Drupal has stunningly matured !

I have been working with Drupal since 2005. I have developed websites using Drupal 4.x and now I still do with Drupal 6.16.
Drupal is indeed a wonderful CMS and the community is that makes you join them !

Back then, I had developed sites based on Web 2.0. I had to write custom modules for implementing desirable behavior for wikis, blogs.
There was more customization involved for automating certain tasks -
eg -

• Needed to create a wiki page on creation of a organic groups (og) based group.
• Needed the home page to be a wiki page for all groups.
• Multi author blogs
• Multiple blogs per user
• Output the data in a certain fashion..in the ages when views didnt exist!
  

And theming, ah ! I had to write functions in phptemplate.engine, then use the template to write out the html.

Over the years Drupal has matured in the following areas :

• Number of modules has grown
• 90% of my requirements today are possible with just configuring the right modules
• Support for modules has grown
• More hooks are available in modules
• Theming is great with the hook_theme()
• Support for jquery..YAY!
  

Drupalgardens is also an impressive site. I am exploring it and will post soon about my experiences..

I recently developed a module where I used concepts from object oriented programming, PHPUnit. It was a great experience writing Drupal code and playing with Drupal hooks.

All in all a commendable effort from the community !