6 ms·

Drupal Is Dying

33 points by mobilio 4y ago

Kelteseth 4y ago
Same with joomla I guess[1]? What I have done in the past with Joomla 3 has now become Hugo static site only. It is so much better for my use case. No one I know needs a full-blown cms. Selling people that they can edit their own website largely fell flat, because they paid me to do it in the end every time. Also, Joomla needed an update every month or so because of security issues was bad because often plugins would randomly break. [1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=DE&q=joomla https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=DE&q=j...
- 2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
  Joomla and Drupal both have their strong points, but nowadays most people will just install WordPress with a 1-click installer and add some plugin/theme that does whatever WordPress doesn't do out of the box. It's nothing new and both project will stay alive, although with minimal updates. I mean, phpFusion is still alive after all these years -- just with a much smaller user base. Eventually, I suspect, WordPress will go the same way and we'll have another shiny hammer, that makes every problem look like a nail.
  - skoskie 4y ago
    Since Guttenberg WP has become a complete mess and most devs I know are migrating away from it. It’s definitely on the chopping block.
- yurishimo 4y ago
  While I would argue Drupal may be dying, Joomla is truly dead. I don't know a single remaining Joomla consulting agency that has more than 1 employee. At least full-time Drupal shops are still a thing.
frank_bb 4y ago
rantmode 4y ago
Disclaimer: I'm a full-time Drupal developer. I think there are fair points/questions raised in this piece, but some of them don't really make sense or there are a few gaping contradictions: - Drupal is also moving towards no/low code (albeit in a slower way, as is always the way with Drupal). Layout Builder is in core and is getting steadily better. Acquia has its own Site Studio solution for this (wether or not that is a good thing for the project is certainly debatable). - I agree that Drupal does too much and there are probably too many slightly different (maybe even conflicting) ways of doing any given thing. Arguing this is bad makes no sense to me. Yes, you need to make the right choices when deciding what to go with, but this is true for every ecosystem and for the same reasons. How many different FE/JS frameworks does one have to be proficient with these days? Everyone in every field has chosen the losing horse at some point and that will continue to happen everywhere. - Using Drupal 7 content-type editing UI screenshots in June 2022 to illustrate how "bad" Drupal is in 2022 is simply dishonest. - Most of the 3rd party service providers (Mailchimp, Typeform, Disqus) listed as better alternatives to what Drupal offers also have integrations with Drupal. Not sure what the point here is; refer to the 2nd point I made above. - I do agree with the point about finding talent to work on/with PHP and Drupal specifically - but how is this different from any other technology? There's always talent shortage in any given field for a varying degree of reasons. This is just PHP-shaming. Also, why would he care about developer talent/proficiency with other technology if at the end of the day he recommends building sites with a SaaS? That's for site-builders, not developers. - Is a Google trends graph for Drupal an argument? At most I think it would be fair to assume Drupal is probably a known-quantity in the agency space and doesn't grab much headline-space nowadays also because of that. I agree you're probably better off using a SaaS alternative if what you're building is a simple CMS-type website for smaller clients. The adoption of Drupal by bigger (ie, enterprise-level) clients is what I've been personally witnessing for the last 4+ years.
- mtopolov 4y ago
  Hi rantmode ! I wrote the article shared above. Let me answer your points. 1. Drupal Layout Builder > Indeed. The problem lays deep in Drupal's modular architecture, making it almost impossible to create a simple (in terms of UX) page builder with Drupal. I do not see Drupal fighting with Webflow, WeWeb or any other page builder there. Drupal ingest too much complexity. 2. Using Drupal 7 UI screenshots > I confess, clickbait on my side. Drupal 10 UI with tons of modules is still way more complicated to use than Content Stack. 3. The point about Drupal modules is not the same as for FE/JS Frameworks. The audience is not the same. On one side we have end-users that will prefer the simplicity of Mailchimp vs Simple News module. So what you're saying is that there is no point, as Mailchimp is integrated with Drupal. I'm returning you the question, if almost each module in Drupal is worse than it's SaaS equivalent, and you simply integrate Drupal with it, why using Drupal at all? At the end if your Drupal is only a content storage with CRUD, you have hundreds of better solutions (Hygraph, Xano, Content Stack, Prepr, etc...) 4. On ressources shortage. It's very different. A good PHP developer is not a good Drupal developer. Drupal's Learning curve is steep. But when you use any SaaS headless CMS you don't have to know it's internals. You simply build your front-end in any framework you're familiar with and connect it through GraphQL. Therefore any front-end developer will be ok, while with Drupal you'll need to specifically loook for experienced Drupal developer. 5. Google trends is not an argument, I regret that slippery slope I've taken. You can spank me.
