Today Drupal is 13 years old

In the early 2000s I wrote my own CMS, of course using PHP 3 (!) and MySQL. Everything was so simple, flexible and… funny. I thought I would never switch because it was so easy to extend and the system was so responsive. What I didn’t realize at that time, was that the web itself was rather simple.

But at some point, in the middle of decade, everything changed: the Web 2.0 came into the scene. Web API, web services, all together with XML, RSS and feed aggregation. Rich web user interfaces and then the amazing user interaction and social networking or social-media. After getting used to the changes, I finally realized that my CMS is dead. There was no chance to keep the rhythm.

And then the panic. I tried PHP-Nuke, and then XOOPS, and other, and other… Neither was flexible and robust enough to build on it. And then, in 2006, I tried Drupal. ‟Oh God! This is really ugly. An ugly CMS with an ugly theme and an ugly community site!”, I said. And I left Drupal :)

I went away trying other opensource solutions. I was playin' a little bit with Mambo — the ancestor of Joomla, I have even contributed to Mambo with some modules (called mambots in their ecosystem). I was totally dissatisfied. What a mess! I wasn’t able to develop anything stable using that system without hacking the core or place queries in the theme layer(!) Awful!

Then I remembered about Drupal: ‟This CMS is flexible enough, isn’t it?”. I decided to give it one more try. After passing beyond the interface (grr!) I discovered an amazing CMS, with a solid, clear and flexible API and, moreover, with a great community supporting it.

That was more than 7 years ago. The story still goes on...

Happy Birthday Drupal!