Is drupal dead?

By Jack Daniel on 20 Nov 2012 at 10:52 UTC

Too many unsolved issues, even in modules marked as stable release
Too many unanswered question
Too many broken links of what supposed to be "live working example"
Too many modules that doesn't even worth listed
Unstructured documentation

Comments

No it isn't. Drupal 8 to be

ayesh commented 20 November 2012 at 11:03

No it isn't.
Drupal 8 to be released next year, and many modules are still active. Individual developer decides how much time he/she can devote improving it though.

What's new and changing in PHP 8.4

From a guy that develops

boon4376 commented 20 November 2012 at 17:12

From a guy that develops websites for a living - Drupal is the most versatile and powerful CMS with capabilities far beyond it's competitors.

For my usage - which gets pretty complex - I never run into any problems unless it's something I'm doing that's "weird".

I find it to be adequately stable - and rarely run into "bugs", even with many beta modules.

Yes Drupal is dead

sanjeet001 commented 13 July 2015 at 18:27

4 months ago I started to build my application using Drupal and one of its distribution.
After the application was developed everyday there was a bug in that distribution and modules.
Bugs were already listed but not resolved for months.

Finally I decided to rebuild my application from scratch using PHP and now my work is done without any headache.

Rather I will say Drupla is hell with too many of bugs and very less resolutions interactions and developments.

I will prefer anything over it.

This question was asked 3 years ago, and only two comments in three year....
Yes man it's Definitely dead

=-=

vm commented 27 September 2015 at 18:58

I don't see any issues filed by your user in any of the issue queues on drupal.org.

This question was asked 3 years ago, and only two comments in three year....
Yes man it's Definitely dead

As a CEO (as listed in your profile) is that the metric you really want to use?

death by poison

joesephlloyd commented 14 July 2015 at 13:49

I feel like its dying a slow painful death. Caused by buggy modules, lack of intuitive layout/structure and very poor base optimization for larger sites.

Although I've been working on a site that has been riddled with issues from bad coding practices. So my view could be considered bias.

=-=

vm commented 14 July 2015 at 14:39

published usage statistics, user growth, developer growth doesn't support such an assertion.

More people are using Drupal

jaypan

Victoria, BC

commented 15 July 2015 at 00:20

More people are using Drupal than every before. It's growing, not dying.

Contact me to contract me for D7 -> D10/11 migrations.

looks like dead for me

zorox commented 27 September 2015 at 17:36

drupal 8 is years beyond it's delivery date

=-=

vm commented 27 September 2015 at 18:57

Drupal 8 has had an official release date that has been missed by years? I don't recall seeing an official release date and there usually isn't under RC's are released.

Drupal is community driven

Chasen commented 28 September 2015 at 06:28

I'm thinking this thread needs to be locked. It contains no useful information or queries beyond unsupported accusations about the state of Drupal.

As said above, if you take a look at the usage statistics, Drupal is very active and popular with a high degree of flexibility.

Ultimately, it's a community supported and driven application so if you think something needs to be changed, then get in there and start a conversation about changing it rather than throwing your toys out of the pram.

If you have meaningful suggestions, bugs to report or the ability to contribute code then please do so - that's the whole point of Drupal and what makes it so great.

This is exactly what Dries

ayesh commented 28 September 2015 at 07:46

This is exactly what Dries covered in his Driesnote in DrupalCon Barcelona a few days ago.
Drupal IS losing its momentum, but we are working on it!
Drupal RC will be released on Oct 7, a couple more RCs and we will have a stable (we mark so!) release then.

What's new and changing in PHP 8.4

Perhaps a certain type of relationship with Drupal...

shanesevo commented 17 May 2017 at 17:38

Interesting to see this incendiary question thrown out there as early as 2012. It is true that interest in Drupal may have peaked around 2009 according to Google search trends. Drupal is now at another transitional inflection point with the launch of Drupal 8. The community is asking and wondering about the significance of their project again. For sure, there are many competing frameworks out there now... and the launch of Drupal 8 can be seen as an answer to those alternative frameworks. The Drupal development team that I work with at Commercial Progression recently read through the popular Dave Hall blog post and put together a podcast around the discussion of "Drupal is Dead, Long Live Drupal".