nov21b 4y ago
I ditched Drupal for a Node.js based setup during the 7 to 8 migration. The writing of Drupal's decline was on the wall at that time and in hindsight switching was a good decision.
souvlakee 4y ago
The speed of their official site says why it's dying.
Gentil 4y ago
People who are ranting about PHP should know that it still powers a significant portion of the internet. The nodejs, deno and bun are an evolving space. If you want to take that train, that is definitely a good idea as it is HOT and popular now. But not everyone wants to you know. PHP is one of those "boring technologies". Mature, slow paced and reliable tech. It has fixed a lot of the real issues which made it a meme language. If you are writing JS in the front, PHP is very similar and easy to pick up. For people who are looking for a more mature and slow moving area, they could just fall back to PHP. Or try Laravel which adds some hotness to it.
- phplovesong 4y ago
  PHP is still used widely on the web. But from all of PHP out there, its like 98% wordpress.
  - gjsman-1000 4y ago
    According to metric information at (https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php), about 80% of the known public internet where we know the back-end language uses PHP. About 25% of the internet is WordPress. So... ~55% of the internet is PHP non-WordPress. These aren't the best numbers but try to disprove them.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - qsort 4y ago
      The where we know the backend language qualifier is doing a lot of work there. According to those statistics Scala is ahead of Javascript, Python is at 1% and behind both. I'm not sure I have a better idea on how to measure that, but the numbers don't really add up...
phplovesong 4y ago
I know this will sound like an echo chamber: But PHP is on the decline. Its only hanging on barely because of wordpress. Let me explain. The web changed. The web evolved. Too fast for PHP to catch up, and fundamentally the web today is not compatible with the PHP way of exec + die immediately. The web is more and more real time, all sorts of events fired thru sockets, work queues, and state is stored both on the client and on the server. PHP is not up for this task. This is why people have been moving away from PHP for the last decade, and this will only increase as time goes by. Finally, please dont even start with that "nodejs clone in PHP" as its just a hack. If you use a node-js clone (there are many options) built in PHP you cant use any of the core stdlib, as its all blocking by nature, so for me and many others its a non starter. PHP did a good job in evolving the web. Late 90s and early 2000s websites was the start, now its time to use better tech and continue forward. Thanks PHP, but your time is up, its now time to say good-bye!
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  Modern PHP frameworks work around the issue where the web server directly executes PHP files targeted by the request URL. They also provide nice abstractions that are battle-tested and secure. PHP is not my cup of tea (I can't be productive with the unintuitive function naming) but with a modern framework it can be proper. Laravel for example gives you a Django/Rails equivalent including task queues/etc, and becomes immune to the dumb vulnerability of uploading malicious PHP files in the media folder since all requests are routed through a single entry point rather than having the web server directly execute the PHP file.
  - phplovesong 4y ago
    This does not matter. PHP always starts, then exists immediately. This means you cant run something trivial as a websocket server in traditional PHP. I know theres some caching, but each request needs "the entire state" of the PHP app, and some frameworks like laravel or symfony are huge, and this is clearly visible when you notice how poor PHP performance is in basic req/sec benchmarks.
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
vfclists 4y ago
PHP/Symfony/Drupal and everything is else bananas because of EOL. You are dealing with a stack where every 2 years one subsystem goes EOL. Drupal 6 & 7 have lasted that long because Drupal didn't have to depend on anything except PHP. Build on a set of always EOL'd subsystems and you get developer burn out, endless budget requests and justifications for maintenance, upgrades, endless obsolescence etc. Drupal has failed primarily because lack of leadership. Drupal has always been its community, and with so many contributors switching the community to a different language would not have been difficult. The underlying model and the fit for the language is all that would have mattered. In the early days of PHP one Buytaert (not Dries) said Drupal should be switched to LISP, and given how stable LISP has been over the years it wasn't that farfetched. If so many people can learn Autocad and Microsoft Excel and Office Basic, then so many people could also switch to LISP. Personally I would go for Smalltalk. The main power of Drupal is that it was always like Excel formulas -> Word/Excel Macros -> Office VBA -> Access -> C#/SQL Server/.NET. It served a whole load of users of varying skills and it helped basic users learn and upskill. For a sheer lack of understanding or perhaps money, the leadership decided to go "enterprise" a blew up a huge majority of its users and contributors, and for most of its users it is pretty dead unless they want to try Backdrop. The focus on enterprise was a failure of leadership to understand what made Drupal as strong as it was. Users are not going launch resource heavy Dockers and VMs with command lines just to start a personal CMS. For all those people Drupal is basically a non-starter.
