If this item looks unfinished, then that’s the case.

Rather than wait until is done, and then fail to write the blog post, I’ll try writing as I go along, and then if I ever do finish, the blog post will be ready too!

My very first Drupal site - the one the launched my career as a web developer in many ways - was www.athenryac.com. I was getting involved with my local Athletic club, and put my hand up to build a website for an upcoming event. I evaluated a number of platforms such as Mambo and Zend - this was in the days before Wordpress - and landed on Drupal. The initial launch was on Drupal 4.4, and I thought I was just brilliant.

It grew and grew over the years, and I've upgraded along the way, and time permitting, added features. It was heavily active in terms of contributors, commenters and visitors for a good number of years. But a number of factors lead to a demise of sorts. I wasn't as involved in the club - social media avenues such as Facebook and Whatsapp rose to prominence and the running scene got its own independent sites such as www.runireland.com.

In truth, it hasn't been maintained properly, neither in terms of backend or frontend development, but more importantly content, in a number of years. I'm not saying all that is going to change, but I will talk about the upgrade to Drupal 10.

I've always been a great believer in 'less is more'. Or rather, I became great believer when I realised that everything you add to a system needs to be maintained in the long run. With every iteration of the website in a newer version of Drupal, I always look to see what could be done with just Drupal Core alone, rather that custom code and contributed modules. As a frontend developer at heart, I'm totally fine with building out a new Drupal theme each time, and I enjoy it. But other than that, it’s always useful to see how far you can get “out of the box“ with Drupal core in each new version.

So let’s get started. At the time of writing, Drupal 10 hasn’t been released, but I’ll kick-off with the latest version, always conscious that some small things might change before it is released. And with a bit of luck I can contribute back to the project in terms of testing at the very least.