What do "Drupals" think about ProcessWire?

[bernhard]

I've won a ticket for the Drupal Developer Days 2023 in Vienna. If anybody is going there as well let me know!!

I don't know a lot about Drupal. I've tried it in the early 2000s and never touched it since. I only know that Ryan seemed to be using it before he built ProcessWire.

So my question is: What do people from the Drupal world think about ProcessWire? Or what would they think about it if they knew it? Or how do they think in general? I'm asking for totally opinionated and subjective statements. What mindset do they have? What kind of websites/webapps do they use Drupal for.

I'm also asking for developers and people using Drupal (clients). What do they like Drupal for, what do they not like it for?

Do we have any Drupal developers here? What is your opinion if you compare the two systems?

[Nicolas]

Had a looked at Drupal 7, was scared by what I've seen and leaved it in a closet since then. A few years later I'm tempted to give v10 a try since Drupal now use a lot of Symfony components.
Would you provide us a debrief coming back from the conférence ?

[bernhard]

14 minutes ago, Nicolas said:

Had a looked at Drupal 7, was scared by what I've seen

Could you be more specific please? 🙂 

14 minutes ago, Nicolas said:

Would you provide us a debrief coming back from the conférence ?

I'll try to!

[ryan]

@bernhard I don't think there's much crossover between Drupal and PW on the software side, but I think there are other similarities. I did develop in Drupal for awhile (before ProcessWire) and while I liked it, I don't think ProcessWire inherited many ideas from Drupal on the technical side, other than some of its directory names. I thought Drupal already did a good job of doing things its own way, and I saw no reason to follow a similar path. I wasn't going to be able to make a better Drupal than Drupal. Not to mention, some of my own preferences also made me not enjoy working in it as much as some others do. Instead, I'd say it helped to cement some of strategies in ProcessWire to be the opposite of those in Drupal, because it seemed like there was more opportunity there, and more consistent with the way I wanted to work with the tool. For instance, at least at the time, Drupal's output/markup was really mixed around in lots of different files and components, and it seemed very opinionated about how it should all work. While that's great for being able to plug in components and use things in a more turn-key and consistent fashion, I found it challenging for the way I wanted to use it, as much designer as developer at the time, and especially on an e-commerce site I had to build and maintain. So that's why ProcessWire is very non-opinionated about how you handle your output and markup, and why it's always been largely markup agnostic. That's just one example of many things. But what I really liked about Drupal was the community behind it and how passionate people were about using it. To them it was not just a software, but a timeless tool with many facets and uses, one that you could build anything in, at any scale, and that had a real following, positive reputation and quality community. I thought it would be great if ProcessWire was similar in those respects. 

[szabesz]

related: https://codingpad.maryspad.com/2013/07/19/interview-with-ryan-cramer-processwire-cms-founder-and-lead-developer/

[cb2004]

I have only ever moved 1 site away from Drupal into ProcessWire, the client was very relieved that we did the move.

[bernhard]

@cb2004 any specific reasons why that was the case? 🙂 

[cwsoft]

@Bernhard. Maybe a sort of never change a running/known system. Guess it‘s hard to leave an area where you have some profound knowledge for something new before the known systems shows it‘s limitations or starts to get annoying. Another big driver are customers, which are used to Drupals backend and workflow and avoid a change to something new as well. 

[Nicolas]

On 7/13/2023 at 2:31 PM, bernhard said:

Could you be more specific please? 🙂 

The templating and plugin system didn't clicked for me back in the days as i was looking for a CMS simple to extend.

[kunago]

I tried a few CMS: started with Joomla then some MODX, Grav but stuck with Drupal/BackdropCMS for some time. What I liked about Drupal on which I built quite a few websites, was that it was robust and flexible enough. It was easy to get the thing done fast because it provided many modules and hooking templates for fine tuning which was great at that time. That was okay until Drupal 7. Then with Drupal 8 they lost me. I had all of a sudden no idea what was going on and how to do anything. I started to completely rely on modules and could not code on my own. I am not into OOP which I think Drupal 8 migreated to. I was looking for an alternative and settled with ProcessWire. Since then, I am totally happy as I am able to create a simple website within a few hours, which was unlikely to be the case with Drupal of whatever version.

The downsides of Drupal I found while using it are: it was way too heavy; even basic functionalities were module-based; it was slow; it had high resource consumption. To sum it up, even if Drupal was back to 7 where I left it, I would not go back. It was great at that time but I moved on.

[tires]

I have created 4 larger wesites with drupal 7 before I got to know processwire. The modules and the community are great with drupal. But in the end I found it extremely annoying and frustrating.  It was no fun and the projects often ended up taking much longer than expected. I can't say how it is with the newer versions ...

If you want to have clean code the templating is quite complex. It seemed to me that the Drupal way was rather to take the very complex code as it is output (with nested elements and classes) and then just customize or hide elements in CSS.

The module "views" (perhaps the most popular in drupal) is quite complicated and in the end limited in its possibilities. What is complicated to click together in "views" can often be done in processwire with pages->find in one line!

What I also found annoying was that, depending on the modules used, the backend no longer looked very uniform. This is much better in processwire.

If I have to make adjustments to the websites today, it takes me a while to think my way back into the structure and understand which module creates which content in which place.

I am really happy to have found processwire and will certainly not be using drupal for another website.

[da²]

The first time I had a look to Drupal I didn't find how to create a basic page, like just... "can I create a template?", "where do I write php code?", "where do I add a <div>"?
Sometimes I go in Drupal documentation, just having a quick look, there's a lot, a lot, a lot of documentation, there is so much to read, but for so little useful information.

It's like a big wall where you would look for a door to pass through that you never find.
I don't lose hope; perhaps one day I'll have enough motivation to find that door. 😅

[tires]

It also took me a while to understand drupal.
In a nutshell: A template is called content type and instead of pages there are nodes. These nodes can be transformed into a page structure via a navigation module.

The templating is also somewhat difficult and the structures are predefined.

The advantage is probabely that the editor can create many things in the backend himself (e.g. with the views module). However, it is anything but intuitive or easy to understand and learn.