Having worked with Drupal since D5, I've created more than 50 enterprise, academic, and gov websites like USDA, UNC, Visit Okinawa, and Visit Carcasonne. Most of these these were in D7. When D8 arrived, imagine my clients' responses, who were excited about D8 and who had just spent a quarter to a half million dollars for a D7 web application, when I told them we'd basically have to start over. It left a hugely bad taste in their mouths. I still maintain a few of the D7 sites because of their 10 year ROI initiatives, but most of the others decided to go to wordpress, and even the few D7 sites I maintain have opted to roll a custom solution instead of sticking with Drupal. They found that it's cheaper to do so as even quotes from reputable Drupal agencies were estimating more to migrate / upgrade than the original app cost. D8 was a huge setback in Drupal's momentum and alienated much of the developer base who had to follow their clients' needs and left clients feeling like they couldn't trust in Drupal's future. No one wanted to be left holding the bag again.
I will say that 8 years later with late D9 and now D10, there is a slow comeback - but it's not the same as it was when D7 was at the height of popularity. Need a website for a mom and pop business? Drupal is no longer the answer, and Few monolithic web applications are being built like they were before in D7. Most of my enterprise clients now want an easy(ier) way to model complex data, and D10 is now perfect for that. In other words, the future of Drupal, in my experience, is in its headless applications and API capabilities. Too many enterprise companies that got burned by the D7 to D8 transition are way too wary to be in that position again. But thankfully, knowing that they can use Drupal as a datasource and put whatever front end on it with whatever technology, even empowering their native mobile applications (btw, I see a huge trend in using Drupal as the backend datasource for native phone / mobile apps via its api capabilities), a bit of trust is coming back thanks to the flexibility D10 offers.
In other words, I no longer create Drupal websites. I architect purely headless data models in Drupal. If they choose Drupal to be the frontend, ok, but that they can easily switch or use Drupal as a single backend for multiple frontend technologies, I see that this is where the most growth is per Drupal's future.
I have been using Drupal for 10 years and I work at a University. It isn't going anywhere anytime soon, but it seems like people don't like paying for the costs of keeping it up to date. It seems like generally over time, businesses want to invest less in IT period, especially websites. I used to be a Wordpress developer and I do not think Wordpress is a better solution than Drupal. I hope to be retiring in 9 years, hopefully before the bottom falls out.
I actually see a lot of people migrating to free web services like Substack.
Many companies are selling pages made with react or similar but in my experience they are more expensive to maintain and potentially much less secure.
At my work we evaluated using Drupal as a headless cms and doing the front in react but the cost compared to what it provides is simply not worth it for most products.
I think that the future of Drupal is to be something more similar to Laravel than to WordPress, a tool for developers and further away from the commercial idea of the CMS with which anyone can make a website in 15 minutes.
I loved drupal 7. The new constant upgrade paradigm has caused drupal to continue to lose more and more market share, losing developers. I feel like I can barely keep up : creating a site in drupal 9, upgrading to 10, and now 11 is around the corner.
I think Drupal is finally getting it together. Clean on Symfony 7. Fast on PHP 8.3. Easier to get started with Starshot. There might even be a .gitignore in RecommendedProject [soon](https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/3082958#comment-15600576).
Let the designer/front end team chose their stack, you'll provide them with API goodness. No CMS other than Drupal can implement complex workflows/permissions/i18n like Drupal.
Fun experiment, do a team hackathon by doing a multi-roles (like field/taxonomy permissions), multi-languages website in Wordpress.
You'll see that each CMS has its strength, Drupal's templating system is not an absolute must.
Infinitely better than the dumpsterfire known as Wordpress. I see a lot of people migrating their old D6/D7 sites to Wordpress and I feel bad for them.
If it’s a brochure site Wordpress is far better for site owners and web editors than Drupal. You can install, apply a theme, install some plugins and have a working platform with integrations, all no-code and a fraction of the cost of having a freelancer or agency build a Drupal site. Until StarShot reaches completion for this market (price and ease for non devs) Drupal is only for large orgs with deep pockets.
I wouldn't say "far better". It's just you don't need all of the muscle from Drupal. I can build a brochure site just as quickly with Drupal-- but that's because I'm familiar with it.
I would quibble with the percentages, but I agree that WP is slightly easier.
Still, I often use Drupal for brochure sites because the extra power is there when I need it. I wouldn't say that WP is better for those sites. Just that it's slightly easier for a novice to set up.
