After 4 years of retirement from full-time employment, I took a look at what IT activities I have actually been involved in recently, and what skills have been most heavily utilized. The reality surprised me, in that:
- My 30+ years of IBM mainframe development experience, using both the z/OS and z/VM operating systems has had very little interest from potential clients. Many of the businesses where I have contacts have been moving away from those systems (z/OS in particular). A friend of mine even has gone so far as to incorporate a small company specializing in providing support for companies in the process of phasing out those systems.
- My 15+ years of Linux and web development skills have really now been the source of new clients, particularly small businesses seeking help and technical expertise to establish an on-line presence for their products and services.
In view of this, I decided that it was time to revamp the overall look and focus of my own website. The next decision to be made was which CMS I should use for the revamped website. After much review, my choices were reduced to either Drupal or WordPress.
My previous website had been built and maintained using Drupal 7 for almost 10 years. I liked the theming structure and the abundance of modules to support the various formatting and content types. However, Drupal 7 reaches end-of-life in November of 2021, so it didn’t make sense to rebuild my website using that foundation. The logical thought was to move to Drupal 8, but a few attempts to use it were disappointing. My experience trying it was:
- Drupal 8 is released, but really still under development. in a lot of ways, it is not a finished product. There’s lots of really great new ideas in the core, but many of them haven’t really matured yet. Using it in production requires debugging hard problems, watching the issue queue, applying patches and upgrades, etc. The radical changes made to theming make transitioning from Drupal 7 just too complex and time consuming!
I have used WordPress for some client websites, and after getting up to speed, have been impressed by the variety of available plugins and widgets, the ease of performing updates, and the overall stability of the system. The oft-heard criticism of WordPress is that it is bloated and resource-consuming, but at this point it seems that Drupal 8 is as well.
After much consideration, I therefor decided that my personal CMS of choice for the future is WordPress!!!