2024 UPDATE: My site has since been moved away from Drupal! I still really like Drupal and will continue to work with especially for clients. I felt for a single use non enterprise site though it had just become a bit overbearing to maintain. I had launched the site on Drupal 8, then Drupal got up to version 10, and it just became nearly impossible to upgrade. One issue was the Drupal 8 site ran php 7, so whenever i tried to upgrade it would break because drupal 10 required PHP 8+. So it became kind of an endless loop trying to upgrade it. I did everything I thought right before, used the package manager, drush etc, and any attempts to upgrade it would lead to dozens of errors. The funny thing is is that I described it as dependency hell I was after spending two or three days trying to upgrade… only to find out that was a real term that I didn’t coin!
Overall my experience with Drupal remains positive, I just think to effectively use it as it was (and maybe still is) as a one man shop was really difficult. If you have a dev ops team to help maintain it however it really is the bees knees in terms of robustness! So i’m still consulting and looking for Drupal work, but for my own personal site I have went other directions!
As you may have noticed I am launching a new website. After years of using Joomla, WordPress, and just hand-written scripts I have decided to start setting up Drupal for my homepage. Although I have used Drupal periodically in the past, I wanted to get more up to speed with it as it is now used as RIT’s main CMS. Also I think it could be something I set up for future clients.
It is a great tool, especially for tech-saavy developers, but at the same time I would be nervous about setting it up for clients as there seems to be a lot of set up time to get certain functionality that may be quicker to do with other systems that may have a component already built to solve a problem.
For example; if I wanted to create an event registration type website with integrated payment funcitonality I have used “Event Booking” by OsCommerce for Joomla. Literally with a one-click installation it comes with all the functionality you would need to list events, charge various prices, and have registration deadlines built right in. Out of the box it would work for probably most people events, and might take some adaptations if you are converting from a custom built solution.
On the other hand, I was trying to investigate how I would set up a similar system in Drupal. Sure, Drupal is really robust and I could create a content type called “event” I feel like I would need to invest a great deal of time building it out. And then on top of that integrating in payment would be another challenge on top of that. I suppose once you do build it you get a system that is built exactly for your needs, as opposed to adapting from a pre-built system, but the amount of time it takes to re-create the wheel here would probably be a turn off for most clients.