It is

seodomination commented 26 June 2017 at 19:37

I think Drupal has so many issues all around that it cannot sustain itself. I built a couple of sites with Drupal 4, than I went on developing in other technologies, after years my company asked me if I could build a corporate website in Drupal 8. What a nightmare. There is basically no documentation. Half of the modules are far from production ready. Try to update to latest version, everything breaks (I updated many of WP sites hundred of times I don't even back them up before doing it as it has never ever failed) and the process is far from simple. Everything is overcomplicated. And the biggest issue is that the community is dead. Try to ask a question and you will get 3 views and 0 answers.

disagree ...

sprite commented 27 June 2017 at 19:21

Drupal 7 is currently the appropriate version for building Drupal websites that need a lot of backend functionality, such as Commerce.

Drupal 8 is essentially a COMPLETE re-write and re-design of Drupal. Consequently, it will take time for all the module support to catch up. For example. D8 commerce is finally in alpha/beta stage. The Drupal 8 internal re-design makes for powerful internal construction capabilities and will in the long run provide for far greater feature depth that the deepest CMS, Drupal 7, already had for years.

As for your claim that "There is basically no documentation." The following links prove that claim false.

https://www.drupal.org/docs/7
https://www.drupal.org/docs/8
https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/7.x
https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/8.3.x

The following example commercial Drupal 8 distributions, with their live demos, demonstrate the current amazing state of the art of website building on Drupal 8.

http://www.morethanthemes.com/drupal-8
http://demo.morethanthemes.com/showcaseplus8/default/
http://demo.morethanthemes.com/restaurantplus8/default/
http://demo.morethanthemes.com/magazineplus8/default/
http://demo.morethanthemes.com/scholarly8/default/
http://demo.morethanthemes.com/levelplus8/default/

Meanwhile, there is ample technical assistance from numerous, very experienced - VOLUNTEERS - who are readily available on the Drupal forums, with timely responses, as this response proves.

spritefully yours
Technical assistance provided to the Drupal community on my own time ...
Thank yous appreciated ...

agree to disagree

seodomination commented 26 June 2017 at 22:32

I am hearing this sentence for many years now "Drupal 8 is essentially a COMPLETE re-write and re-design of Drupal. Consequently, it will take time for all the module support to catch up. " While it is understandable for a while, it is not understandable for so many years.

If I have to decide how to start a big project would I decide for D7 that will become deprecated and is historic in some terms or D8 which is not actually production ready due to lack of modules? No I will choose something else.

Yes the documentation exists but I would not say that it is a great help. There are almost no code samples and no interface screens (as Drupal is heavily dependent on admin configuration and some setups are far from intuitive), it is more a high level explanation in my opinion. Even if I search for something on Google I never find anything useful, I work on other projects in Django, WP and React and I never had such issues finding a solution.

Maybe it is because I am fairly new to Drupal, but I am your target audience. If new developers find it difficult (and I am not alone in this) and not worth doing, than we will suggest other solutions to our clients and will be also using other solutions.

freedom of choice ...

sprite commented 26 June 2017 at 22:54

Due to your clearly negative and close minded attitude about Drupal, you are fully free to lose out on the power of it.

Right now, Drupal 8 is a fantastic platform for advanced corporate and brochure type websites, as the advanced Drupal 8 commercial distribution examples above prove very well. The Drupal expert morethanthemes guys, put a lot of effort into building what are essentially advanced Drupal "website in a box" products, ready for customization and content. I doubt you took any time to look at them though, to see the power of what Drupal can do (both D7 and D8).

If you were such a great developer, you would port needed modules from their D7 versions to D8 yourself and give back to the Drupal ecosystem. Meanwhile, D7 is not going to be "deprecated" any time soon. That isn't how the Drupal community operates.

If you really understood open source systems, you would be jumping in to "improve" the documentation yourself, rather than simply complaining about it, despite its massive depth and breadth. In your short month, you simply CANNOT have absorbed and/or assimilated much of it.

Drupal is a software system, and as such it can really only be learned by doing, by "walking through it", working with it, something you don't appear to be willing to do.

Your account on this site is 1 month old.
My account on this site is 11 years 5 months old.

The very idea that you think you can make the sort of prognostications you have in such a short time is clear evidence of your lack of judgment.

