Taking Off The Rose Tinted Glasses

Why did I put myself through this. Drupal and PHP are probably best left in the past, but I decided to modernize them. For no good reason. My head still hurts from this.

Why did I deploy PHP on Vercel lol.

SOURCES

S/O Ph4se0n3 for the awesome edit 🙏

[sparthir]

A framework based on a language isn't the language. PHP has moved on and become a lot better. It's a lazy thing to paint the two with the same brush imho.

[sarahwbs]

Been doing PHP development for 24 years now, it's not going *anywhere*.

[dogoku]

As far as I know, the only time this happened is from D7 to D8 which went from a functional paradigm with hooks to an OOP paradigm, which is why it was such a massive breaking change. I have never heard of anything that major since that. For a framework this old, having one massive rewrite in 20+ years, I think is perfectly normal.

[julian_center]

Vercel's auto deploy and preview build stuff is cool and all, but it's neither a unique feature, nor is the result more than AWS Lambda being automated. Most modern applications require more than just an API serving static data. Production-grade apps with real users DO have state that's more than just a function of your codebase. Think databases (+auto migrations), file storage, jobs, queues, schedulers and so on. Sure, you could use a Vercel-provided or other another third-party service for each one of these requirements, but then you'll end up with a crazy level of vendor lock-in that will require you to rewrite your entire application if you ever decide to move your project. Don't get me wrong, FTP sure isn't the solution, but a VPS (+Coolify) for small projects and K8S for big projects is IMO.

[devOnHoliday]

Laravel doing exactly what is required to make php cool again and then we have Wordpress and Drupal. Taylor is driving a Lambo for a reason

[radiozradioz]

I'm on the edge with this channel. It's becoming exhausting. When I first found the channel I saw an intelligent senior software guy like the rest of us, and it was great for the first few videos, but after watching a great many of them and I've come to realize how narrow Theo's expertise/experience is. Which is fine, we need specialists, but for me the content loses its entertainment value when he talks about anything outside his comfort zone; primarily I don't like the authoritative tone he has on everything regardless of how much he knows about it. Perhaps he's just very confident, he is young.

This video isn't one of the bad ones, he doesn't say anything too silly. It's just not great, which is why I'm getting despondent. This one felt unfocused more than anything - There was an intro about Drupal upgrades, then Theo spent a long time graciously explaining the concept of CI/CD to us. Maybe he was responding to a comment on stream that explicitly linked PHP to lacking CI/CD, I'm not sure, but it seemed pretty odd. There are many, many, JS shops that don't use CI/CD. I guess both of these things are old and that is the connection? There was also an odd part in the middle where he went through really basic git stuff as if it was a difficult technique.

This has been more a general comment about the whole channel. This video's not bad, just unremarkable. There have been a few stinkers recently. There was one where he read code from a programming language he was unfamiliar with, can't remember which, you could tell he tried his best to imply that he was following on better than he actually was (fair enough, I've done that too in the past). In that scenario, I would have expected that he would read the code, try and figure out the algorithm, then explain it to the audience. But what he did was go through the lines and read out some of them, including the lanugage-specific operators that likely mean nothing to him or viewers who are unfamiliar with the language.

It's just not the advanced video content I thought it was going to be from the first few videos. He's really good at talking about immediately React-related things, but he swings & misses far too often when he talks authoritatively about things outside of that. I'd definitely say to watch this space, Theo in 10-20 years, mellowed out and a bit less cocky with broader experience, I think he's going to do really well.

[marcelmirandaa]

I’m a typescript developer myself but this video is filled with so much bs. There’s nothing inherent about PHP that ties it into a deployment process that wouldn’t allow previews.

Also, actually try updating a Node v4 app to use latest deps, the amount of deprecated and no longer available NodeJS apis is palpable. Updating an old Nodejs app is not trivial, I can say so, since I’ve done it myself.

[SavaScript]

When I first found out about PHP (about 13 years) ago, it was godsend and a breath of fresh air. It was a great alternative to Java web apps (built with JSP) which was nightmare to build. The fact that PHP was literally just embedded into your HTML was mindblowing.

