Comment by sroerick | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sroerick | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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