28 Dec 2023, 8:43 pm
Has anyone here ever worked with Drupal, the open-source CMS for building web applications? I recently built my portfolio site using Drupal 10. I find myself mostly developing small brochure-style websites these days, for which Drupal is generally overkill, and have started using WordPress and even drag-and-drop page builders like Brizy and Squarespace, but for larger scale projects or when I want to flex my technological muscles a bit, I find Drupal to be quite intuitive to use, though maybe that's because I've been working with it for years.
I find, as a neurodiverse developer, sometimes I can be a bit set in my ways, and I learned Drupal a long time ago, back when Drupal 7 was first being released, and I found myself using it for basically everything for a long time. No matter what the project needed, I tried to stick with familiar themes and contributed modules, too. For instance, every single one of my projects - including my new portfolio site - has run a Bootstrap subtheme.
I've looked at Node and thought about maybe scripting a more custom site one day with Node on the backend and React or Angular on the front end, but Drupal is just so convenient sometimes for me. Building content types, taxonomies, views, etcetera - it all just makes sense to my neurodivergent brain.
I also found myself experimenting with coding after a long hiatus from it and in spite of being dreadfully out of practice, on my last Drupal project. I was doing CSS3 animations, but ran into the problem that they all fired immediately after page load, so I was messing around with the JavaScript IntersectionObserver API to get the animations to only trigger when the region was in the viewport. I felt so accomplished doing such a simple thing and getting it to work after having not even touched a line of code since prior to the pandemic. Does anyone else here feel that kind of excitement when coding and getting something to work as desired, like we're some kind of invincible genius, even if that's not necessarily true? Or am I alone there?
Anyway, back on subject - who here has worked with Drupal before, and did you enjoy working with it?