dr_faustus 4y ago
Spending some karma points here, but having worked with many stacks (PHP in the 90s, Java from J(2!)EE to Quarkus and also lots of RoR), the node/bun/whatever JS/TS/[10 other tools that need to be intricately combined] has always repelled me. Just the fact, that every little piece of software typically relies on hundereds of dependencies, half of which are not maintained and readily break with every major node version has always left me completely incredulous that anyone who ever worked with a language with a half-way decent tool chain and dependency management would ever put up with such a hot mess. I mean, sure, PHP is certainly far from elegant and to this day suffers from the fact, that it started as a minimal template language (I got into it in the PHP 2 days). Most higher level language features feel a bit bolted on. But that's just as true for JS where everything actually has to be bolted on by the developer on a daily basis (Typescript, JSX preprocessors, etc.pp.) and in terms of effort to just get going and maintaining even a project of medium complexity PHP is still running circles around the node stack.
- qsort 4y ago
  In my experience with the exception of very specific needs, for web development the programming language is very far down the list of what matters. Number one concern is the database schema. I push hard for "server-rendered unless there's a reason not to" and I can't say I've ever regretted that.
treesknees 4y ago
Huh, it's been years since I thought about Drupal. I actually got my first major start in the tech field developing Drupal solutions for various organizations and companies. I remember the war room we put together for upgrading our clients, and all the testing we did to make sure the dozens of modules and themes would work correctly. I always thought Drupal was great because it allowed less-technical folks to really build an interactive web application without having to write any code. We occasionally had to dive into some PHP or JavaScript, but in general we built great websites without having to do much "custom" coding beyond the themes.
- vfclists 4y ago
  All those non-technical folk were dumped when Drupal decided to go "enterprise" and started to demand composer, docker and VMs to get Drupal going. Jeff Geerling's series on trying to upgrade his fairly basic blog to Drupal 8 showed what Drupal has become.
  - treesknees 4y ago
    Perhaps I used the wrong term. I really meant for those who are more operationally focused than development. IE you don't need to write code to get a nice Drupal website. I think it's always been the case that if you wanted to get it up in the first place, you needed to know a bit about MySQL, Apache config, and potentially PHP config. Again I haven't touched Drupal in a long time, but sounds like some of those were replaced with newer technologies like Docker, which are still more operationally focused.
chrisandchris 4y ago
> You can everything with Drupal, there is always a module for any feature you might need. "You can everything with Wordpress, there is always a module for any feature you might need." Conclusion: Wordpress is dying too?
- RobotToaster 4y ago
  Given the general awfulness of most of the wordpress "community", one can hope.
ofrzeta 4y ago
While I agree with the conclusion there are many reasons for the decline of Drupal: - the main reason people give up on Drupal 8/9/10 is that it's complex and has a lot of bugs. Some issues are going on for +5 years with no solution in sight, e.g. https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/2752443 https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/2752443 - the old Drupal had a huge community because it was comparatively simple, for instance the hook system that is based on a convention of function names: Name your function something_alter_hook then it gets called automatically in the core. Use another hacky function if you want to determine the order when it's called :) - now there's an abundance of classes, interfaces, design patterns and a custom ORM. You still have the old hooks system that often acts as glue between the old Drupal and the new OOP layer. - super complicated "config system": There's a way of exporting the running "configuration" of a site (core and 3rd party modules) to YAML. So you can version control the config and transfer it between a development and live site. However this comes with many gotchas and apart from simple cases you almost always will run into some kind of problem. - slow adoption of Drupal 8/9 (https://www.thedroptimes.com/9105/why-drupal-7-still-popular https://www.thedroptimes.com/9105/why-drupal-7-still-popular). Drupal 7 is dead for years now but still the majority of Drupal sites are running this version with no intent of migrating. This leads to a decline of the developer community and to ... - low quality of third party modules. There are many good modules but there are also many modules that never reached beta status. It is the norm to have to work with something that's labeled "alpha". - bad documentation. Many times the official docs are just skeletons with the obligatory remark "tbd".
phendrenad2 4y ago
I won't touch public-facing Drupal/Joomla/Wordpress/Rails anymore. The security vulnerabilities are too frequent and I value my time.