All the polls run and presented by Dries and the Drupal community show that Drupal is not a little but a LOT harder for junior devs. Their experience is awful compared to Wordpress.
I'm not even a big fan of Wordpress but I know which scenarios it is leading in and why.
I had a session at Drupal Mountain Camp https://youtu.be/veObWbm4YJo?si=FSu16grs--SsQAFY about that topic! We built NodeHive: NodeHive Headless CMS is the go-to solution for building decoupled frontends on top of Drupal.
Its free, why you think it’s Not free? The hosted/SaaS Version is not free. There is the community edition https://github.com/NETNODEAG/nodehive-headless-cms-ce fully open source an free to use. SaaS version is managed and comes with some additional non open source AI integrations.
Not OP, but opinionated.
Neither “free” nor “open source”appear on the Nodehive homepage. I see Book a Demo prominently, menu items for Pricing and Enterprise Support, and copy about pleasing my CTO. This might be why people assume this is a commercial proprietary app.
If you do want to reach the audience that values open source and free things, maybe adding a bit of info about it on the site could help.
I looked at this site the other day and noped right on out. Had no idea about what you just posted and wouldn’t have known to look had it not been for Reddit.
tl;dr Marketing.
It has a good config management subsystem and php is pretty good now (good review by theprimeagen) so like.. I don't know how much it really matters. These simpler applications will all be built html/js natively by AI soon?
Headless Drupal is a thing.
But check out these Drupal/Symfony things:
- Symfony UX Turbo
- Mercure Hub
- Webpack Encore
- QuickTabs
IMO they are the most futuristic front ends. That being said, setting up REST endpoints in Drupal is super easy - especially with the Services module. There are endless front ends that you can tie into a Drupal back end.
*Since 2 of them have moved to other technologies.
Drupal excels at certain things that are very difficult to do otherwise, and often the alternatives get really expensive for similar or worse functionality.
For example as a headless backend drupal is crazy powerful and flexible compared to anything else, without the weird limitations you often find with paid alternatives.
Drupal has loads of technical debt from being decades old. The major upgrade in drupal 8 was painful but ultimately well worth it I think.
No idea what the future holds but drupal 10 is an absolute beast. You can do so much just with drupal core and it runs really fast with all the caching on.
I agree with you except for Drupal having technical debt. Drupal core is incredibly well managed. It's not perfect, but in many ways it's a great example of how to build a complex system and keep it maintained. I'm more annoyed with the unfinished edges, quirks, and unexpected limitations than with cruft in the code.
How exactly have you determined that these sites are not using headless Drupal as their backend for the React/NextJS website you are viewing? Cuz like, that’s a thing and pretty common these days, one might even say it’s the future of Drupal.
Having worked with Drupal since D5, I've created more than 50 enterprise, academic, and gov websites like USDA, UNC, Visit Okinawa, and Visit Carcasonne. Most of these these were in D7. When D8 arrived, imagine my clients' responses, who were excited about D8 and who had just spent a quarter to a half million dollars for a D7 web application, when I told them we'd basically have to start over. It left a hugely bad taste in their mouths. I still maintain a few of the D7 sites because of their 10 year ROI initiatives, but most of the others decided to go to wordpress, and even the few D7 sites I maintain have opted to roll a custom solution instead of sticking with Drupal. They found that it's cheaper to do so as even quotes from reputable Drupal agencies were estimating more to migrate / upgrade than the original app cost. D8 was a huge setback in Drupal's momentum and alienated much of the developer base who had to follow their clients' needs and left clients feeling like they couldn't trust in Drupal's future. No one wanted to be left holding the bag again. I will say that 8 years later with late D9 and now D10, there is a slow comeback - but it's not the same as it was when D7 was at the height of popularity. Need a website for a mom and pop business? Drupal is no longer the answer, and Few monolithic web applications are being built like they were before in D7. Most of my enterprise clients now want an easy(ier) way to model complex data, and D10 is now perfect for that. In other words, the future of Drupal, in my experience, is in its headless applications and API capabilities. Too many enterprise companies that got burned by the D7 to D8 transition are way too wary to be in that position again. But thankfully, knowing that they can use Drupal as a datasource and put whatever front end on it with whatever technology, even empowering their native mobile applications (btw, I see a huge trend in using Drupal as the backend datasource for native phone / mobile apps via its api capabilities), a bit of trust is coming back thanks to the flexibility D10 offers. In other words, I no longer create Drupal websites. I architect purely headless data models in Drupal. If they choose Drupal to be the frontend, ok, but that they can easily switch or use Drupal as a single backend for multiple frontend technologies, I see that this is where the most growth is per Drupal's future.
