- GIT, Composer, Drupal Console, and Drush). Drupal helps you create dynamic, content-driven websites. © 1999 – 2020 Viget Labs, LLC. and admit that the way it is is shitty and causing problems and needs to be changed (a bunch of things in Views, for instance), and that the current audience of Drupal developers is getting small enough that their familiarity is irrelevant. (Again, the best way to compete with them is to become better at what it's already good at, not trying to change its nature to more resemble them, because that's how you pick up their weaknesses along with their strengths.) Because it was designed with structured data in mind, it works will with data-rich websites where you need to reference data in different ways and on different pages. Because of … Make composer optional everywhere. Then one leading Drupal frontender had the nerve to stand up and say it might be quicker just to write CSS. But when taken as a whole, I do not begrudge the project managers who have to decide if and when to upgrade to Drupal 8—or sit tight on Drupal 7 LTS, or move to Backdrop, or re-platform to some other system. That's another big reason to push away lots of users. In reply to So far, everyone has by bluepresley@ga…. I agree with 99% of this article. Should I upgrade to Drupal 8 now (or soon) since Drupal 8 to 9 will supposedly be a painless upgrade? Read the current issue. The world moved on since Drupal 7. I am an old geezer with no formal code or Drupal training who cut his teeth on Drupal 5, 6 and 7. It goes about websites with a sophisticated organization of data, like corporate resources and online shops. For example many payment gateways in Drupal Commerce are outdated. #Front-end Engineering, By contrast, platforms like Craft and Contentful, have made admin UX a focus. Drupal has an excellent article creation tools out of the box. And these benefits are massive for new site builds or migrations from outside the Drupal ecosystem into Drupal. No one pretends that Drupal is perfect or all-wise. Caveat to those who read on—you may think I'm trying to disparage Drupal through the rest of this post. Reasons for Choosing Drupal: Drupal is a good choice over WordPress for projects that require a searchable database, where Views is at its best.WordPress is a better choice for SEO-focused projects because of Rank Math and other great SEO tools that exist only in the WordPress ecosystem. Drupal is a free open source content management system (CMS) and content management framework (CMF) written in PHP that allows you to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. And yes, the legacy ,knowledge and community should be considered. But it's also a tool that requires you to... Others chose more familiar pastures and either moved on to some other PHP-based CMS or switched to some other ecosystem. A Driesnote which states that in the last year there was no single new feature in the past 12 months, and massively improved documentation, would do more for Drupal than the world's snazziest page builder. Very interesting article. That solution may be a static website, a solution with Contentful, a Craft site, a custom-built CMS, or something we haven’t thought of yet. Drupal 7 was too nerdish. One of the few huge differentiators between Drupal and most other CMSes has always been the ability to run 'multisite' installations. But Drupal 8 is actually a really good choice for those who build decoupled architectures using JSON:API, or GraphQL, or whatever other fancy decoupled framework and need a reliable content backend. The more custom code, the more difficult the decision. It is free to be used by any blogger or developer. Even if the module has the exact same features and functionality. At least it got the RTBC stamp last week! Since my update procedure consists of replacing the Core and Vendor directories and running composer update, I do not see why the replacement steps cannot be put into the composer workflow. Stop trying to compete with different technologies, and just try to be the best at being what you already are! D8 and D9 may be a superior technological solution (compared to D7 and before).. but Drupal, any version, will now die, because it failed to take into consideration how it affects business decisions.. Riddle me this: If it takes $200,000 to upgrade a D7 version to a D8 version when I can just recreate the application from the ground up in Wordpress for $50,000? This is not a Drupal thing, it is basics for everyone. In recent years, with the help of Digital experience platforms (DXP), global companies are focusing on creating a better digital experience that effectively … Except that Drupal 7 would inevitably come out that competition worse off. Going one step further, does one want to store just the custom code in the repo and use a build process to build out the artifact? To be honest, though, it seems that those who do 'decoupled' with Drupal are often people who started with Drupal (or something like it), and then get into the decoupled game. On the current project, we are doing that. In this post, we’ll compare Drupal vs WordPress side by side and discuss the pros and cons of each platform. Many multisite detractors are quick to point out that this is kind of an abomination and is architecturally impure. You can only make things right by ackowledging what needs to be made right. Loved the structured way the CMS was build. Views has its difficulties, but the GUI is pretty solid. Good Drupal developers will be able to pick up any web project that use similar technologies, but the reverse isn’t necessarily true. Part of the new knowledge is that Drupal is "growing up" after a long period of adolescence. It is search engine friendly. But