From May 2010 to April 2014 (just shy of 4 years) I worked for Virginia Tech and supported a variety of web platforms and content management systems. These included Percussion (Java Applets…what a pain), as well as WordPress and WP multi-site installations, but also A LOT of Drupal. This isn’t a comprehensive “life’s story” but just a glimpse back at the work I did over a decade ago using a CMS I was immediately fascinated by and spent a few years getting to know quite well.
I started building sites with Drupal on version 7 with a base installation and quickly segued into more building of sites on Drupal 8 once it released. Back in the day, this process was a bit arduous and required a good deal of system admin level know-how to get sites built but also to stand up web servers. Today, it’s point and click. My fondness for Drupal at the time was more a reflection of how much I disliked having to built sites by hand with HTML (oh how times change).
During my time working on Drupal at Virginia Tech, I launched 3 major departmental websites (spia.vt.edu, cpap.vt.edu, gia.vt.edu; all have moved on to other platforms since I launched them in 2013) on the same underlying code and platform (again, Drupal version 8). I built out both a core theme and child themes to leverage minor brand element differences while adhering to the university’s overall brand identity standards. This was a hugely successful project for me and helped set my career on a path towards even more complex projects. Along the way, I picked up many new skills both in understanding how CMS’s like Drupal work (not just one’s built on PHP either), and how to build, secure, and administer servers.
Although I haven’t done much work with Drupal since my role at Virginia Tech, I still do web design and development on other projects. I’ve since moved away from CMS work and now use Hugo as a static-site generator, but I still remember all the good times (and the frustrating ones) working with Drupal.