How a Forgotten Drupal Site Surprised Me After 8 Years

As If PHP Being 'Dead' Wasn't Enough…

Back when I was building most of my client projects with Drupal, it felt like everyone online had declared PHP dead. And Drupal? Slow, outdated, impossible to scale, you name it. That kind of talk was everywhere, at least in the dev spaces I followed. It was almost trendy to hate on it.

Why I Got Tired of Drupal

At the time, I was already fed up with Drupal myself. Configuration management was a pain, and version control was awkward at best. I'll admit it, most of my Drupal projects had little to no proper version control. I just couldn't get it right. That made deployments stressful and tracking changes even worse. On top of that, I felt like I had to constantly check the documentation just to write even the most basic code. The endless hook names, complex function signatures, and scattered patterns made the whole experience feel like a constant uphill battle. I was ready to leave it all behind. So I did.

The Rise of "Modern" Stacks

And guess what? Around that time, everyone suddenly had strong opinions about what a modern stack should look like. If you weren't building with Node.js, MongoDB, and a JavaScript framework, you were doing it wrong.

“The JAMstack is the modern architecture for the web.”
— Netlify

HR ladies started asking about 'Isomorphic Javascript' in the first call, like it was the most natural thing in the world. You could practically hear the cappuccino sip right after.

If your very simple portfolio site wasn't split into a dozen microservices, it raised eyebrows. Even your next-door neighbor, who just wanted a website (online brochure) for his wife's handmade socks business, would casually drop questions like, "So, are you using Vagrant in your dev stack?"

The hype was real, and even though I wasn't fully convinced, I dove in just to avoid looking outdated. I remember how awkward it felt to say "I used PHP." So I'd always start with 'Node.js' when people asked what I coded in, and then mention PHP like it was some guilty secret. I swear to God, I even had to do this during an interview for a PHP developer position to gain some respect.

Back to Solving Real Problems

But soon enough, the hype started to wear off, at least for me. I refocused on what I actually enjoyed: solving real problems. It just so happened that the kind of work I was doing called for PHP again. Laravel, and the TALL or VILT stack more broadly, fit naturally into the type of solutions I needed to build. And I wasn't afraid to reach for other tools and languages either, as long as they made sense for that particular job.

When Your Old Code Refuses to Die

Fast forward eight years. Out of nowhere, I get a call from a client I hadn't heard from in forever. Panic in their voice: "We can't access the admin panel." I almost laughed, because in my mind, that site had probably crumbled into digital dust years ago.

I still remember building that site. It wasn't for a typical client. It was a political party that had dealt with years of cyber attacks and repeated hacks on their previous websites. Stability and control were non-negotiable. At the time (and honestly, even now), I believed Drupal was the right tool for the job. We went with Drupal 8, and I spent weeks setting up permissions, editorial workflows, content types, and views tailored exactly to how their team worked.

We had a very solid outcome at the end. The only critique we ever got was that the admin panel didn't look as "pretty" as WordPress, but everything else just worked. On the other hand, their previous websites didn't have all these strict workflows and permissions. From day one, the site ran smoothly and did exactly what it was supposed to do.

So, after getting the call, I tried to log into the server (a single DigitalOcean droplet). The disk was full. Turns out that it was still up, still online and running. It was just out of disk space. Obviously, I used the maintenance mode to access the server's terminal. Cleared some cache and all image conversions and the website went back on.

I added some RAM and additional space to the droplet and everything went live again.

The Real Shock

To be honest, I was shocked. This site hadn't received a single module or theme update in eight years, and yet, it had never been compromised. This was a news website with a long history of being targeted by cyber attacks, and somehow it stayed rock solid the whole time. Nine people were actively using it every day to publish new content. There was even an active donation portal handling traffic around the clock.

The most surprising part? It was blazing fast. Thanks to the caching configuration I had set up years ago, the site was responding like a static HTML snapshot. I compared it to other news platforms, even modern ones built with newer, more praised technologies, and this old Drupal site was outperforming many of them. It was surreal.

Lessons From a Forgotten Server

This experience reminded me of something we often forget in tech: hype fades, but good architecture endures.

I left Drupal behind because the developer experience didn't bring me joy, but I can't deny the fact that when it came to stability, structure, and performance, it absolutely delivered. Eight years without a patch, no downtime worth mentioning, no hacks, and it still served high-traffic content daily like a champ.

So here's what I walked away with:

• The shiniest stack isn't always the most resilient one.
• Trends come and go, but thoughtful decisions at the right time can outlive them all.
• Developer happiness matters, but so does technical humility.

I'm still not going back to Drupal. Laravel is my happy place now. But I've gained a new level of respect for my old tools that quietly just work long after I've stopped paying attention.

Sometimes, it's not about what's cool. It's about what survives.