I think the moral of Drupal's saga is if you revamp many major portions of an ecosystem's architecture in one release, you have to accept the attrition that comes with such a refactoring. They tried some with the release of Drupal 7, but need to do the process over again because it's still mainly rather poor. So adoption is even worse than it might seem from graph. I rebuild websites faster with Laravel than D8. The rest of us don't think it's fun. :). It's falling farther and farther behind every year. Companies that provide commercial (micro)services do not bother to write integrations/tutorials/SDK's to Drupal themselves, but offer them for other languages/frameworks. For once, please, let us not hear a Driesnote with (self-)congratulations about the wonderful new features. The number of site builders Drupal is going to lose far, far outweighs the number of Symfony developers they might gain (especially as the latter number is likely to be zero. Im amazed, the theme output and settings are way more easy to understand and implement, html output is exactly as I want, Twigs helps a lot. I, too, am still optimistic about Drupal's future. 6. Drupal … The overarching issue is that the Drupal community was sold on the idea that moving Drupal to Symfony would pull in thousands of other PHP developers who would flock to Drupal once it started using a more modern code architecture. - features is almost impossible to use annotations are PHP things (which, they took from Java and C#). Drupal’s functionality goes much deeper than WordPress. Some Drupal 7 contributed modules have Drupal 8 and Drupal 9 versions available, while others no longer apply in a world with different programming paradigms. is sound. Open-source; Anyone can install and use Drupal without any costs. Things like that seem to be much more focused on programmers self-pleasuring by automating all teh things because they can and because they think it's fun to do than actually solving any real problems of building a website. (I remember pointing out how immature D8's media handling was about five years ago, and getting pushback... but then seeing people several years later admitting how immature D8's media handling still was...). But this will be a case study on how to destroy a viable vibrant platform. I couldn't care less about the latest object-oriented design pattern or way of managing dependencies. The last instance was handed over to another company, it's still alive, and it caused me so much grey hair that I don't want to think about it. Don’t limit yourself to a single CMS as a software engineer. And most modules would, as part of the general upgrade process, write an update path so those using the Drupal 6 version would have all that module's configuration make its way to Drupal 7, as long as they were running the latest and greatest Drupal 6 module version when they upgraded. My approach is to embrace the change and have fun learning all the new things there are to learn. No board of directors is going to pay 4x more because "hey, we just like the Drupal project.". I don't buy that argument, because otherwise we'd see similar attrition in pretty much all the other PHP CMS communities... and we don't. With that said, I would definitely take the bitter pill and move as quickly as possible to Drupal 8. I’ve been to Drupal Cons, I’ve been to Drupal meet-ups, and I’ve given presentations on Drupal topics. I've already decided to continue many of my sites on D7 LTS because "they just work". But I think the usage pattern and value proposition for Drupal has changed. This boiled down to a cost benefit / cost of ownership issue. you find that total number of dev-versions used is almost 70k! Not for developers, but for anyone who is doing something on the web. But this meant that large swaths of Drupal experience were thrown out the window. Full stop, repeat that. - you can no longer disable a module (who came up with that brilliant idea). Drupal can be a good option for sites that will use a lot of custom content types and taxonomies (called vocabularies in Drupal). Drupal is focusing on Decoupled approach however, honestly this looks more coupled and complicated monolithic then it ever had been. Drupal is the #1 platform for web content management among global enterprises, governments, higher education institutions, and NGOs. Drupal hosting companies will make it easy to get set up, and help you run updates. Look, Drupal's current trajectory isn't looking good and the Dries-itis it's suffering from, needs excised: 1.) Reported in December 2011, first patch was submitted in July 2012, still not fixed. Here are a few examples that also explain some of my own reasons for frustration, some issues just don't get fixed. Although I could muddle my way through on earlier version of Drupal, they never felt quite like a complete CMS. No complaints there? I believe we could hide some of the complexity and have a Drupal 8 that still works for the likes of me. Profiles/distributions are one way to lower the amount of time and effort required to put up a site. You can find plenty of arguments out there about how terrible Drupal is — that’s easy — but it’s not true. Drupal just has some of their own custom annotations, but the concept is not drupal specific. A complete chaos, works great if you are used to it. I think as someone mention above - Drupal is no longer intended for small/medium sites but only for larger enterprise level sites. It’s worth noting that Drupal didn’t invent modules, nor is it the only platform that has a concept like modules. It needs to play to it's strengths which means competing for the specific market which it can excel at rather than trying to be a "jack of all trades". So trying