Taking Off The Rose Tinted Glasses 

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

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.

Why does this video feel like an ad?

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.

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.

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

You probably should've mentioned Vercel is a channel sponsor. DeArrow replaces this video title with "A Vercel ad disguised as a Drupal rant"

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

You couldn't make a less obvious ad lol

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.

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...

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

PHP is old, yes ... but i don't think you need to ask people not to push code via ftp anymore ...

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

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.

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 😂

PHP is comparable to Node. Next.js is comparable to Laravel/Symfony. Drupal is a CMS, not comparable to any of these tools (only happens to be built on top of PHP/Symfony). If you have built a fully-fledged enterprise web portal on Next.js, with its data layer and server-side components (usually a monolithic architecture), migrating that custom build to newer versions of Next.js is still a nightmare just like it is migrating from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8. Pick your poison.

Working with Node isn't as bad simply because breaking changes are done only when necessary, not every, oh, I don't know... Every version!?

It's actually a bad comment and represent exactly the type of people you were joking about- people that do not want to learn. I'm working with drupal since version 5. I was upgrading 5 to 6, 6 to 7, 7 to 8, and right now 7 to 10. It has never been easy to upgrade to a new major drupal version until drupal 8. Because 8 to 9 or 9 to 10 is pretty much painless, requires just minor updates to custom code in some cases (due to php8+ requirements and deprecations mostly). The problem with migration from 7 is due to drupal being rewritten from custom engine to symfony in version 8, template engine was changed to twig. So, if you learned how to program for drupal 7, most of the knowledge became useless, as you have to learn some symfony and twig for 8+. And yes, a lot of companies are still on drupal 7, because you have to rewrite all your custom modules and themes for 8+, only data can be transferred from 7. And quite the contrary, drupal was chaotic in versions 7 and before, but since 8 it's well structured and documented, but lost some developers that never wanted to learn a new code base.

Drupal is probably hanging with enterprise contracts. I know Warner Music Group runs a lot of their artists sites off Drupal.

My first job out of university was working in a drupal 7 site that needed to be upgraded to 8. My second job was to upgrade a huge vue 2 codebase to vue 3. Really feels like I’m cursed at this point.

Title of this video should be replaced "Using Drupal to bitch about PHP and promote Vercel without knowing a thing about PHP" Insinuations about PHP devs still using FTP deployments are crazy.. And Drupal is a crazy example too. Comparing Drupal to Next.JS seriously ? Looks like Drupal 7 to 8, was a full-rewrite hence upgrading is not straightforward, same as Angular 1 to Angular 2 ? At least Drupal tried to provide an upgrade path... I really have the feeling its all about getting sponsor $$$ from Vercel ....

sooo, you're saying pull requests aren't a thing with PHP? Ok then.

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.

We spent 2 months 3 devs just for upgrading our Drupal 7 project to Drupal 8

Skill Issue

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.

try upgrading magento to magento 2, or good luck installing a free magento extension, most of them are buggy or broken. Drupal is a peace of cake compared to magento, at least drupal docs are decent.

This video is sponsored by Vercel.

for me there is no difference in the complexity, comparing Drupal 7 -> 8 migration and nextjs pages to app dir (or RSC). Both of them requires almost a full rewrite. Talking about large & complex projects, not simple endpoints. Don't get me wrong - I'm not inlove with Drupal. I have a full rights to hate it even more than you can think of. Imagine what the community state will be if they (Drupal) didn't moved to using composer and the Symfony framework. It would be considered as a vintage CMS xD About the CI/CD demo that you did - it's good. Also it's never the case xD Imagine putting a MySQL db into that. What if you want ElasticSearch or any other search (Solr, etc)? Good luck with the feature deployments. It's never that easy as a simple hello world project.

Bro I want to find out what git add -p does I dont see anything on google

Tell us you don't know modern PHP and Drupal without telling us you don't know modern PHP and Drupal. Both Theo and the OP on HN.

Migrating from Laravel 4 to 5 was a fucking nightmare.

Wonder how hard it would be to port drupal to Go...

Remember when you could build a moderately simple local use personal tool in javascript and being able to double click on it without having to spool up an entire webserver back end first?

Oh there was never a doubt in my mind that Drupal 8 was a new product and Drupal 7 would never die. They are completely different projects. And Drupal literally has a slogan "The Drop is always moving."

Sounds like it puts react native upgrades to shame

I remember when I started in my current place in 2019 they were in the process of moving from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 and it was essentially a full rebuild. Thankfully we used that as a chance to modernise, moving to a git based deployment and moving our public facing documents to AWS but it still required manually uploading and tagging thousands of documents. Thankfully however I only had to suffer a few months of D7 and managing files via FTP before the rebuild was complete.

