I am calling this post “Website Redesign aka Where did my Drupal Go?”

I have managed, ran, administered, and fought with my web domain Wislander.com since 2003. During that time I have used a number of different approaches to have a web front end including static HTML, home brewed PHP/CSS, and a number of different CMS (Content Management System) including e107, Joomla, Mombo, WordPress, and for the past several years Drupal (Drupal 4, 5, 6. 7). I was really quite happy with Drupal for a long time, and was a very strong supporter of the wonders and merits of that open source CMS platform.

Recently I decided it was time to upgrade the look and feel of my website, possibly add some new features, and move off of Drupal 7 since it was end of life and it was going to stop being supported soon. So I started playing around with Drupal 8, and became frustrated with some of the hurdles with upgrading from version 7 to version 8. Including there is no way to do an in place upgrade. Some of the reasoning being that it gives you a chance to clean up your content, or remove old content. But what if you do not want too? So I brought up a new Drupal 8 site, worked to get all of the features I had running on my 7 site only to find some were no longer possible, or they were not available in 8, but they might be in version 9; or the developer of a module that I relied heavily on didn’t have time to make a version compatible with newer versions. Worst of all, some of my custom views were not exportable and importable because of a database structure change so I would be to create all the views from scratch, and not being a database admin, I was unable to get all of my posts to shoehorn into the new system without a lot of work on my part. So I tried to install Drupal 9 because if I was going to put that much work into this, I might as well go to the latest and greatest instead of bumping up against the EOL (End Of Life) problem I was facing with Drupal 7 sooner than I wanted to.

So I prepped a new Drupal 9 location on my hosting, uploaded all of the files and plug-ins, and themes, allocated a MySQL database and started the install. First error: Need to run a newer version of PHP. Fine, went in, updated PHP, restarted services, started installation again, wrong version of MySQL. Checked the SQL matched the requirements listed on the Drupal site, tried again.. same error. Tweak this, tweak that. Try installation again success.. kind of. Every time I tried to install it gave me a different failure point.

So I decided to punt and try a different CMS altogether. After poking around and reading forums, I came to the conclusion that I should just bite the bullet and try WordPress again.

My first attempt at running WordPress probably 75 years ago (okay more like 10) was not pleasant. In the first month that I played with it I had 100s of attempted SQL injection exploits, I was not notified when there were security updates pending, and for the most part, it was a struggle to get it to do anything more than straight linear blogging and it seemed like it was easy to exploit. But that was 10 years ago.

After installing it and adding a few security tweaks the latest version is a much more pleasant experience and feels like a real CMS. Again, I have very simple needs, but it has been so much easier to bring my current site on line than it was with Drupal 8/9; and moving it from a test site to production was very straight forward, and took almost no time. I think it took about 2 days to migrate all of the content that I wanted to, tweak the appearance, and get it to look and feel the way that I wanted. From there I went live and completely retired my Drupal presence completely.

Hopefully the WordPress developers keep on this path so I can stick with the platform for the foreseeable future.

I am not sure why Drupal has become a much more convoluted installation process than it used to be. Maybe someday I will take some time and play with more again. For now I am going to stick with my current setup since it fits my needs.