Drupal drops first big upgrade in five years and looks forward by looking backwards

Open-source CMS software Drupal has unveiled its first major update in five years by launching a new version 9.0. The biggest update is backwards-compatibility from version 8.0: the project's developers have styled the upgrade as not much more complex than adopting a point release. "If you've kept your Drupal 8 site up to …

[Paul Johnston]

Please no!

Thought I was finished with this nightmare.

[Pascal Monett]

So Drupal is still relevant, at less than 5% of the market

Well it's a good thing that Drupal has captured governmental use, that way it can have only 1.6% of the market and still boldly claim twenty years from now that it is still relevant.

As long as governmental organizations keep working with it, that is, because apparently the day they decide to go elsewhere, Drupal is wiped out.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: So Drupal is still relevant, at less than 5% of the market

Sort of depends how you define the market, but that's still a lot of websites and they generally come with juicy support contracts.

Getting whitehouse.org a few years ago gave Aquia the licence to print money and establised Drupal as the "IBM" of CMS for a lot of people. I know several companies that have since moved to it largely as a result of this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: So Drupal is still relevant, at less than 5% of the market

You have to define the "market" - a lot of sites using Wordpress are probably irrelevant personal ones running from cheap hosting. That's not a "market" where you can make money. There could be a smaller "market" of more complex sites built using Drupal, Joomla and other CMS where money can be made - that makes them far more relevant.

After all, those are more or less the number of Linux desktops....

[macjules]

EOL for Drupal 7

End of life has been extended to 2022, not 2021. Please see PSA-2019-02-25

[Dale 3]

Re: EOL for Drupal 7

Also see https://www.drupal.org/psa-2020-06-24, which updated the PSA-2019 announcement to move the date to 2022.

Note that Drupal 8'd EOL is still Nov 2021.

[batfastad]

DrupLOL

With the level of caching infrastructure required to get anywhere near acceptable performance Drupal may as well just be considered a really poor static site generator.

Does Drupal's built-in caching still pre-build the template/addon PHP into the database then eval() it back out on page load? Truly dreadful.

[Nick Ryan]

Re: DrupLOL

Oh yes, Drupal definitely has some very strange implementation methods, some of which really are strange and unhelpful and use very non-standard features of PHP. As an exercise it's very useful and quite interesting to follow the code from request through to page delivery - it's a bit tortuous but at least it's possible to do this.

On the other hand, WordPress is also host to a horror nightmare set of curious implentation methods, is also inefficient as hell and as for security... Well, largely forgotten about because so many instances of it are "fit and forget" rather than actively maintained and updated. Keeping to the core of WordPress makes life a lot easier, but trying to find a decent module that encompasses of all requirements rather than just 2/3 of them, that is well written and still supported... that's challenging.

Most other CMSs also suffer too, for example Umbraco which has one of the worst designed back end management systems I've come across and always fails at times and has an accessibility score in the high negatives and documentation that is always very out of date and usually just missing. As for some of the popular (i.e. more commonly used) modules, often they are incredibly badly written too.

Basically, they all suck in their own different ways - and have rabid followers who will listen to no criticism of them.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: DrupLOL

I've just commissioned a Joomla site which should be live in a few weeks (not because it takes so long, but the developer I use is quite busy).

I've evaluated quite a few CMS, and against my needs it comes out as the most suitable: it's Open Source, actively maintained and (and this is crucial for me) after the developer has finished I can add pages and functionality without needing to go back to the same developer if I so choose (unlikely, but I abhor lock in), and that without needing too much deep expertise.

Wordpress is OK if you need the online equivalent of a brochure, but as soon as you need ACL and user groups you're bending the code in ways it wasn't designed for, whereas for Joomla that's pretty standard fare.

So, new version of Drupal: meh :).

[Jonjonz]

Any you thought Linux updates were a pain...

Back in the day when I ran various systems for a government shop, updating any flavor of Linux was a pain, but updating Drupal was tempting the apocalypse.

Experience Drupal users know you either stick with the version that runs your site reliably, or your rebuild it from scratch on a newer version if you really have to have some of the new bells and whistles, people would just laugh when you even suggest upgrading from one version to another.

[Anonymous Coward]

Pascal

Still relevant. Loads of people have heard of it. Lots of universities teach it.

Oh wait, time slip...

[Allonymous Coward]

CMS behind gov.uk

[citation needed]