I am confident that the huge worldwide Drupal community can live on and prosper without you just fine ...

spritefully yours
Technical assistance provided to the Drupal community on my own time ...
Thank yous appreciated ...

when you find that super perfect solution out there.

sprite commented 26 June 2017 at 22:55

When you find that super perfect CMS solution out there that you are sure is going to be way, way, way, better than the depth of Drupal, and which also provides Drupal level security team coverage, write back and let us all know ...

spritefully yours
Technical assistance provided to the Drupal community on my own time ...
Thank yous appreciated ...

my thoughts

seodomination commented 27 June 2017 at 11:39

I believe that Drupal can do many things, but what good is it to me if I have to spend 20 hours to find something that could be explained to me in a short sample. I learn new technology by reading documentation, searching on Google and asking the community. All of the three ways fail with Drupal.

Please name one person who has no prior knowledge of Drupal and could build something complex from your documentation. Searching on Google gives you only really old results which are useless today and if you ask here or on Drupal stack exchange no one answers anything. Just look at he questions here https://drupal.stackexchange.com/questions only one has an answer.

I would gladly help on modules but I don't have the deep enough knowledge about Drupal to do it and I would prefer to invest my time to learn something that has better documentation and support.

Peace

see ya ...

sprite commented 27 June 2017 at 13:41

There isn't any credibility to cherry picking a single question on stackexchange and claiming none of them get answers. The fact is that there is so much interest in Drupal on stackexchange that there is a complete drupal stackexchange subsite!

Meanwhile, your profile shows that you've asked about four questions total on drupal.org, which gives you zero credibility, and yet dane to say the things you have about Drupal.

You are unwilling to read the mountains of Drupal documentation, you are unwilling to allocate time to read the mountains of important Drupal documentation (it is a development environment after all), you are unwilling to contribute to the Drupal open source project (and/or incapable), and yet you criticize something (Drupal) for which I have cited amazing examples of what Drupal can do above, which I don't believe you have even taken time to study or evaluate at all, just like you don't want to read the Drupal documentation.

If you don't like Drupal, go elsewhere and use some other CMS or website development framework.

The Drupal community does not need the likes of you, and will get along just fine without you ...

spritefully yours
Technical assistance provided to the Drupal community on my own time ...
Thank yous appreciated ...

I don't usually join in

turpentyne commented 27 June 2017 at 18:31

I don't usually join in conversations, just ask questions. I once tried to ignore what Sprite says. I didn't get very far. ;)

I've got a year of experience with Joomla, a couple years of experience with Wordpress, and I even dabbled for a few months with "CMS Made Simple" and a couple other solutions. Now I'm into a year with Drupal 7 and starting to work on Drupal 8. So, as somebody who's definitely worked on the major contenders in CMS, Drupal is a great option - and, any research will tell you that it does require some investment of time and learning. That's never been a hidden fact. That being said, let me be named as "one person who has no prior knowledge of Drupal and built complex sites with it."

While it may require some extra effort to get over a couple learning curves, I can say as a low-to-middle of the road designer/coder... questioning D8's worth, community and future, seems to indicate not having really dug into it. D8 is a complete rework, with an eye to the future. A fact that flies in the face of statements about it. As such, there is a learning curve. But to lay claim that there's no documentation flies in the face of many problems I've solved with the help of this community, youtube videos, and a little research/ingenuity. And I don't even work on modules.

OS Training videos were huge

adminMN2023 commented 27 June 2017 at 22:00

OS Training videos were huge for me to connect the dots with how Drupal manages information. I'm building, what I think, is a fairly complex site (exposed filters and the like) combining Drupal 8 with a Gavias theme. Knowing D8 is in its infancy - I've tried to stay within the core tools with a few exceptions (and have even found some core tools to beunfinished).

Yes - some of it has been ridiculously frustrating, but the forum has been a huge help - the contributors have helped me tremendously. I've worked with Joomla since V1, and Wordpress since probably 2010. I'm definitely NOT a programmer/developer, just a guy the hunts/pecks/badgers his way to finding answers.

Free Drupal 8 Training Videos from OSTraining

shanesevo commented 19 September 2017 at 15:13

I completely agree about the value of the OSTraining video content, it was very important to getting me up to speed with all things open source years ago... and they are still on it. Commercial Progression has teamed up with them to sponsor the creation of several Drupal 8 training series, the first of which is out now and focused on Drupal 8 SEO best practices. The next in the series will be around the upgrade module from Drupal 7 to 8.