to manage a modern Drupal 8 codebase with Composer and having the ability to have different copies/versions of different modules inside the codebase is... not quite impossible, but can be very close to that. Drupal 7 had it all but. It may be noted that many of the more 'ambitious' Drupal 6 sites also needed a full migration to Drupal 7 and couldn't be directly upgraded—but for the long tail of smaller sites which usually used core modules and a smattering of contrib modules, and had little if any custom code, the upgrade.php process worked quite well, and resulted in hundreds of thousands of site upgrades that I don't believe we will see with Drupal 7 to Drupal 8. But as you start to add modules, you start using more and more memory. Drupal isn’t bad, Drupal is good. In fact, I would argue that the use of Composer made that even better. It seems as though the idea behind D8 was to require custom code to be written for everything you need to do and rely less on contributed modules. Facebook is the place for identity, not a random url. Here's my question: why would an Enterprise use D8 if the vast majority of companies using it will require a programmer? So, for me, the pain has moved from the site itself to the deployment workflow. And get rid of the idiotic 'the website encountered an unexpected error' message for something more useful. So far, everyone has commented, and indeed what this article is about - is the struggle technologically between D<=7 and D8. If you start new, start with 8. https://www.drupal.org/project/libraries. Just adding CSS or a font to a theme and expecting it to be loaded, or trying to figure out which template file might override some html output, has become a nightmare. However, Drupal is... weird. ): Time for my semi-annual pre-#DrupalCon informal poll: If you're still on #Drupal 7 and haven't moved to 8 yet, what's holding you back? These things being involved in the bigger maintenance equation should be trivial point-and-click operations, or better yet, be completely transparent to the entire set of processes involving how Drupal is used or maintained, and yet, despite being in a technologically advanced society where we can make cars drive themselves, allow refrigerators to access the internet, or make little speakers order us pizza from our favorite restaurants by speaking to it, we're consigning to this idea that the only way to use something like Drupal Commerce (or other Drupal modules) is only by issuing commands at a command line!? - there is no longer a way to clone a bundle to port to another site I don't find October compelling at all. This. used for building websites, but like anything on the web, there is always the potential for security vulnerabilities to be discovered and exploited. #Content Management. I admit that I am guilty of running two Drupal 7 sites with a very large amount of custom code. While Drupal themes do exist, most Drupal websites sport a custom-coded theme, or at least a highly customized theme. Here are seven heresies which could lead to Drupal nirvana, if anyone dares whisper them: All custom modules have each own git repo, and we are using Satis (much faster than adding git repos to composer.json) to manage them as composer packages separately. I left Drupal behind to build better sites, using the best tools. I haven't paid much attention to it over the years, but recently decided to give it a test spin on a small site. Drupal 8 has made a big leap in terms of the amount of knowledge a developer needs to work with it. In other words, Drupal, in 7 era, is still in the camp of "something that mostly anyone can install and use" (even if obviously such lightly-savvy people will make everything with contrib themes and modules, and probably struggle for big updates). The choice for both Drupal and Joomla is much smaller. It’s arguably the most secure of the big three open source CMSs (Drupal, WordPress & Joomla!) Let's get an improvement in place NOW, and THEN argue about whether it could be still better... jeez. 3) It's all about the programmer. Drupal has pretty good caching (though obviously it's not making things easy for Bradley!) Drupal sites vulnerable to double-extension attacks. A large community, even a nice one, doesn’t equate a highly-skilled one. Drupal 7 was great for that because you could install and update with minor understanding of technical operations. D7 should have been HTML5 ready the day of it's release. That's not the kind of feeling you want your developers to have!!!!! Article Categories: Good for creating large, complex websites Free and open source code: Drupal is completely free which allows it to compete with other similar CMSs like Joomla and WordPress. Drush 3. Drupal is a good framework for building sites accessible to people with disabilities, because many of the best practices have been incorporated into Drupal Core. It will still take time, and maybe even cause a little more strife in the end, as some more old Drupalisms may need to be put to rest. I never took a comp sci class in my life) chose to expand their knowledge and grow with Drupal 8's new architecture. I am implementing my first D8 Block as a plugin. PS Look, this is not a contest of who can say smarter things. Bugs. Some of this code will not need to be rewritten completely (thankfully! The promise of modules is oversold. --just my humble untrained opinion. New API architecture often required full module rewrites. The weirdest thing for me is that Drupal is still based on patches instead of pull requests. The big tent of Drupal developers have internalized these quirks, but the much bigger tent of web developers is usually baffled by them. ), at least at first glance. Very sad. On the subject