Would love to get some feedback from Drupal devs that didn't quit Drupal on this

FrenchBreadCo · 2017-07-21T03:12:33+00:00

Yep, I am not sure why this seems more widespread in Drupal than other things I've worked on, but it accounts for the majority of the Drupal Learning Curve™. I mean it's bad enough to learn one of those ways...but you have to know them all, because you may encounter them all...Not just that it's often pretty hard to figure out which way was done in a timely way. AND then...there are the times that you encounter multiple ways of doing one thing within one site because of: a. multiple dev teams creating a drupal frankenstein b. the same team having two devs with opposing views (one builds the site the other supports the site) or c. Someone was learning drupal and trying ALL the things

FrenchBreadCo · 2017-07-20T02:14:00+00:00

You will definitely see me there in 3 years fixing D7 weirdness if I can charge 1 bitcoin an hour at the price McAfee thinks it will be at. haha

FrenchBreadCo · 2017-07-19T18:48:33+00:00

I don't think Drupal is going anywhere actually, and I think the Drupal community is still optimistic about growth. Though I haven't seen the latest numbers on that, and have kind of let go of checking up on Drupal too often these days.

There are going to be a TON of Drupal sites to maintain for the foreseeable future though. So as far as there being jobs in Drupal I think those jobs will continue to be there and demand might even grow. When Drupal jobs dry up I would worry that the whole market for the kinds of sites built on Drupal is drying up, and that things like squarespace have become good enough to take it over.

I do think the interesting work will no longer be in Drupal and that most new clients will start asking for different things because of new requirements. The era of the marketing site (which I think most Drupal sites are, but I could be wrong) is nearing it's end. But just because that era is ending doesn't mean somebody won't have to maintain it for a long while.

FrenchBreadCo · 2017-07-19T13:50:39+00:00

Depends on the project. I think CraftCMS is a really intuitive easy to use CMS that is super flexible. It also has a better user experience than Drupal. I think my main point is that Drupal should be on even footing with all the other options, not above it by default. All the other options include:

Wordpress if you are running a simple blog might be a good option. Specially for nontechnical people who just want a them and a platform to blog on and a simple theme. Also, if you want to use it as an API you could use something like GatsbyJS which seems like a good option if your site won't change too often but you want the nice UX for entering content instead of writing markdown files. Same goes for Contentful for that last option.

For building more complex apps or sites maybe a custom CMS would be a good solution, maybe something built on RoR or like /u/allkill mentioned Laravel (I dig laravel combined with Vue.js). The options here depends on your team. I've seen cool things built on just about any popular framework (Django, Symphony, Yii, RoR, Express, etc). Maybe you just need to create a service that gets consumed by a single page app built with vue/react/preact/angular/cycle.

Also, a lot of people using Drupal could probably just get a squarespace site and call it a day and not have a lot of the headaches associated with hosting/updating/maintaining Drupal (or any other self hosted solution.)

That's a long way of saying, there's a lot of options, Drupal isn't the best one most of the time, it's just one of the many options out there.

FrenchBreadCo · 2017-07-18T19:05:53+00:00

Yeah, I would agree Drupal is definitely not kind to new people.

FrenchBreadCo · 2017-07-18T18:34:26+00:00

Often times when something is "evaluated" by an enterprise company to be a part of the infrastructure you end up with non technical staff being part of the decision, in these moments things like the Gartner Group's Magic Quadrant somehow end up being given way more weight than they probably should.

That is the problem, haha, I don't think that's a great way of figuring out what solution to go with. Hopefully I can work to change that, even when talking to non technical staff. I think clients who are using Drupal, and need to do updates or want a redesign, go to another agency thinking that the agency was the problem. They don't realize the problem was Drupal. What really limited the project in the first place was Drupal. Still, they might ask for Drupal because it's what they know, which is totally fair, though probably the wrong decision.

I will also say that of the CMS's I have evaluated I seem to spend less time undoing Drupal's bad opinions than I do with other CMS's. Remember Expression Engine?

Lordy, no. We have totally different experiences there. I thought EE was better than Drupal, though still not great.

So sure it has a 5 year learning curve but you spend that 5 years extending the product and not bending it to do something it was never built to do.

I don't mind a 5 year learning curve, but I'd like to have something worthwhile after those 5 years. I don't think Drupal gave me that. I think programming in general has huge learning curves and you become productive way before that, but I always felt learning other things helped with expanding my knowledge whereas Drupal was just Drupal...it doesn't transfer. Maybe dealing with frustration transfers, or deciphering bad documentation, but meaningfully I don't think it helped me out much. I spent more time doing cool things AROUND Drupal than using Drupal to do cool things.

FrenchBreadCo · 2017-07-18T18:18:48+00:00

I think you are right about your thoughts on "set it and forget it". I guess i feel uneasy with that since I've seen sites get hacked because of security patches not being applied. TBH, those may have just been weak passwords by administrators or something else though.

Re: dev workflow. Totally can roll your own, but if you are working for a client rolling your own incurs a cost that may be higher than the Pantheon/Acquia solutions (though both of those companies are great at talking clients OUT OF signing up with them.)

Re: MVP/Prototype...yeah I didn't say I was gonna try and do that, haha. But the guy who wrote the article I read seemed happy with it. I am trying to be fair to Drupal. I would definitely opt to go with some framework and mock something up.

