Link to the post: https://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/garfieldtech-v3

Excerpt:

So why move away from Drupal after 20 years?

1. ...
   
2. ...
   
3. ...
   
4. I didn't want to keep supporting a project lead by a known cheater, liar, autism-shamer, and biggot.

it's hard enough to book WP sites...

how can a single freelancer book Drupal projects?

I've had a few over the years, but it was mostly by luck!

any tips or suggestions short of "my uncle owns the business", "word of mouth" or "I work at NASA" advice?😅

had a client last month whose site went from like 2s to 9s load time over the past couple years. support kept telling them enable caching and it'll be fine. it wasn't.

spent a day actually digging instead of just throwing cache at it and found the real problems -

images were like 5mb+ per page, nobody ever compressed them. 23 modules installed that literally weren't being used anywhere on the site. hosting was still running an old php version, not really set up right for D11. and no cdn, so every single asset was hitting the origin server directly

fixed all of it over about a week, didn't even touch caching config in the end. once the actual bloat was gone the default caching handled everything fine

not the first time i've seen this either, feels like half the "why is my site slow" posts jump straight to caching or hosting when its actually just years of stuff nobody cleaned up

what do you guys usually check first when someone says their drupal site is slow

The thing that trips people up most isn't the module compatibility list — it's field data that technically migrates but silently loses formatting or reference integrity. Run a full content audit before you start, not just a module audit. Specifically check: paragraph/field collection nesting, any custom entity reference views, and URL alias patterns if you're on pathauto. Those three are where most "successful" migrations turn into a six-month cleanup project afterward.

I have an old Drupal 7 site that I can't seemingly migrate to drupal 11, Here's where I am at present:

I downloaded all the files from the existing site and created a ddev copy of the site with the same php version etc, the site renders and i can view all the nodes and such

I created a new ddev project running Drupal 11.4.4 and add a secondary db to that via ddev import-db --file=/home//Documents/Sites/sitename/databasename_2013.sql I also created .ddev/docker-compose.volumes.yaml so can mount the files etc from the drupal 7 site for the migration module as well as added the required modules that I used on the drupal 7 site if they existed

After running the migrate step via the extension Migrate Drupal UI I see that the images & users are imported in the new ddev Drupal 11 site, the images are too, but none of the nodes are done, I'm stumped on how to proceed now, I suspect the issue is related to multi languages as that site initially was drupal 6 and multi language enabled but not sure how to check now after all these years

Currently looking into ddev and composer to manage stuff, but i'm unsure about the following

I know I can use eg composer to install modules eg: composer require 'drupal/ctools:^4.1'

this will grab ctools but I still need to use the gui/site in drupal 11 to enable that, can't i activate it in the cli? Google is failing me atm

I am using codex to write modules for drupal now, it works perfectly without problem, but I have to manually upload to Drupal and communicate with codex for what happen, its still fine but bit slow, I am working between the site online and codex, am looking for a way to let codex work directly for the site, anyone has experience for this ? Thank you.

Hello. I’m an SEO but new to drupal world. I have no idea about modules, how they work or how to use and finalise them. But I’m new to this job and it’s all about drupal.
And i’m a lil lost in all these modules. Is there a place where people get all the seo specific drupal modules? Or any modules anyone here would know that are a must for a drupal website? Please help a newbie out. :)

Fastly's performance doesn't match the expectations set by their name!

Not sure why it's added, but it's terrible as drupal.org now fails core web vitals.

https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/0b5urh3up8

With Drupal 7 reached end of life, I’m curious how organizations that haven’t migrated yet are approaching the transition.

● Are you planning a move to Drupal 11 in the next few months?
● What’s been the biggest blocker—budget, custom modules, integrations, or migration complexity?
● If you’ve already completed the migration, what was the biggest challenge and what would you do differently?

I work with a team that focuses on Drupal migrations, so I’m interested in understanding the real-world pain points organizations are facing rather than making assumptions. It would be great to hear experiences from nonprofits, universities, healthcare organizations, and enterprise teams that are still evaluating their options.
Looking forward to hearing your experiences and learning from the community.

I've been trying various combinations of modules like ai_search and ai_vdb_provider_milvus and ai_vdb_provider_postgres but nothing seems to work well together. It's hard for me to find the best combination of Drupal versions (10 or 11) and module versions. Does anyone have any recommendations?

TIA

Been coming across a surprising number of Drupal 7 sites still live this year, even with EOL long behind us.

Curious what's actually holding people back is it cost of migration, custom modules with no clean upgrade path, or just "it still works, why touch it"?

Also curious if anyone's done a D7 → D10/11 migration recently - what ended up being the most painful part?

When I upload a photo to an article or comment it looks perfect in the editor but after saving it is enormous. In the editor I see an icon for size but the only choice is "original." What are some best practice solutions I can use to encourage members to upload pics of their activity?

I’m coming back to Drupal after more than a decade away. I’m an experienced PHP programmer, but don’t remember really anything about Drupal and besides it’s probably changed a ton since I last worked with it.

I’m looking for learning resources, books, videos, documentation that will help me deeply learn Drupal as an engineer, not just a content manager.

I started with the official documentation, but it seems pretty disorganized and not a clear path on where to start.

I’m open to free or paid content so long as it’s high quality.

Voting is now open for the community-elected At-Large board seat!

If you’re a member of the Drupal Association as a Ripple Maker, check your inbox for a ballot from Helios voting bot with the subject line “Vote now: Drupal Association 2026 At-Large Board Election”.

Voting closes on 14 August at 23:59 UTC.

You can learn more about the 8 great candidates here: https://www.drupal.org/association/board/elections/election-2026-dates-and-candidates

Happy voting! 🗳️

I've been building with Drupal for many years now, especially in secure environments, and can't help thinking that over time the need to use additional tools to maintain it has dramatically increased.

Drupal used to be much more simple to build & administer when tun locally first then deployed, but now community notes assume you use Drush & Composer, which aren't really necessary if you know PHP dev & MySql administration.

I can't help thinking that the additional management tools mostly serve to help someone track how & where people are using Drupal by reporting specific build/deployment info & dev activity...

I haven't evaluated the add-ons yet, but may have to, because I regularly assure my clients their data and IP is safe. Also, running certain tools in firewalled environments causes a lot of issues & often requires whitelisting. If there are security gaps, we'll need to shift to a different solution, kust on principle alone.

It's important for Drupal to be fully transparent about what they monitor.