Migrating from Drupal to WordPress

If you can read this on planet.debian.org then migrating my blog from Drupal to WordPress was successful and the feed has been successfully changed by the Debian Planet Maintainers (thanks!).

I’ve been a long term Drupal user. I think I started to use Drupal since it was included in Debian. At some point Drupal was removed from Debian and I started to use Serendipity instead. Later Drupal was included in Debian again and I moved back to Drupal. I think this must have been around Drupal 4 or Drupal 5. No idea.

I even became active in the Drupal community and went to one of the first Drupal barcamps in Germany, namely in Cologne. This was shortly before Dries Buytaert started a business off of Drupal and went to the USA. I met with many devs of Drupal in Cologne and enjoyed the community and started with others a local Drupal User Group in Rostock.

In 2011 we organized a Drupal Barcamp in Rostock, which was quite successful. But at that time it was already apparent that Drupal became more and more complex. It was far away from its original idea of providing a simple to use website and blogging site.

Now I’m still on Drupal 7 and this is some sort of a showstopper. Older major version upgrades had a upgrade path, like from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. But for Drupal 8 there is no easy upgrade path. There are some ways to upgrade, but nothing as smooth as the prior major upgrades. In fact the upgrade from 6 to 7 was already painful.

My impression of Drupal today is that it is a framework suitable for agencies to built complex websites for their customers. It’s too much of a hassle to use it for your hobbyist websites.

So, after all the years my Drupal journey will come to an end. It was a long time with you. Sometimes joyful, sometimes painful. I wish you all the best, Drupal!

Maybe I stay with WordPress, maybe I’ll use Hugo in the future. Having a static website is very appealing, though… 🙂