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Comment by cattown | Hacker News Reader

I miss Drupal a lot. I sure wish it had won out in the CMS battle with Wordpress. I remember making little custom CRUD apps with almost no code all the way back when Drupal 5 was the thing.

Like a lot of other ppl it seems I left off when they switched to composer. That didn't fit too well into the workflow I had at the time using cheap web hosting services where I didn't get a shell as dev environments.

Also the upgrade treadmill was brutal. A few nice little web apps I made got totally left behind by security updates and such and were also too hard to upgrade to newer versions of Drupal. I remember that also being a major motivator to make the big jump to Python and other things. More code but also easier to manage over long periods of time.

Lots of good lessons in Drupal for other frameworks. I haven't tried it in a while, but it's still in my mind one of the best low-code custom fields, forms, and views systems out there.

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The Drupal community made a pivotable decision that ensured it would never "win" a CMS battle with WP.

Wordpress has always been a more product-focused blog/site-builder that works out of the box and simplifies code concepts for an average user who doesn't need to know much PHP to get everything they want to be done. It has always focused on open-source PHP CMS as a product.

Drupal has always been an engineer-first CMS; D8 doubled down on that: focus on long-term maintainability with OOP/Symphony/Composer/etc. That decision caused the casual site-builder who knew little PHP code to say "no thanks". It has always focused on open-source PHP CMS as a framework.

Backdrop happened for those who wanted a good off-ramp for those who were happy to keep the current Drupalisms of D7 and didn't need more PHP-web-dev tools. Unsurprisingly, it became more WP-like as it tilted more toward PHP CMS as a product.

The current community of the Drupal world has kept focusing on improving the UX of the site builder/maintainer role with its current initiatives (auto-updates, project browser) to self-correct.

Ultimately, Drupal focused more on its core strength. That's not a bad thing, that's just product differentiation. It turns out the average website doesn't need to maintain a lot of custom CMS code/workflow/logic they just need to track a handful of blobs of text/image content.

In my opinion, Drupal is a much better platform than WP, except that it has always had a much higher geek factor, and I think that's what has stunted it.

I feel that the engineering behind Drupal has always been top-notch. I wrote a couple of Drupal plugins and themes, BitD (Back in the Day), but that was a long time ago. I'm sure that big changes have come, since then.

What I liked, was being able to completely customize both the frontend and the backend of a Drupal site. WP doesn't really give you much, in the way of making its backend much simpler.

During that time, WP has improved its engineering and architecture significantly, so it's still a tough call.

Very true I have been working with a webdev company that only makes sites in Drupal and it was very nice how fast they could implement things but the updates were lengthy and often took way more hours than any small version jump upgrade should take.

And because of the release cycles it's hard (or expensive) to keep a site running for 10+ years. In the end we opted for a plugin called "tome" that would just render the page as a static site and we'd just push the HTML files

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