Back on Drupal

Author
Date published

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: 

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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. 

Keywords