Back in 2019, I switched this website to WordPress. Today, stephencross.com is running on Drupal.
Why?
Before 2019, stephencross.com was a place I experimented with new technology. This was not a great strategy for building an online presence. Using WordPress for a few years allowed me to understand it better from the site builder and content creator perspective.
I decided to move to Drupal for a few reasons:
- Out-of-the-box Drupal experience - As a developer that works on Drupal sites every day, I don't often experience the 'start from scratch' building a Drupal website process. I'm not using tools from my past projects.
- Control - I started adding new functionality to stephencross.com on WordPress and felt out of control. I found plug-ins conflicting and had trouble getting the results I was looking for. This could be a lack of experience with WordPress.
- Experimenting - There are Drupal modules I want to experiment with and need a production environment to use.
Launch Day
On launch day, stephencross.com is incomplete; I have more work to do. Highlights:
- Olivero: I'm using the default Drupal theme because it works well and looks good. While I will likely update the theme in the future, visual branding is not a priority for me .
- Schema Blueprints: After experimenting with Schema Blueprints module, I decided to think Schema/API first.
- Migration: based on volume, there was no need to write migration scripts; content was manually moved.
- Hosting: I'm using Pantheon.
Post Launch
I have a few critical changes to make shortly after launch and more updates over the next few months.
- Google - I have not paid much attention to 'Googly' things. I'm going to pay attention to SEO.
- Performance - I will maximize page performance based on the parameters of my environment choices.
- UI Tweaks - I have a number of minor UI changes to make, but I didn't want to hold up the launch
- Social - I need to add features to support social media, like Twitter Card information.
- User experience - I need to add features to make the user experience better.
Stay tuned. Let's see if I can stick with this change for the next five years.