[grinskks]

modern Drupal is pretty awesome. The docs are lacking a bit, but improved a lot in recent years.
It's the most flexible system I came across. You have fine grain control over which assets load on a page with it's library system. You can build htmx like stuff with it's ajax api (sadly still running with jquery). The cache api makes page loads very fast. Field UI for modelling content, Views for aggregating content ...
The more I work with FE Meta Frameworks, the more I respect Drupal

[yookoala]

I lived long enough to go through the transition between Drupal 4.7, 5, 6, 7, 8. Each and everyone of these are complete rebuild.

Drupal 8 was a huge paradigm shift to modern PHP. Transitions between 8, 9 and 10 are much smoother than before.

I've also had the displeasure of using node 4 with sole old react version in one of my older project. Can't imagine how I might rewrite to configs and toolchain to have them work in the latest node and react...

[fnc.owenmelbz]

I don't think you can fairly compare Drupal to the rest of PHP lol

[twfahey]

Long time Drupal dev here. Thanks, this is motivational - I feel like the Drupal project doesn't get enough representation. Once you have a deeper understanding of it, it's a fantastic tool for many applications. There is a lot of skill involved, though, and not enough quality content out there promoting it in a way like you with Next. So again, thanks. I'm going to aim to use this as fuel to drive my own content creation around Drupal, and help show the world how it's actually useful.

[karenwest]

Technology discourse be damned, I draw the line at Super Smash Bros Melee slander.

[pfqniet]

I dunno man, when I drag a file into my FTP client, I don't have to sit around for however long it takes for Vercel to build my preview, it just updates instantly. A major plus point of interpreted languages like PHP and JS is fast iteration time, and having to wait 30s just because I missed a comma in my array is unacceptably slow. Presently I just have a WSL terminal in VSCode and develop locally, and my changes are instantly reflected in the output. When I'm done I can push my changes to the git repo, and our update process is a brief maintenance window while the live environment pulls the release in a controlled manner, with human eyes on it to ensure it runs smoothly and allowing us to communicate clearly with our users if (or when) things go wrong. CI makes it far too easy to screw up a live environment, I will never use it outside of a dev or staging or PTB environment.

[skapator]

Tell me you don't work in the real world without telling me you do not work in the real world.

[SnowDaemon]

Theo PLEASE STOP this.
You are a respected developer and influencer.
People like that you talk about the industry and typically know what your talking about.
But lately you've been making ignorant comments and even whole videos that are just soooo stupid.
We know you love React, most of us do as well. But you can promote it without putting other technologies down.
You're losing your audience, (at least the people i know and what I've seen) because unlike you, most of us use React AND PHP, and Go, and Rust, and Linux, and etc, etc.
So when you put down all these other things (especially when you do it by making false claims and just making stuff up, hoping we dont notice), it makes us not want to even entertain you anymore.
I know you benefit from promoting React, that's cool. Say good things about React! But leave other tech out of it (especially if you dont know anything about it. you literally just reacted to a 1day old HN thread with only ONE comment 🤨)
I'm only speaking for me, some friends, and the vibe i get from other comments, so if we're the minority then i guess keep doing your thing....
but i have a feeling we're not. i hope you fix this, because i used to love your content.

[AaronMcHale]

Drupal 7 to 8 was painful, but looking back it was worth it. Going from 8 to 9, 9 to 10, and soon 10 to 11 is incredibly easy in comparison, and where Drupal 10 is compared to 7 is night and day. I’m working on a website for a university that has very complex content workflows, with lots of users, some of the stuff we can do out of the box would take literally months in another framework, and that’s all with CI/CD, I can’t imagine building it in anything else. You’d be surprised just how many government and education institutions use modern Drupal for their websites. For instance, there’s a whole conference just for US government agencies who use Drupal.

[JohnDoe-jhyr]

Within the Drupal community (at the time when D8 was introduced), there was no ambiguity about it not being backwards compatible and that it pretty much required a rebuild because it completely changed programming paradigms.

[aaaa-igsc]

Theo decent PHP devs are using PHP 8.3 which is a world away from the PHP you experienced. They have been using Laravel and git for the past decade+. JS and Vercel are late to the party, not PHP catching up with deployment! Drupal is your Gatsby 😂

[omgCHopper]

Drupal major version upgrades were always difficult, until we got to Drupal 8. Technical docs and guides were fine. Sounds like a skill issue