Drupal Is Dying

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.<p>PHP is one of those &quot;boring technologies&quot;. 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.<p>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.

Disclaimer: I&#x27;m a full-time Drupal developer.<p>I think there are fair points&#x2F;questions raised in this piece, but some of them don&#x27;t really make sense or there are a few gaping contradictions:<p>- Drupal is also moving towards no&#x2F;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).<p>- 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&#x2F;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.<p>- Using Drupal 7 content-type editing UI screenshots in June 2022 to illustrate how &quot;bad&quot; Drupal is in 2022 is simply dishonest.<p>- 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.<p>- I do agree with the point about finding talent to work on&#x2F;with PHP and Drupal specifically - but how is this different from any other technology? There&#x27;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&#x2F;proficiency with other technology if at the end of the day he recommends building sites with a SaaS? That&#x27;s for site-builders, not developers.<p>- 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&#x27;t grab much headline-space nowadays also because of that. I agree you&#x27;re probably better off using a SaaS alternative if what you&#x27;re building is a simple CMS-type website for smaller clients. The adoption of Drupal by bigger (ie, enterprise-level) clients is what I&#x27;ve been personally witnessing for the last 4+ years.

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.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trends.google.com&#x2F;trends&#x2F;explore?date=all&amp;geo=DE&amp;q=joomla" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trends.google.com&#x2F;trends&#x2F;explore?date=all&amp;geo=DE&amp;q=j...</a>

&gt; You can everything with Drupal, there is always a module for any feature you might need.<p>&quot;You can everything with Wordpress, there is always a module for any feature you might need.&quot;<p>Conclusion: Wordpress is dying too?

I ditched Drupal for a Node.js based setup during the 7 to 8 migration. The writing of Drupal&#x27;s decline was on the wall at that time and in hindsight switching was a good decision.

While I agree with the conclusion there are many reasons for the decline of Drupal:<p>- the main reason people give up on Drupal 8&#x2F;9&#x2F;10 is that it&#x27;s complex and has a lot of bugs. Some issues are going on for +5 years with no solution in sight, e.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.drupal.org&#x2F;project&#x2F;drupal&#x2F;issues&#x2F;2752443" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.drupal.org&#x2F;project&#x2F;drupal&#x2F;issues&#x2F;2752443</a><p>- 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&#x27;s called :)<p>- now there&#x27;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.<p>- super complicated &quot;config system&quot;: There&#x27;s a way of exporting the running &quot;configuration&quot; 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.<p>- slow adoption of Drupal 8&#x2F;9 (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thedroptimes.com&#x2F;9105&#x2F;why-drupal-7-still-popular" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thedroptimes.com&#x2F;9105&#x2F;why-drupal-7-still-popular</a>). 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 ...<p>- 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&#x27;s labeled &quot;alpha&quot;.<p>- bad documentation. Many times the official docs are just skeletons with the obligatory remark &quot;tbd&quot;.

The speed of their official site says why it&#x27;s dying.

Huh, it&#x27;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.<p>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 &quot;custom&quot; coding beyond the themes.

I know this will sound like an echo chamber:<p>But PHP is on the decline. Its only hanging on barely because of wordpress.<p>Let me explain.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Finally, please dont even start with that &quot;nodejs clone in PHP&quot; 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.<p>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.<p>Thanks PHP, but your time is up, its now time to say good-bye!

I won&#x27;t touch public-facing Drupal&#x2F;Joomla&#x2F;Wordpress&#x2F;Rails anymore. The security vulnerabilities are too frequent and I value my time.

PHP&#x2F;Symfony&#x2F;Drupal and everything is else bananas because of EOL.<p>You are dealing with a stack where every 2 years one subsystem goes EOL.<p>Drupal 6 &amp; 7 have lasted that long because Drupal didn&#x27;t have to depend on anything except PHP.<p>Build on a set of always EOL&#x27;d subsystems and you get developer burn out, endless budget requests and justifications for maintenance, upgrades, endless obsolescence etc.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>The main power of Drupal is that it was always like Excel formulas -&gt; Word&#x2F;Excel Macros -&gt; Office VBA -&gt; Access -&gt; C#&#x2F;SQL Server&#x2F;.NET. It served a whole load of users of varying skills and it helped basic users learn and upskill.<p>For a sheer lack of understanding or perhaps money, the leadership decided to go &quot;enterprise&quot; 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.<p>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.

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&#x2F;bun&#x2F;whatever JS&#x2F;TS&#x2F;[10 other tools that need to be intricately combined] has always repelled me.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;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.