I like Drupal as a click and point your own API + the fact that you can version your configuration changes (the click and point changes). Its gotta some great work flow plugins as well. Also the old migration where a pain, but doing a 7 - 8 is not as bad as previous ones.

Wait what do you mean "open source alternative" to wordpress, wordpress is open source as well

I want to see your dotfiles for that fancy terminal.

I pushed a module for Drupal 5. Then I found out that Drupal 6 would completely obsolete it. Very dispiriting.

wth , you can deploy php to vercel all this time ?

When you mentioned the Node 0.4 stuff, I had to look it up because I was unaware. God damn that shit is insane.

Crazy how I always thought of Jeff Geerling as the raspberry pi guy on YT

Vue 2 to vue 3 might be up there with durpal for the worst upgrade experience

I simply don't get the purpose of this video. I've been a fullstack developer for twenty years and i faced similar situations in every language or framework. Try to refactor or update something that has been done with older version of webpack... Man that is painful. I am not a php fan boy (even if i use laravel for 11 years and i know it super well) but i literally refused for 20 years to use something like Drupal or Wordpress simply because if you are a real developer you have the ability to craft your own opinions and research about stacks and solutions and it is was quite clear that wordpress and drupal are great projects but the developer (or the team) have literally no control and that is frustating, but to be fair has really nothing to do with PHP or its current state or the actual ecosystem. If you take a very old crappy project and you rewrite it with a super-modern solution, again, it has nothing to do with both languages. Same results will be similar if you choose django, rails, adonis, fresh deno, etc.. And btw if you use ftp to deploy you are basically not a developer but a scripter, but again this has nothing to do with PHP....

for me biggest php problem was those "plugins" (or whatever they were called). Your provider decided which of them are enabled, and that was a major pain. Otherwise, same selling point as javascript - keep your existing HTML but sprinkle some "back-end" here and there.

Using Drupal 7 does not require use of FTP.

Sounds like they should've called it a slightly different name if it was a just complete re-write (and without strict api compatibility promises). Then advertised it in a banner on top of the drupal site. Seems almost like the Python 3 situation, but with a much smaller community around the issue.

Can definitely confirm, that upgrading any Drupal 7 to Drupal 8+ (now we are on Drupal 10) is basically a rewrite. I am just glad that I already did that years ago for our 10+ Drupal sites when our customers recognised this issue and gave me the ressources to do that painfull upgrade. BUT to be fair every upgrade from Drupal 8 to Drupal 10 now was pretty smooth sailing.

One thing that may be a workable option for Drupal 7 folks is Backdrop CMS.

I think its worth mentioning that v8 of drupal modernized it to a more mature and stable framework thats based off symfony (like laravel and other acclaimed php frameworks), so making an easier DX for devs from either world. Plus the documentation from v8+ is quite thorough. Becoming a 7 to 8 migration expert may be a great way to land a job tbh. Just beware of some of the silly custom code people created prior to v8 and make sure to implement cicd as early as possible

I mean, at least the mustache is nice.

I suspect going from NextJS page router to app router would be as painful as upgrading Drupal major versions. Also Drupal is an entire platform and I would think nothing of comparable complexity (not saying thats a good thing) exists in the JS world

Oh but the edit made it look so easy 😂. Can't fool me, I was there. I do not miss ftp in the slightest

@4:07 - this caused me to realize I hadn't subscribed yet! (I've seen and liked at least 20 videos)

@2:15 What are you on about? CI/CD is a standard in a modern-day PHP development. I worked on a PHP project with CI/CD a good decade ago, before Next.js even had its initial release. Before Vercel, that you advertise so much, was founded. Yes, configuring it wasn't as simple as nowadays, but saying it wasn't a thing is just... detached. Also: *Why are we making rant videos about 2011 frameworks in 2024?!* Are you going to make a rant about jQuery 1.6 for balance's sake?!

i love the vercel cli so much, dont even have to push, just do vercel --prod

"omg its not getting maintained anymore! Its not gonna get security updates" Be thankful that it even builds. I left my android app unattended for 2 fucking years and I cant even compile it anymore (technically its an ejected Expo app but the problems are only in the Android Studio project part) because it automatically pulls all the newest SDK versions against my will and Google deprecates the entire android API every 6 months. I needed to add a small if in one JS file(js because its expo) and it turned into a major refactor to managed Expo (so much of the native code has been integrated into managed Expo over the years, we dont the ejected env anymore) and EAS. FML.

