craft cms

Coming from free Drupal contrib: making peace with Craft's paid plugin economy

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.

BM Blue Moose / 2026-09-07 / 04 min

2026-09-07 / 04 min

craft cms

No Views UI: fetching content in Craft when your hands expect Drupal Views

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.

BM Blue Moose / 2026-09-07 / 04 min

2026-09-07 / 04 min

craft cms

Craft Cloud vs my $6 VPS: what first-party serverless actually buys you

My reflex to Craft's own managed hosting was the self-hoster's sneer — why pay for what I can run myself? But Craft Cloud isn't competing with my VPS's price; it's competing with my weekends and my bus factor, and that's a fairer fight than I wanted. What it includes, the lock-in the abstractions hide, and when managed hosting is the rational call vs. self-hosting pride.

BM Blue Moose / 2026-09-07 / 04 min

2026-09-07 / 04 min

craft cms

Craft is becoming a Laravel app — a Drupal dev watches a CMS change engines mid-flight

Craft 6 (alpha since May 2026) is a ground-up port from Yii onto Laravel, and can embed in an existing Laravel app. I lived Drupal's Symfony 'get off the island' in Drupal 8, so I have a haunted perspective: the framework swap is the right long-term bet and a short-term ecosystem earthquake. The questions that decide it aren't about Laravel — they're about the plugins.

BM Blue Moose / 2026-09-02 / 04 min

2026-09-02 / 04 min

craft cms

Craft's project.yaml, from someone who's been burned by Drupal config sync

Picking up a Craft CMS backend as a Drupal veteran, the first thing I looked for was config management. Craft's project config solves the same problem with a gentler philosophy — the database stays the runtime source of truth and you can rebuild the YAML from it. Gentler is mostly good, and a drift trap if you skip allowAdminChanges=false. A working comparison.

BM Blue Moose / 2026-09-02 / 04 min

2026-09-02 / 04 min

craft cms

Entry types, Matrix, and why Craft 5 quietly out-designed Paragraphs

Drupal taught me to juggle nodes, paragraphs, blocks and media — four entity types with four APIs. Craft 5 collapsed almost all of it into one primitive: everything is an entry, and Matrix blocks are just nested entries. The conceptual economy is real. What a Drupal dev gains (nesting that just works) and gives up (Views, SQL-shaped reporting).

BM Blue Moose / 2026-09-02 / 04 min

2026-09-02 / 04 min