This website has been down for a while, but I finally got around to getting back on line with a not insignificant difference: I’ve moved everything back to WordPress.
It has been ten years since I wrote Goodbye WordPress, Hello Drupal. That’s a long time in computer terms. In that post I argued that WordPress was not a CMS for tinkerers because it was “hardwired”. Anyone familiar with WordPress today would probably argue that’s not the case. WordPress has indeed come a long way in ten years.
My relationship with Drupal began around 2006 with version 4.7. In those days it was one of the few CMSes that supported UTF8, which was a must for seemlessly bilingual (Japanese and English) websites.
I quickly fell in love with Drupal’s configurability and I actually built one of my businesses on the strengths of its configurability. I wouldn’t say I was a Drupal expert but I had a significant amount of business process built into that site.
Alas, with each major Drupal release there was the dreaded starting over feeling, and by the time that version 8 was released, I no longer had the the stomach for major-release, learning-curve hell. This and other sites stayed on version 7.
Then I completely borked the website.
I could have restored from backup and be done with it, but I wanted to stick with clean and simple (i.e., minimal customisation), so redoing it from scratch wasn’t that daunting. Given that I am no longer fluent in Drupal and have actually done a fair bit of client work in WordPress, I decided to so a clean WordPress install and go from there.
To be fair to the good folks at Drupal I still feel it is a solid platform, and many of my annoyances about WordPress still hold true but, in the interest of getting on with more important matters (like actually new content), I’ll live with WP until something else more compelling comes along to change my mind again yet again.