Automatic Upgrades

Now I know that the Drupal community has a strong attitude against allowing automatic updates as a core feature, but excluding it is a deal breaker for me. I have spent hundreds of hours with drupal with joy until reality kicked in and I realized that it is just not practical for me to use for any site of significant value. It came to a point where the cms would break almost every 15 days, and required at least 6 - 12 hours of extra work to safely transition from the rapidly outdated versions of drupal. In the past I had almost been an evangelist preaching the underestimated value of the drupal cms. If it's true that Drupal is used by millions of people then it's likely that millions of man-hours are being wasted in frustration on this with many thousands of sites going extinct because it is too much work to maintain.

WordPress is a practical solution as it offers automatic updates. Could you imagine what would happen if Microsoft Window's was incapable of having automatic security patch updates and upgrades? Microsoft can do it, WordPress can do it, Drupal 8 and Dupal 9 ought to be able to do it. It's not a matter of it being too difficult, it's just a matter of being stuck in old habits and being unwilling to change.

Why is it impossible for drupal to have a feature that automatically backs-up ALL associated databases and database tables, including all changes made to the template files and modules, while it upgrades the version? It isn't. In fact, more problems are caused because this feature is missing. One click updates would make Drupal a practical option.

If the drupal community could plan ahead and include this feature in future versions, the value added to the community and as a result to the rest of the web would be significant. I have had half a dozen sites go offline because of the standard drupal security updates and patches required too much maintenance and as a result the sites that had a fair volume of traffic have simply been deleted. Once I had upgraded, the sites would go back down within a short period of time and all because of yet another critical security patch. This cycle has eliminated all reasons for using drupal in the first place.

If the Drupal community could change just this one thing, I would go back to promoting it above all of the other cms systems. I know for a fact that I'm not the only one that has a serious problem with this limitation. I'm giving you my honest opinion because I respect the hard work that has been poured into this cms but without this all critical feature I am forced to face the cold reality and leave drupal behind.

Matthew Felsted