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Comment by sroerick | Hacker News Reader

What better alternative is there as a webdev? Genuinely looking for answers from a production perspective.

Most successful shops I meet or talk to are all-in on Wordpress and I don’t think this drama has affected this calculation. Big Indian SEO + Wordpress firms with American sales teams rule this market.

I haven’t done freelance web work in a couple years, but I remember pouring a couple hundred hours into exploring static generators and alternative CMSs just to decide that yeah, Wordpress was probably the cheapest and most user friendly option to.

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Drupal is seriously worth another look if you haven't used it in a while. It's really a mature CMS that was completely rewritten a number of years ago. There's also currently an initiative underway to make a new "distro" of Drupal that is more user friendly and less developer focused, which could be great for people coming from WordPress.

Drupal does have a learning curve, it doesn't have the robust marketplace of off the shelf themes that WP has, but I love it.

I struggled with Drupal when I used it. I was responsible for taking over a crowdfunding site which had been built in Drupal and as an intermediate Wordpress and Django developer, I found Drupal’s learning curve insane and it felt like the entire ecosystem was stagnating and dying. There are a lot of Reddit posts that go something like “I took a pay cut to work on a stack other than Drupal and I’ve never been happier”. It’s also the second most hated stack after salesforce.

I don’t know if any place where Drupal has been successfully used except for large corporate blogs, which I think it seems well suited for, but I’m happy to be corrected here.

It wasn’t for me but I’m glad you like it! If you’re well suited to it I think it’s a great career path.

Drupal is very popular in government and higher education. It's a very flexible and non-opinionated CMS, so it's easy for a developer to build something really crappy with it by not following best practices. When Drupal 8 first was released, there weren't a lot of off-the-shelf modules like there were with Drupal 7, which resulted in people building some pretty crappy sites in some unconventional ways.

The situation has really improved in recent years. Drupal 10 and 11 (the latest stable versions) are mature, the module ecosystem is robust, and there has been a renewed focus on usability.

It's not the right choice for every site of course, but I think people who have had a bad experience with it in the past should give it a second chance.

What are the advantages over something like Wordpress? What are the advantages over something like Laravel or Django?

My assessment of Drupal is that it really is only for enterprise blogs - it doesn’t offer the things a more robust framework would offer. So it makes sense if the scope of work is a blog for a large organization that has 100,000 to spend on a blog. It seems like most Drupal contracts are in that range, so it becomes more of a game of scoring those contracts than anything else.

I used to be all Drupal, and then the big rewrite broke so many upgrade paths, with some critical modules left abandoned. I waited for a whole year for that, and even invested time to see if I could do some work, but it’s just too much, and Drupals documenting is (was?) poor. It’s internal stack is or was also really opaque.

You really need a team for that. I switched to Wordpress for just that reason, it’s a lot easier to tinker with.

I love to hear that has changed.

Have you checked out Backdrop CMS? https://backdropcms.org/

Isn't that pretty much just d7 without the d7 EoL? Better to migrate a d7 site to it (assuming a rebuild with current Drupal is too much work or doesn't have necessary modules) than run d7 despite EoL, but I'm not sure it makes sense to spin up a new site using it over current Drupal.

It started off as a fork of d7 (really very early d8) but it's since diverged into it's own thing. It still has a core that is d7 compatible, so migrating is very simple (you can import a d7 database and it just works), but the theming layer is different. It's placed an emphasis on usability and modernization.

It's definitely a good choice for migrating from d7, and could also be a great choice for a new site for someone who enjoys working on a classic drupal stack.

The people behind it are great, but the community right now is kind of small.

I haven’t, thank you for the link!

Drupal is really bad. Better off to use ProcessWire but that is showing its age. It was called the jQuery of CMSes at one time and they were growing in popularity but the creator didn’t want to be on a popular CMS ranking site because others were gaming the ranking system for other OSS and paid CMSes, so it became obscure.

Idk about user-friendly. This is a very subjective benchmark.

In practice, there are a lot of non-technical users who can navigate the Wordpress backend. I’m not saying it’s particularly well designed, just that the large install base has led to a far larger number of experienced users.

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