Drupal CMS Debate

Wordpress is fundamentally a blog posting app with a rich plugin and editor ecosystem for advanced usage. It starts out simple, can result in a functional website in a matter of minutes, but can be expanded a LOT to meet your needs. And it's largely backward compatible and major versions usually provide some escape hatch in the form of a plugin that can revert to some previous functionality or preferred UX (like undoing the newer block editor in favor of the simple rich text one of yore).

Drupal is a great dev experience, in my opinion. WordPress's code is a dumpster fire, but the recent rewrite of Drupal in Composer is a pleasure to use. A bit of a learning curve, but it is powerful and extensible, plus it has a great community.

Drupal 6 and 7 use Drupal crap function-based programming (not functional programming) style which over time leads to maintenance mess as you have tangled interdependencies of modules which are not 100% in terms of test coverage or quality. Drupal 8 bootstraps on top of that mess OOP. Drupal is engineered as garbage and gets unwieldy pretty quickly if you are going to be doing custom programming and straying away from the main modules. However for your case it's foreseeable you could stick

How is Drupal working out for you as a platform?

Drupal's lack of object orientation, confusing user-interface and administration, weird nomenclature, and the fact that it really is (despite what their community may tell you) a content management system makes it a non-starter for me. If you're into PHP, try something like Symfony or Cake.

I'm always somewhat mystified regarding the abject hatred Drupal gets from the HN bunch... I understand a few points:1. Perceived as overly complex.2. Reliant on dev paradigms that originate from the PHP4 days, i.e. no OOP.3. Performance can be a problem.4. It's PHP, and old-school PHP at that.5. Everything is done in the UI, and you can't ship DB-based config in code.6. It's for people who don't know how to code. (I would argue this applies more to WP

Personal opinion: Even as someone who used and loved PHP for a decade, Drupal is just awful. It's overengineered and bloated and the documentation is pretty sparse, not to mention it's hard to scale up. Its admin and editor UX is decades being modern headless CMSes. It is extremely powerful, but seemingly built to handle the most extreme edge cases rather than the most common use cases, and a lot of the power is just confusing and unnecessary for your typical website. In like 10% of th

Working with Drupal as a user is not the same as working as a Drupal developer. If you know Drupal well enough that you’re not flailing around trying to figure out how to do things—if you actually know the framework and you build sites with it regularly—it’s remarkably pleasant from a code perspective. The main problem with Drupal is the learning curve. It’s much easier to get started writing, say, a Laravel app. But for the narrow case where you need a heavy-duty content management system with

Drupal was great for a time. At this point it just makes developers sad to work on. I see it as the tail end of the *Nuke days (DotNetNuke, PHPNuke up to 2006-2007 prior to Python/Ruby/PHP 5 days).A cleaned up pass from that phase but well before the mobile, service based, cloud and responsive web that is also more efficient.Building custom products you want to make sure your developers are happy and the platform is flexible and fast to iterate on, Drupal is not the best choice. It has the s

Drupal is a CMS, not a general purpose web app platform.There are a few Drupal modules that are essential do doing anything remotely "custom" and the most important of these I would consider to be CCK, Views and Panels. Many of the better modules integrate with Views. The top 20% of Drupal modules are decent, the remainder are to varying degrees quite amateurish.If you find yourself writing a lot of PHP on a Drupal project, you're doing it wrong. It's not just that the learning curve is