of comparing Drupal 7 and Drupal 8: "But one thing that has always been annoying, and now is probably to the state of alarming, for some, is the fact that Drupal 8 adoption has still not hit a level of growth which will put it ahead of Drupal 7 adoption any time soon. This is annotation, and it's a Drupal thing. With all of the above, they need to be able to innovate, prototype, and iterate QUICKLY. I started out as a complete newbie on Drupal. But having one standard way to build and maintain Drupal codebases will be better in the end, because right now it can be quite messy, especially for those who downloaded Drupal as a tarball and use no CI system. For backenders, there is no way back. This should worry people in the Drupal community a lot. 5. In addition to the revamped architecture, new required build processes, and upgrade difficulties, almost every Drupal site has to completely rewrite its theme. Drupal 7 sites can no longer be upgraded to Drupal 8 with update.php, module migration for Honeypot for Drupal 8, [Meta] Better support for D7 -> D8 contrib migrate, Composer and Drupal are still strange bedfellows, Converting a non-Composer Drupal codebase to use Composer, https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#most-loved-dreaded-and-w…, https://www.drupal.org/association/blog/drupal-business-survey-2018, Modern programming paradigms (fewer #DrupalWTFs), 'Getting off the island' and becoming more of a normal PHP application (kinda the opposite of something like Wordpress). Does D8 server my clients better and give better value than D7? But I think the usage pattern and value proposition for Drupal has changed.". I'm almost $200 bucks an hour, and I'm no closer helping them achieve their goals to move to D8 than when I started.. (And, I've been developing Drupal solutions since early D5). All that makes Drupal best for large sites: if you need a lot of customization, high bandwidth, extensive guaranteed uptime, etc., then Drupal is an excellent choice. You can have a business page with Livestream and media on Facebook for free. Interesting post and I agree with many of your points. Period. Between GIT, Composer, Drupal Console, and Drush; all these things should be optional. In the past many of these things were kind of papered over by Drupal's simple-but-good-enough menu system, but now you have to be more formal about everything. If Drupal is ever the best solution for your project we will tell you, because we will want to use it. 3. What are we at today.. about 4 years into D8 (and release of D9 not to far off) and a small subset of everyday missing pieces: However, right now the increase in knowledge required to make a modern Drupal 8 site is huge. This cr… In particular I was drawn to the section "Themes have to be rebuilt" and your insight, "But this is in many cases the straw that breaks the camel's back. And here it is. ... Tracked as CVE-2020-13671, the vulnerability is ridiculously simple to exploit and relies on the good ol' "double extension" trick. Thanks for your reflections! (I still don't really see the point of Composer. I'm not speaking in the hypothetical here; this is exactly what happened with the Honeypot module. We have come up with reasons to go off-the-shelf or to go custom-built. He understood both the front end and backend needs. Fun for hobbyists and completists, but if you want to get things done, I dont' have time to look at that. There are some nice aspects to D8 OO system and some of it is better documented now than it was 2 years in but "feature base" of D7 (core/contrib) is still a long ways from being migrated to D8. Well I do feel sorry for people trying to use Drupal together with PostgreSQL. For ordinary developer like us it was never easier anyway but now you need to migrate. And the first two statements are, perhaps, necessary consequences of that change. ), Part of this is identifying what makes Drupal uniquely better than other systems and what its audience is, and that is the content development and site-building experience, the content modeling and views, the module ecosystem and flexible, combinatorial way in which modules work together as a set of flexible building blocks. If so, get ready for one team member to be the designated DevOps person because now complexity goes up a fair amount. I said no, it's a convoluted mess for anyone other than programmers. The following will cover how strong Drupal is from a design perspective and how to improve design if you are using Drupal. Taking over these sites wasn’t seamless. Drupal has come a long way in terms of accessibility over the years. The deliberation process takes forever, and often doesn't produce any particularly great solution anyway. But building a site with a huge part of custom code? I recently asked bojanz if Commerce had any plans to "actually become an ecommerce platform" he said it was. Drupal modules can be easily installed. In the current culture many module maintainers decline to commit very necessary patches for want of test coverage, which is preventing essential features and modules getting stable releases. Those websites were good, and they’re visited by millions of people. We should have a JS frontend right now, but Dries has been too cautious trying to figure out which framework will last. However, it is not built on it, … Hopefully someday. Drupal contains taxonomies, content types, blocks, views, and more. is a front-end developer who combines the creativity of a designer with the data-driven practicality of an engineer. Some Drupal developers who are not classically-trained (like me! I hate Wordpress. Sure, there are use cases where someone would consider either Drupal or a hip trendy decoupled web framework backend.