Comment by 0x70dd

Seven or eight years ago, I led a project for a large media company to consolidate publishing workflows across multiple products, moving everything from several content management systems to Drupal.

After evaluating the landscape, my take was that the project was a waste of time and wouldn’t benefit the company. But a large consultancy was involved, so we had to pick a CMS. We picked Drupal. The result was exactly what management wanted: a single CMS, well-defined taxonomies, and all the content in one place.

Unsurprisingly, the writers hated it. They’d been forced to give up specialized tools for something half-baked that mostly did the same things.

The development experience was atrocious. Scaling was difficult, rolling upgrades and deployments without downtime were nearly impossible, and we constantly ran into bugs and limitations in the existing plugins. We had to bring in Drupal consultants at $300 an hour to get the project over the finish line, but we eventually did. All we ended up using was the admin interface and a GraphQL API, which the company’s products then had to be rebuilt around.

Management wanted everything hosted by Acquia, so we ended up paying $100,000 a year for a few servers that would have cost, at worst, a few hundred bucks a year on Hetzner.

By the original requirements, the project was a success. We managed to move all the traffic over without any downtime. Shortly afterward, I left the company because of how miserable the project had made me.

A few days ago, out of curiosity, I checked whether they were still using Drupal. It turns out management hadn’t learned from its past mistakes: they’d migrated to yet another CMS, even though it was obvious non-management the problem was the business model not the CMS. What of waste of time and money.