33 points by mobilio 4y ago

Same with joomla I guess[1]? What I have done in the past with Joomla 3 has now become Hugo static site only. It is so much better for my use case. No one I know needs a full-blown cms. Selling people that they can edit their own website largely fell flat, because they paid me to do it in the end every time. Also, Joomla needed an update every month or so because of security issues was bad because often plugins would randomly break. [1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=DE&q=joomla https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=DE&q=j...

2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
Joomla and Drupal both have their strong points, but nowadays most people will just install WordPress with a 1-click installer and add some plugin/theme that does whatever WordPress doesn't do out of the box. It's nothing new and both project will stay alive, although with minimal updates. I mean, phpFusion is still alive after all these years -- just with a much smaller user base. Eventually, I suspect, WordPress will go the same way and we'll have another shiny hammer, that makes every problem look like a nail.
- skoskie 4y ago
  Since Guttenberg WP has become a complete mess and most devs I know are migrating away from it. It’s definitely on the chopping block.
yurishimo 4y ago
While I would argue Drupal may be dying, Joomla is truly dead. I don't know a single remaining Joomla consulting agency that has more than 1 employee. At least full-time Drupal shops are still a thing.

frank_bb 4y ago

rantmode 4y ago

Disclaimer: I'm a full-time Drupal developer. I think there are fair points/questions raised in this piece, but some of them don't really make sense or there are a few gaping contradictions: - Drupal is also moving towards no/low code (albeit in a slower way, as is always the way with Drupal). Layout Builder is in core and is getting steadily better. Acquia has its own Site Studio solution for this (wether or not that is a good thing for the project is certainly debatable). - I agree that Drupal does too much and there are probably too many slightly different (maybe even conflicting) ways of doing any given thing. Arguing this is bad makes no sense to me. Yes, you need to make the right choices when deciding what to go with, but this is true for every ecosystem and for the same reasons. How many different FE/JS frameworks does one have to be proficient with these days? Everyone in every field has chosen the losing horse at some point and that will continue to happen everywhere. - Using Drupal 7 content-type editing UI screenshots in June 2022 to illustrate how "bad" Drupal is in 2022 is simply dishonest. - Most of the 3rd party service providers (Mailchimp, Typeform, Disqus) listed as better alternatives to what Drupal offers also have integrations with Drupal. Not sure what the point here is; refer to the 2nd point I made above. - I do agree with the point about finding talent to work on/with PHP and Drupal specifically - but how is this different from any other technology? There's always talent shortage in any given field for a varying degree of reasons. This is just PHP-shaming. Also, why would he care about developer talent/proficiency with other technology if at the end of the day he recommends building sites with a SaaS? That's for site-builders, not developers. - Is a Google trends graph for Drupal an argument? At most I think it would be fair to assume Drupal is probably a known-quantity in the agency space and doesn't grab much headline-space nowadays also because of that. I agree you're probably better off using a SaaS alternative if what you're building is a simple CMS-type website for smaller clients. The adoption of Drupal by bigger (ie, enterprise-level) clients is what I've been personally witnessing for the last 4+ years.

mtopolov 4y ago
Hi rantmode ! I wrote the article shared above. Let me answer your points. 1. Drupal Layout Builder > Indeed. The problem lays deep in Drupal's modular architecture, making it almost impossible to create a simple (in terms of UX) page builder with Drupal. I do not see Drupal fighting with Webflow, WeWeb or any other page builder there. Drupal ingest too much complexity. 2. Using Drupal 7 UI screenshots > I confess, clickbait on my side. Drupal 10 UI with tons of modules is still way more complicated to use than Content Stack. 3. The point about Drupal modules is not the same as for FE/JS Frameworks. The audience is not the same. On one side we have end-users that will prefer the simplicity of Mailchimp vs Simple News module. So what you're saying is that there is no point, as Mailchimp is integrated with Drupal. I'm returning you the question, if almost each module in Drupal is worse than it's SaaS equivalent, and you simply integrate Drupal with it, why using Drupal at all? At the end if your Drupal is only a content storage with CRUD, you have hundreds of better solutions (Hygraph, Xano, Content Stack, Prepr, etc...) 4. On ressources shortage. It's very different. A good PHP developer is not a good Drupal developer. Drupal's Learning curve is steep. But when you use any SaaS headless CMS you don't have to know it's internals. You simply build your front-end in any framework you're familiar with and connect it through GraphQL. Therefore any front-end developer will be ok, while with Drupal you'll need to specifically loook for experienced Drupal developer. 5. Google trends is not an argument, I regret that slippery slope I've taken. You can spank me.

nov21b 4y ago

I ditched Drupal for a Node.js based setup during the 7 to 8 migration. The writing of Drupal's decline was on the wall at that time and in hindsight switching was a good decision.

souvlakee 4y ago

The speed of their official site says why it's dying.