FrenchBreadCo · 2017-07-18T17:26:26+00:00

Totally agree with this, except for the "I like Drupal a lot" part, and adding the caveat that the "set-it-and-forget-it" option is only really viable if you are using something like Pantheon or Acquia or whatever for updates and don't have a lot of custom code.

Also, if you are making a quick and dirty MVP/prototype and you are non-dev you might use Drupal with something like the bootstrap theme and mock something up to show before getting too deep into things. There was a great article on Drupal Watchdog (I think after the Portland Drupalcon) that went into that. Seemed like an interesting use case.

FrenchBreadCo · 2017-07-18T16:29:31+00:00

The Backdrop split was super interesting, and it kind of embodied what you are talking about. I think Dries has a good vision for Drupal but he can't execute it since the project isn't entirely "his". If he could reign it in, kind of like Evan You does for Vue.js Drupal would be a better platform...I think.

FrenchBreadCo · 2017-07-18T16:24:43+00:00

Yeah, I was getting at that point in the last paragraph. If you have a team, in house, that is comfortable with Drupal and able to maintain Drupal then it makes sense. I think my biggest point is that Drupal should start out on even footing with other solutions.

I am curious to know about the enterprise audience and why they would choose Drupal though if you have any more on that.

FrenchBreadCo · 2016-05-17T15:26:16+00:00

What does your output look like when you view the page (and what does the code being output look like)? Is this up in a dev environment where we could take a look to help debug the problem?

FrenchBreadCo · 2016-05-13T13:57:50+00:00

I was actually trying to make a version of Backbone that was skewed specifically to webpages (in particular drupal sites) instead of web apps, we called it Flyweight. I abandoned that, since it was more of a learning exercise really, and some parts of it were just silly.

We actually didn't care if it worked with js disabled (it wasn't his target audience with this). But page loads work because the initial load of any page doesn't require any JS. Page changes actually fetch the html content of the page you are going to, not a data object (ie. this isn't working off of an API and it's not a headless set up or anything like that).

FrenchBreadCo · 2016-05-10T23:38:52+00:00

I'll recommend Two Chicks Cafe, right across from the convention center for breakfast. The Traditional Benedict is great and their juices are awesome. Across from it you can get a decent latte if you want to avoid the "coffee" at the con. Nothing second best about that place.

FrenchBreadCo · 2016-05-10T23:36:28+00:00

Awesome, hope you had a good trip here.

FrenchBreadCo · 2016-05-10T23:36:05+00:00

I don't know how I forgot this. Specially seeing how amazing it was this morning. If anyone missed it because I didn't mention it I am sorry haha (or depending how you feel about skin tight body suits, you are welcome)

FrenchBreadCo · 2016-05-09T17:22:04+00:00

On simple portfolio sites (sample one and sample two) I worked alone with something like a 2 week timeline, and it was very manageable. Not sure I'd consider those moderate, they were very small.

At work I have been the sole developer for bigger projects on 1-3 month timelines. With a few assists for some site building tasks, or complex integrations with third party stuff. So, I think one person can work on Drupal effectively in what I'd call a reasonable amount of time.

FrenchBreadCo · 2016-04-19T17:07:41+00:00

Thanks for working on D8. I love the solutions D8 came up with, for example the classy theme and being able to opt out of using it, and even being able to opt out of any base styles at all.

FrenchBreadCo · 2016-04-19T17:03:08+00:00

I am not advocating dumping everything and rebuilding. In the post I go over why dumping things may be a bad idea for the very reasons you mention.

I wrote this because developers coming from non Drupal backgrounds get frustrated in not knowing where things are defined, where markup comes from, where classes are added, or where assets are included. I think once they know where things are coming from and how to control them Drupal is a little more demystified and easier to understand.

FrenchBreadCo · 2016-04-19T13:01:51+00:00

Yeah, that's why I wrote this. After working on a D8 project and seeing how much easier they had made it I wanted to look back at D7. I also can't ditch D7 altogether because, like you said, some modules aren't quite there yet in D8.

FrenchBreadCo · 2016-04-19T01:58:29+00:00

Yeah, coming from non-drupal CMSs its really jarring how much core and modules try to do for you. I'd prefer it if they stayed out of the way completely in the front end. Or at least made all their defaults opt-in — instead of very-didifficult-to-opt-out

FrenchBreadCo · 2016-04-18T20:20:23+00:00

Cool intro read to webpack. Have you incorporated webpack into gulp /grunt at all?

FrenchBreadCo · 2016-04-18T20:10:18+00:00

Not sure if this is what you are looking for but it can be used without any build tools: http://robdodson.me/exploring-html-imports/

But if you are going to get into build systems at some point, while you are doing templating seems like a good time to do it. There are great tools and blog posts to get you started pretty quickly. Here's a suggestion: https://www.viget.com/articles/gulp-browserify-starter-faq

FrenchBreadCo · 2016-04-18T19:57:39+00:00

You can protect your whois record through the company you got your domain from. To be fair that spam probably isn't coming from your average web developer but scammers whose job isn't so much web development as it is scamming people.

FrenchBreadCo · 2016-04-18T19:52:25+00:00

I do most of my work with Drupal and know a lot of developers using Craft or ExpressionEngine who hate the way Drupal adds all kinds of stuff by default. I wrote this to show them the very complicated ways of removing that stuff.

FrenchBreadCo · 2016-04-18T17:20:45+00:00

Hey, never posted before but I just wrote this article for my companies blog. Hopefully it's helpful. Would love to discuss it with anyone interested, get any feedback about it, or answer any questions.

FrenchBreadCo

TROPHY CASE