Long-form writing on Drupal, PHP frameworks, AI tooling, automated testing and everything else in a working programmer's stack — shipped from production, not theory.
A Drupal dev's honest audit of Craft's out-of-the-box editor experience — first-class drafts and live preview that out-polish Drupal, parity on transforms and exports, and the one real gap: no approval workflow.
Craft and Drupal both theme with Twig, which fools you into thinking the front end will feel familiar. It doesn't — the template IS the controller, and query and cache discipline quietly become yours.
![The PHP attribute that yells at you for ignoring a return value: #[\NoDiscard] in 8.5](https://blog.bms.ovh/sites/default/files/styles/bluemoose_cover/public/covers/jxOzEZVtcTz2OYP0-OenUUmj3oe7VSWKvPW1xZ2XLl0.jpg?itok=xqjr3Xg7)
PHP 8.5's #[\NoDiscard] makes the engine warn you when you call a function and throw away its result — the classic immutable-API footgun ($url->withScheme('https') that quietly did nothing). Why it's the rare attribute that improves your code by nagging you, where it fits in Drupal (Url, cache metadata, fluent withX() setters), the (void)-cast escape hatch, and why it only helps if your CI fails on warnings.
Immich is the self-hosted Google Photos replacement everyone recommends, and it ships features faster than its commercial rivals. v3 also swaps the Postgres vector extension underneath your library (pgvecto.rs → VectorChord) on a point-major bump. 'Ships fast' and 'boring backup for irreplaceable photos' are in tension — snapshot the DB before you pull, pin your version, and keep a dumb app-independent copy of the actual files.
The most useful upgrade to my agent workflow lately is embarrassingly low-tech: a folder with a SKILL.md in it. Anthropic's Skills (now an open standard) use progressive disclosure to load the right instructions only when relevant. They're the honest counterweight to MCP: half the time you don't need a live tool, you need the paragraph the agent was missing — versioned in git, no daemon. Plus the supply-chain caveat nobody screenshots.
Opening Craft's Plugin Store and seeing a price on the field type you need is a values-level culture shock for a Drupal dev used to free GPL contrib. How the money works (20% cut, one-time + annual renewal), why the paid model is a feature disguised as a tax (maintenance funded by self-interest, not goodwill), and the real lock-in: 'we stopped paying' and 'we stopped getting security updates' are the same sentence.
The thing that made Craft feel different from Drupal wasn't a missing feature — it was a missing screen. There's no Views UI; you fetch content by writing element queries (a fluent Twig/PHP API) or hitting Craft's free first-party GraphQL. For a developer that's mostly better — all in code, all reviewable. For the site builder who shipped listings without a developer, it's a real loss worth naming.