Gentil 4y ago

People who are ranting about PHP should know that it still powers a significant portion of the internet. The nodejs, deno and bun are an evolving space. If you want to take that train, that is definitely a good idea as it is HOT and popular now. But not everyone wants to you know. PHP is one of those "boring technologies". Mature, slow paced and reliable tech. It has fixed a lot of the real issues which made it a meme language. If you are writing JS in the front, PHP is very similar and easy to pick up. For people who are looking for a more mature and slow moving area, they could just fall back to PHP. Or try Laravel which adds some hotness to it.

phplovesong 4y ago
PHP is still used widely on the web. But from all of PHP out there, its like 98% wordpress.
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
  According to metric information at (https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php), about 80% of the known public internet where we know the back-end language uses PHP. About 25% of the internet is WordPress. So... ~55% of the internet is PHP non-WordPress. These aren't the best numbers but try to disprove them.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - qsort 4y ago
    The where we know the backend language qualifier is doing a lot of work there. According to those statistics Scala is ahead of Javascript, Python is at 1% and behind both. I'm not sure I have a better idea on how to measure that, but the numbers don't really add up...

phplovesong 4y ago

I know this will sound like an echo chamber: But PHP is on the decline. Its only hanging on barely because of wordpress. Let me explain. The web changed. The web evolved. Too fast for PHP to catch up, and fundamentally the web today is not compatible with the PHP way of exec + die immediately. The web is more and more real time, all sorts of events fired thru sockets, work queues, and state is stored both on the client and on the server. PHP is not up for this task. This is why people have been moving away from PHP for the last decade, and this will only increase as time goes by. Finally, please dont even start with that "nodejs clone in PHP" as its just a hack. If you use a node-js clone (there are many options) built in PHP you cant use any of the core stdlib, as its all blocking by nature, so for me and many others its a non starter. PHP did a good job in evolving the web. Late 90s and early 2000s websites was the start, now its time to use better tech and continue forward. Thanks PHP, but your time is up, its now time to say good-bye!

Nextgrid 4y ago
Modern PHP frameworks work around the issue where the web server directly executes PHP files targeted by the request URL. They also provide nice abstractions that are battle-tested and secure. PHP is not my cup of tea (I can't be productive with the unintuitive function naming) but with a modern framework it can be proper. Laravel for example gives you a Django/Rails equivalent including task queues/etc, and becomes immune to the dumb vulnerability of uploading malicious PHP files in the media folder since all requests are routed through a single entry point rather than having the web server directly execute the PHP file.
- phplovesong 4y ago
  This does not matter. PHP always starts, then exists immediately. This means you cant run something trivial as a websocket server in traditional PHP. I know theres some caching, but each request needs "the entire state" of the PHP app, and some frameworks like laravel or symfony are huge, and this is clearly visible when you notice how poor PHP performance is in basic req/sec benchmarks.
gjsman-1000 4y ago

vfclists 4y ago

PHP/Symfony/Drupal and everything is else bananas because of EOL. You are dealing with a stack where every 2 years one subsystem goes EOL. Drupal 6 & 7 have lasted that long because Drupal didn't have to depend on anything except PHP. Build on a set of always EOL'd subsystems and you get developer burn out, endless budget requests and justifications for maintenance, upgrades, endless obsolescence etc. Drupal has failed primarily because lack of leadership. Drupal has always been its community, and with so many contributors switching the community to a different language would not have been difficult. The underlying model and the fit for the language is all that would have mattered. In the early days of PHP one Buytaert (not Dries) said Drupal should be switched to LISP, and given how stable LISP has been over the years it wasn't that farfetched. If so many people can learn Autocad and Microsoft Excel and Office Basic, then so many people could also switch to LISP. Personally I would go for Smalltalk. The main power of Drupal is that it was always like Excel formulas -> Word/Excel Macros -> Office VBA -> Access -> C#/SQL Server/.NET. It served a whole load of users of varying skills and it helped basic users learn and upskill. For a sheer lack of understanding or perhaps money, the leadership decided to go "enterprise" a blew up a huge majority of its users and contributors, and for most of its users it is pretty dead unless they want to try Backdrop. The focus on enterprise was a failure of leadership to understand what made Drupal as strong as it was. Users are not going launch resource heavy Dockers and VMs with command lines just to start a personal CMS. For all those people Drupal is basically a non-starter.

