The thing the Bolsheviks always talked about has finally happened. My homepage has moved to Drupal 11! And, I should note, it took less than a year after all.
This is the final full stop in my long-running experiment with OctoberCMS. I’ve already moved the rest of my landing pages to static (just plain HTML), because when recent PHP vulnerability came out, each one needed a serious update, and screw that.
While moving, the homepage got some goodies I’d wanted to add for ages, for example:
- Blog posts are now built on Paragraphs, and this is the coolest part. I can stick anything in the middle of a post, teasers and whatnot. I’ll try it out on the next TV series roundup.
- Galleries can be viewed in full in a lightbox, regardless of pagination.
- All the seo-geo-shmeo and structured data got much better (or at least fuller).
- Search on Search API is way better than what October had.
- Gin admin theme, photo reordering in albums, a Bootstrap upgrade from 3 to 5, and plenty of other handy little things.
The one thing I liked more in October was the Markdown editor, which made it easy to paste in texts from Obsidian. I’ll probably add one like it.
Also, the homepage now has an English version. I don’t know how useful it will be, but it’s fun and I’ve wanted it for ages. By the way, Claude translates quite well under my editing, and even tries to keep the jokes on its own. We’ve already done fifty posts this way, and we’ll add more bit by bit, step by step. Though we’re hardly going to do everything back to 2009, of course.
Claude Code turned out to be pure magic at my fingertips here. It not only built on Drupal what I asked for, it also wrote an import parser that splits the content into paragraphs right away, imported the media with proper type separation, and even set the focal points. For good measure, it wrote unit tests for the custom code and visual regression tests on BackstopJS to check how the design carried over.
This comes down (besides the quality of Claude itself, naturally) to two things:
- Drupal has a huge infrastructure and community: tons of materials, examples, code, and practices. That’s why Claude Code is so good at Drupal.
- I already have several D11 projects behind me, so I have my own playbooks, checklists, and a gentleman’s set of modules and practices. I can show all of that to Claude, and it immediately does things the way I like.
Here’s what PageSpeed shows on desktop after the move:
Much better than before. Performance on mobile is a bit worse, but we’ll beat that too.
I didn’t update the design right away, or I’d still be updating it a year from now. But it’s almost ready too. I also haven’t installed the cutting-edge Canvas module yet, but I’ll probably add it after the redesign.
Oh, and while I was at it, I moved to Selectel, replacing the last copy of the tiresome ispmanager panel with a Traefik + Docker Compose setup. But that’s a story for another time.
All in all, I’m extremely happy. Now I just need to finish the new studio site, and then we’ll be golden!