Why I no longer use Drupal

Dec 16, 2012 – Filed as: Software70 Productivity13

TLDR: Drupal is overly complex for a personal blog. It is hard to maintain. Simple static site generators are easier to work with in the long term.

My portfolio website was written during college using hand-coded HTML and used server-side includes to bring in common navigation.

Then in January 2010 I remade my site in Drupal. It gained lots of fancy features such as first-class support for project categories and project languages. You could subscribe to almost any page as a feed. There were project specific updates that could be commented on. From a feature point of view, it rocked.

But some problems became apparent over time:

  • Security updates were frequent and difficult to apply correctly.
  • I didn’t like writing articles on the site because I couldn’t use simple markup formats such as Markdown.
    • Drupal has no good editor plugins for markup languages.
    • And its visual HTML editor generates messy HTML.
  • The theme I used for the site was complex and hard to modify.
    • And the CSS often interfered with my article markup, necessitating me to drop into HTML when editing certain articles.
  • There was no sane way to test structural changes to the site locally and then automatically deploy them to production.
    • Normally this would be done by keeping the site structure in the filesystem and all user content in a database. This allows the filesystem contents to be easily deployed using git push, rsync, or similar techniques.
    • Drupal, by contrast, keeps its site structure in both the filesystem and in the database, along with user-generated content. Updating only the parts of the database related to site structure is cumbersome and error-prone.
    • Thus, I couldn’t really change the site structure after my initial deployment to production.
  • Nothing was in revision control, which made me nervous.
  • I had to hack the Drupal core to get my contact form to work with my web hosting provider.
  • Most of the features of the site weren’t being used by readers.

So now I am rewriting my site yet again in straight HTML (via a simple static site generator) and outsourcing all user generated content (like comments) to third party service providers.

Benefits:

  • Simple simple simple.
  • Automatic security. The web server just serves static files.
  • Automatic scalability, for the same reason.
  • Simple authoring in Markdown with powerful client-side text editors.
  • Instant deployment with git push.
  • Everything in revision control.
  • I can use any web hosting provider. Hell, I can just use GitHub Pages for free.
  • Ultimate control over the site theme and CSS. I can fix problems myself.