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Comment by tylershuster | Hacker News Reader

I moved from building sites on WordPress to Drupal about 5 years ago and never looked back. Thankfully I’ve only ever used the new (8+) architecture so I’ve never had to deal with all the procedural stuff.

I enjoy using the CMS immensely. We build sites with a lot of well-structured data (mostly transit, and other government) so Drupal is a great fit. We also use it to power some services and it works great headless. I don’t get the derision I see on HN about it a lot, but it doesn’t matter. It pays my bills. I don’t need other people to like it. There’s certainly a large community of people who do.

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Were there any resources (books, websites, videos, etc) that you found especially helpful as a WordPress developer trying to learn Drupal?

I sling WordPress everyday and like it for the most part, but I'd like to have some Drupal knowledge in my back pocket. WordPress isn't always the best fit for some projects.

So I'm on the hunt for "Drupal 101 for advanced WordPress developers" type material.

Thanks in advance!

Unfortunately, no. I was hired as a WordPress developer on a team that did a lot of Drupal work, so I was able to gently ease into doing small projects. Understanding the Drupal render pipeline will help you immensely, but it is complicated. Merely being able to understand entity types, fields, and views will put you leagues ahead of what WordPress can do for data-heavy sites. The majority of what I do with Drupal is configuring entities, fields, view, modes, and views. After that, it’s basically just learning to twig syntax (not my favorite part of Drupal) and the various pre-process hooks to make data available to the theme. Once you have the core functionality pretty well understood, it’s easy to extend it because basically everything in Drupal already extends Symfony.

Ah, gotcha. Great stuff here to start digging into.

Thanks for taking the time!

If you need some pointers about a specific subject feel free to email me at t@fust.us

Your best option is to subscribe to drupalize.me and work through their content. (I'm not affiliated)

Unfortunately the changes over the years with Drupal meant you can find guides online but they may be outdated.

There is also a book "Learning Drupal 9 as a framework" written by Stef Van Looveran. He appears to keep it updated and while it isn't a complete resource, it could be worth a look.

Hey I’m mentoring devs and I’ma Drupal specialist. Shoot me a message, happy to set you up.

Yeh, ignore the derision, it's the same people who say that PHP sucks.

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