up until this point I had decided to renovate my website, and where I was going to host it. now it was time to make some decisions related to Drupal itself:

1. should I upgrade or rebuild from scratch?
2. will I keep all the content types, nodes, views?
3. what theme should I use?

and I went about these points one by one:

upgrade or rebuild?

upgrading would be an interesting experience, since it's been in high demand as of late. but then again, it could take longer, and I didn't welcome the trouble of having to apply security patches on the D7 version which would be short lived.

in the end, I decided I would rebuild my website, due to the very small amount of content, and in the process, I would make decisions in regards to its structure.

of course, I kept a backup of the old DB, so I could play around with upgrading at a later time.

content types, nodes, views?

one thing that made me lean towards the rebuild decision, as opposed to upgrading, is that from Drupal 8 onwards, translated content doesn't reside in separate nodes. so believe it or not, a mild OCD came into play and I thought, "well, I'll end up with much fewer nodes, and no gaps between them, so…"

another thing is that I had a content type for specific contributions — stuff like published modules, docs, and tutorials. it was comprised of a title, link, and description. that's it. and it required a view to display those on my homepage. now that was a lot of configs for such a simple thing as a list of links. I decided to ditch it in favor of a single node with everything in it.

(honestly, if I had much more content, I could think of something else, but for now it just made sense to be frugal about it. so I compiled the list on a Basic page node, and attached it to a humble "About" page via an Entity reference field.)

I used to have a list of clients I worked with in the past, with their logos redone in fancy ASCII art, because I'm such a nerd. but that list was outdated, and eventually I dropped it too — except in this case I might bring it up to date and recreate it, but for the time being I have other priorities.

speaking of ASCII, of course I had to redo my text-based selfie, as well as the theme itself.

theme?

that was an easy choice: from previous projects, I picked up the very cool Bootstrap Barrio theme and got to work on its SCSS implementation.

I was once again blown away by a community contribution, how easy it was to use it, and even updated my SASS game. I even got a chance to work on some twig templates.

(there is now a cookie consent banner too, because I'm nothing if not compliant.)

but anyway, now we're getting into the design, and that's the subject of the next post. stay tuned.

Originally published at https://linkedin.com on January 13, 2024.