dr_faustus 4y ago

Spending some karma points here, but having worked with many stacks (PHP in the 90s, Java from J(2!)EE to Quarkus and also lots of RoR), the node/bun/whatever JS/TS/[10 other tools that need to be intricately combined] has always repelled me. Just the fact, that every little piece of software typically relies on hundereds of dependencies, half of which are not maintained and readily break with every major node version has always left me completely incredulous that anyone who ever worked with a language with a half-way decent tool chain and dependency management would ever put up with such a hot mess. I mean, sure, PHP is certainly far from elegant and to this day suffers from the fact, that it started as a minimal template language (I got into it in the PHP 2 days). Most higher level language features feel a bit bolted on. But that's just as true for JS where everything actually has to be bolted on by the developer on a daily basis (Typescript, JSX preprocessors, etc.pp.) and in terms of effort to just get going and maintaining even a project of medium complexity PHP is still running circles around the node stack.

qsort 4y ago
In my experience with the exception of very specific needs, for web development the programming language is very far down the list of what matters. Number one concern is the database schema. I push hard for "server-rendered unless there's a reason not to" and I can't say I've ever regretted that.

treesknees 4y ago

Huh, it's been years since I thought about Drupal. I actually got my first major start in the tech field developing Drupal solutions for various organizations and companies. I remember the war room we put together for upgrading our clients, and all the testing we did to make sure the dozens of modules and themes would work correctly. I always thought Drupal was great because it allowed less-technical folks to really build an interactive web application without having to write any code. We occasionally had to dive into some PHP or JavaScript, but in general we built great websites without having to do much "custom" coding beyond the themes.

vfclists 4y ago
All those non-technical folk were dumped when Drupal decided to go "enterprise" and started to demand composer, docker and VMs to get Drupal going. Jeff Geerling's series on trying to upgrade his fairly basic blog to Drupal 8 showed what Drupal has become.
- treesknees 4y ago
  Perhaps I used the wrong term. I really meant for those who are more operationally focused than development. IE you don't need to write code to get a nice Drupal website. I think it's always been the case that if you wanted to get it up in the first place, you needed to know a bit about MySQL, Apache config, and potentially PHP config. Again I haven't touched Drupal in a long time, but sounds like some of those were replaced with newer technologies like Docker, which are still more operationally focused.

chrisandchris 4y ago

> You can everything with Drupal, there is always a module for any feature you might need. "You can everything with Wordpress, there is always a module for any feature you might need." Conclusion: Wordpress is dying too?

RobotToaster 4y ago
Given the general awfulness of most of the wordpress "community", one can hope.

ofrzeta 4y ago

While I agree with the conclusion there are many reasons for the decline of Drupal: - the main reason people give up on Drupal 8/9/10 is that it's complex and has a lot of bugs. Some issues are going on for +5 years with no solution in sight, e.g. https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/2752443 https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/2752443 - the old Drupal had a huge community because it was comparatively simple, for instance the hook system that is based on a convention of function names: Name your function something_alter_hook then it gets called automatically in the core. Use another hacky function if you want to determine the order when it's called :) - now there's an abundance of classes, interfaces, design patterns and a custom ORM. You still have the old hooks system that often acts as glue between the old Drupal and the new OOP layer. - super complicated "config system": There's a way of exporting the running "configuration" of a site (core and 3rd party modules) to YAML. So you can version control the config and transfer it between a development and live site. However this comes with many gotchas and apart from simple cases you almost always will run into some kind of problem. - slow adoption of Drupal 8/9 (https://www.thedroptimes.com/9105/why-drupal-7-still-popular https://www.thedroptimes.com/9105/why-drupal-7-still-popular). Drupal 7 is dead for years now but still the majority of Drupal sites are running this version with no intent of migrating. This leads to a decline of the developer community and to ... - low quality of third party modules. There are many good modules but there are also many modules that never reached beta status. It is the norm to have to work with something that's labeled "alpha". - bad documentation. Many times the official docs are just skeletons with the obligatory remark "tbd".

phendrenad2 4y ago

I won't touch public-facing Drupal/Joomla/Wordpress/Rails anymore. The security vulnerabilities are too frequent and I value my time.