As said in the title, a small university wants to move from modern campus to something else. I mentioned Drupal even though I have no experience with it but I saw that other large universities use it.

So can you give me some idea, thoughts and insides into it. What do you think the initial cost would be to have a 3rd party transfer and redevelopment the pages? The university wants to switch within the next few months.

I have to adjust my page count as today was the first day I could actually crawl my own websites and we have probably less than 1500 pages. I still want to go with this as it will be ready for the future and yearly less than what currently is paid.

With some excitement, I tried to build a site using Drupal Canvas. Not Drupal CMS, but actually building it from a clean installation. I rewired my thinking toward SDC, canvas pages, and canvas node templates, and after I fully understood it, I really thought Drupal might become a free-of-charge competitor to SaaS website builders like Webflow.

We talk about Drupal Canvas with excitement, but using it introduces two regressions for standard use cases compared to the old Drupal approach. Until these are solved, I do not see a wide adoption on production sites. The following:

First, it is not possible to switch other display types besides "full" to Canvas template. Drupal CMS somehow defines the Card display as managed by Canvas, but there is too much magic happening behind the scenes, which I was unable to replicate on my site. So if I have any view that should list some nodes in a form of a card/teaser, and let’s be honest, almost every site does, I am forced to use both a Canvas template for the full node and an old-style template file such as node--blogpost--teaser.html.twig, where I pass the props to SDC and mimic the Canvas usage for a teaser.

The second issue, no less important, is that the SDC with Canvas approach makes it impossible to use image styles. We are forced to use original images, and the canvas:image component has very limited functionality. Really? Image styles are one of the biggest advantages of Drupal.

How do you approach it? What is the actual "Drupal way" to build a list of cards with teaser images in Drupal Canvas based project? Is it there, or not yet?

Here are two related issues that i found regarding that, worth sharing:

https://www.drupal.org/project/canvas/issues/3562276
https://www.drupal.org/project/canvas/issues/3574412

This post is not intended to discredit Canvas, but simply to share a user’s experience and maybe help guide its development. Big thanks so far, keep going!