PHP is awesome

Why doesn't someone with a bit of drupal experience just work on a set of codemods and iterate through these companies helping them migrate for lots of $$$

a u joking? with basic 10 python code also that live update can be achieved and cron that script

8:48 Hot take: The only devs who complain about the change from Vue 2 to Vue 3 were backend devs that didn't get why Composition API was needed and lazy frontend devs (that eventually lived big changes in updates for React/Next or currently in Svelte), Evan never forced or suggested no one to migrate to Vue 3 as soon as it was released, he even released a more powerful Vue 2 in v2.7 and the full transition lasted 2+ years.

more migrations i do i feel more love about Go. at first i didn't understand the idea of a language that doesn't change but now i appreciate that more than any other features of a programming language

Web legends or dinosaurs

Bashing on old stuff you can find in every trade. The difference is that in the IT and development world every kid thinks that they are genius and their words (heard from another influencer on yt) are absolution

brother saying ANYTHING along the lines of "ftp is worse than git pull for site deployment" is one of the most hipster things i heard. like, ever.

notification gang 🫡

Anything is simpler than wordpress and drupal. Laravel is a totaly diferent thing

Imagine being a dev maintaining any project and complaining about tackling tech debt because you wanted an easy way out just get the work done and make it better so that next time it's that little bit easier.

Be fair. If you're gonna talk about old tech (like drupal) and compare it to new tech (like Vercel and Next), you should at least mention Laravel more. Or at least mention all the shit storm that old JS tools bring about. Hell, even ESM vs CJS is still going on.

i loved your content i found in short form - which funnelled me to follow and subscribe to gour channel. but recently you have been more focused on being clickbaity - and instigating emotional responses. which is fine. but most of the time your comments are out of touch or too rigid. i love your content about JS, but I smell junior developer nextjs fanboy vibe from your recent content. unsubscribing for now.

I used Drupal 7 maybe 10 years ago, it was slow as hell so they complatley rewrtie it with symphony and here is why migrate 7 to 8 is liek a complate re write :) and drupal 8 is old am amaze still talk about drupal 7 in 2024

I still have a few bugs on my Drupal 10 site resulting from the complicated Drupal 7 to 8 upgrade :(

Drupal is a Belgian product :)

TBH I was a PHP dev at the times when PHP 6 failed miserably because the language devs didn't knew what they could do wrong even more and knew then that PHP has no productive future left. I was never part of the Drupal world but what it sounds like is that the same kind of devs plagued them. Seems to me that the greater PHP world is stacked with such "Know it all but worse" devs that regularly sink good stuff by there ineptness. They are there own worst enemy!

Anyone remember google app engine?

I was once a php developer. I used wordpress, laravel, then yii2 which IMO was a downgrade

MELEEE WOOOO

Is there anyone like me who likes the Laravel world and also likes the Next.js world?

I don't dev with PHP anymore, but hearing that Drupal users, and by extension PHP users, expect their codebase to always work (for 20 years !?), and that they're using PHP because they don't want to "upgrade" and expect consistency, is a little funny. There have been multiple times during the peak use of PHP when you had to deeply modify your codebase because of version changes. The switch from v3 to v4 came with many changes. The switch from v4 to v5 was huge. Then v5.3 pops up and changes things that should only change with major versions. Then the language continued to evolve. And I'm not sure you can leave your v5 (or even v7 ?) codebase as is if you want to host your app on servers with modern versions of PHP.

Drupal was always a mess and a great way to learn PHP.

I stopped watching when he mentioned Vercel

Theo, why are you still using git commands? The Desktop UI is king.

Mostly love your takes.. But this one was really out of touch... Been deploying Drupal sites with git since 10 years... migration between 7 and 8 was not harder than 6 to 7 but 7 was maybe good enough so people never put in the work to do it...

bye

i made it to 3 mins

There is no word "miserable" in first sentence. :) Magento is the worst.

git add -A vs -p? that would be a video i'd watch

The Drupal hate is fine and shared here, but the PHP hate shows how out of touch you are with the modern development echo system. a Few dev companies around me still use PHP perfectly fine. Sure they use Laravel mostly, but that is still PHP. Your description which say Drupal AND PHP are best left in the past shows you are very limited in your knowledge of current dev companies. Although agree with the Drupal part, the PHP part is next.js fanboy bashing other languages

I was in dc government for many years and drupal is the go to cms. 7 to 8 gave me nightmares

I've been enjoying your content more and more lately. Thanks for all the effort.

I don't get it. Drupal? why is this even worth talking about. Drupal (specifically hooks) is the worst framework for software development ever created. Being super extensible is the only redeeming quality, but it comes at the cost of ignoring every type safety feature in PHP - Drupal barely benefits from anything added to PHP over the past 10 years, and never will. Unless you're intentionally trying to make PHP look bad, please never mention Drupal again.