowledge, only Strapi CMS is comparatively free/open source headless CMS, in that it can be self-hosted and is not strictly SaaS. There's also a community of plugins, which also seem to be free/open source. Curious to hear of any others, as like you said, most are "freemium" SaaS products.

Drupal users tend to forget that "entities" and "fields" are the vaguest possible nouns they could have come up with. It's like defining a data type called "item" and just making it a struct with an unbounded string, a timestamp, and an owner. It's a nightmare to learn.

Don’t get me started on “vocabularies”.

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