Drupal 8 is awesome - but

jaypan

Victoria, BC

commented 29 June 2017 at 19:14

Drupal 8 is awesome - but there is definitely a lack of documentation as to how to develop within it. The system itself is pretty amazing, but figuring out how to use it would definitely be frustrating with no Drupal background - even in D7, which is coded fundamentally different to D8.

If you are looking for plenty of documentation, and matured modules that provide lots of functionality, Drupal 7 is definitely the way to go. Drupal 8 will probably eventually get there, but it depends on how soon D7 developers start to learn OOP so they can work with D8.

Contact me to contract me for D7 -> D10/11 migrations.

agrre

seodomination commented 30 June 2017 at 12:08

I never said Drupal is bad, I completely agree it can do many things and is a great solution on paper, but it has many issues. If I have no knowledge about D7 or D8 I don't want to invest my time learning D7 if D8 is more than 3 years out already and D8 is not completely production ready due to the state of modules. I think this is a valid issue.

But I think the biggest issue is the community itself, they don't acknowledge there are certain issues. As you can see above people started personally attacking me dough I never said anything against anyone in person here. I think the angry responses are just a reflection of the problems this community is facing.

Some folks can't help it even

adminMN2023 commented 30 June 2017 at 13:58

Some folks can't help it even when they are trying to help. Drupal is a developers playground. Some of these guys are whip-crack smart and get frustrated when the common folk (me) don't see the solution quickly - because they are used to trading information with other seasoned Dev's. Others take time to explain. In both cases there is a desire to help, just a different delivery. So take the information you need that's sitting between the diatribes and focus on that.

Drupal 8 Training Resources

shanesevo commented 19 September 2017 at 15:17

As stated in my other comment above, there is a new series of Free training videos from OSTraining hitting youtube right now. We sponsored two series, the first of which is focused on Drupal 8 SEO, and it is available now. Stay tuned for the Drupal 8 Upgrade videos to hit youtube soon, now that the upgrade module is finally ready for use.

Not my experience

aes2 commented 30 September 2017 at 01:55

Yes, back in pre-D8 days, I wondered how the community, large as it was, could keep up with the expected ever-more-powerful digital experience. Then D8, as part of a major rewrite, embraced "Proudly Invented Elsewhere" and replaced a good deal of its own code with Twig and other parts of Symfony, among others, thus letting Drupal developers concentrate more on Drupal and less on the guts that make it work. Many complained about the gestation time, but D6 and D7 and most of their contrib modules and themes worked during D8's development. As a software developer, I did my best to meet requested dates, but I never wanted to release anything until it worked, sometimes before and sometimes after the requested date. And as a software user, for some products I'm willing to give feedback on beta and even alpha releases, but for some requirements I need to use products that already work. D8.0.0 was missing a lot of contrib components, but core worked, and by now so do a lot of contrib components.

Drupal sites can be designed to allow their owners to supply sophisticated content, but technical people need to do the development. WordPress requires less developer talent, and works quite well for many sites. If it meets your needs, enjoy a simpler job getting it up. There are plenty of training classes for non-technical people to create attractive WordPress sites themselves. Even simpler is the Wix/Weebly/Squarespace option. If you want the control and sophistication of Drupal and you have the technical chops, the documentation is readable, or there are individuals and agencies who can do it for you.

"Try to ask a question and you will get 3 views and 0 answers." Not! The last time I asked a question I got 0 views and 3 answers, all of them correct, which is what usually happens when I ask questions.

I pay good money to a proprietary vendor for support and too often get clueless people who are incapable of understanding the question. I once fought an entire clueless team for more than a month trying to get a serious problem escalated. When they finally did escalate, I got the first person who understood the question, but I could not convince him that his "solution" didn't address the problem. Finally, he went on vacation, almost two months after I started the call, and someone who understood the fragility of one component of their system helped me work around it. For that I paid good money. Not my experience with Drupal.

If WordPress does what you need, great. Don't work any harder than you have to. Likewise Wix/Weebly/Squarespace. If you need more and have the technical chops, learn Drupal, or hire an individual or agency. "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler." - Einstein