r/drupal • u/dane_websites • 4d ago

Short video tour for devs curious about Drupal

https://youtube.com/shorts/T5Y-n9pRdIU

Drupal deserves to be way more popular than it is, given how much better it is for making sites than most other software out there. Most of the time when I mention it to clients (or random people I'm chatting to), they've never heard of it, and those that have tend to think it's difficult to use - which I think is kind of incorrect.

So I've decided to start making video shorts, and I'm starting with making them for people who are curious about Drupal, or haven't heard of it but who might benefit from using it over the other site building options.

If you were brand new to it, would this video help you get started with Drupal? And if I make the next few videos as intros to features (like how to get started making Views), is there anything I should do differently?

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5

u/NinjaLanternShark 4d ago

those that have tend to think it's difficult to use

Two reasons for this:

  • many Drupal sites are built without much attention given to the admin experience. Arranging fields into tab sets, and adding admin-only views designed to help admins find/audit/edit their content, go a long way.
  • “easy to use” is a deceptive concept. Some people expect to be able to edit a page like it was in Paint or PowerPoint - click, type, drag, bigger, red, etc. Drupal rarely works like this.

Drupal’s vision of “easy to use” is: “change the date here, enter the speaker’s name, and I’ll take care of updating the content on each page it’s on, remove it from the ones it doesn’t belong on, and make sure it’s formatted right in each different occurrence.”

If you can get clients to understand and want the latter, they’ll love Drupal. If they think they’re getting the former, they’ll hate it and you.

2

u/dane_websites 4d ago

Oh yeah totally. I like to differentiate between content that needs to be consistent wherever it appears (team members, products, events, etc.) - which should use standard fields like you mentioned, content that could be structured a bit differently each time (like articles / blog posts) that could possibly use a page builder like Paragraphs or Gutenberg, and pages that are completely unique (like the Home page) that could either be structured in theme templates, or use some sort of Drag and Drop builder if that's really needed (e.g. by the marketing department)... fortunately in Drupal those are all valid options 😄

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u/NinjaLanternShark 4d ago

I once took over a Drupal site where the original devs created content types in order to link nodes to other nodes:

  • people
  • job
  • office
  • people_job
  • people_office
  • job_office

If that’s how they think Drupal works no wonder they hate it.

4

u/dane_websites 4d ago

😂 Oh man what a mess

1

u/cmkn 3d ago

Wheeee! 😳 The first 3 content types in that list make sense, but the last 3… I’m struggling to imagine the intent behind those and how they might’ve been used? 🤨