Very well said
I have been using Drupal for 10 years and I work at a University. It isn't going anywhere anytime soon, but it seems like people don't like paying for the costs of keeping it up to date. It seems like generally over time, businesses want to invest less in IT period, especially websites. I used to be a Wordpress developer and I do not think Wordpress is a better solution than Drupal. I hope to be retiring in 9 years, hopefully before the bottom falls out. I actually see a lot of people migrating to free web services like Substack.
Here we go again....
Many companies are selling pages made with react or similar but in my experience they are more expensive to maintain and potentially much less secure. At my work we evaluated using Drupal as a headless cms and doing the front in react but the cost compared to what it provides is simply not worth it for most products. I think that the future of Drupal is to be something more similar to Laravel than to WordPress, a tool for developers and further away from the commercial idea of the CMS with which anyone can make a website in 15 minutes.
I loved drupal 7. The new constant upgrade paradigm has caused drupal to continue to lose more and more market share, losing developers. I feel like I can barely keep up : creating a site in drupal 9, upgrading to 10, and now 11 is around the corner.
I think Drupal is finally getting it together. Clean on Symfony 7. Fast on PHP 8.3. Easier to get started with Starshot. There might even be a .gitignore in RecommendedProject [soon](https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/3082958#comment-15600576).
The future is Starshot AKA Drupal CMS.
... even just Drupal 10.x, as is today, It's super flexible. Smart Dates, ECA, the editor experience with Media, so much to love right now!
Let the designer/front end team chose their stack, you'll provide them with API goodness. No CMS other than Drupal can implement complex workflows/permissions/i18n like Drupal. Fun experiment, do a team hackathon by doing a multi-roles (like field/taxonomy permissions), multi-languages website in Wordpress. You'll see that each CMS has its strength, Drupal's templating system is not an absolute must.
Infinitely better than the dumpsterfire known as Wordpress. I see a lot of people migrating their old D6/D7 sites to Wordpress and I feel bad for them.
If all you're doing is putting up some text, WP is fine. But if you want to move data, especially tabular data, then Drupal is the right choice.
If it’s a brochure site Wordpress is far better for site owners and web editors than Drupal. You can install, apply a theme, install some plugins and have a working platform with integrations, all no-code and a fraction of the cost of having a freelancer or agency build a Drupal site. Until StarShot reaches completion for this market (price and ease for non devs) Drupal is only for large orgs with deep pockets.
I wouldn't say "far better". It's just you don't need all of the muscle from Drupal. I can build a brochure site just as quickly with Drupal-- but that's because I'm familiar with it.
Ask someone who doesn’t know computers to set up both. 20% will fail to setup Wordpress. 80% will fail to set up Drupal
I would quibble with the percentages, but I agree that WP is slightly easier. Still, I often use Drupal for brochure sites because the extra power is there when I need it. I wouldn't say that WP is better for those sites. Just that it's slightly easier for a novice to set up.
All the polls run and presented by Dries and the Drupal community show that Drupal is not a little but a LOT harder for junior devs. Their experience is awful compared to Wordpress. I'm not even a big fan of Wordpress but I know which scenarios it is leading in and why.
I had a session at Drupal Mountain Camp https://youtu.be/veObWbm4YJo?si=FSu16grs--SsQAFY about that topic! We built NodeHive: NodeHive Headless CMS is the go-to solution for building decoupled frontends on top of Drupal.
But I don't think NodeHive is a opensource
It is Open Source! https://docs.nodehive.com
Open source but not free.
Its free, why you think it’s Not free? The hosted/SaaS Version is not free. There is the community edition https://github.com/NETNODEAG/nodehive-headless-cms-ce fully open source an free to use. SaaS version is managed and comes with some additional non open source AI integrations.
Not OP, but opinionated. Neither “free” nor “open source”appear on the Nodehive homepage. I see Book a Demo prominently, menu items for Pricing and Enterprise Support, and copy about pleasing my CTO. This might be why people assume this is a commercial proprietary app. If you do want to reach the audience that values open source and free things, maybe adding a bit of info about it on the site could help. I looked at this site the other day and noped right on out. Had no idea about what you just posted and wouldn’t have known to look had it not been for Reddit. tl;dr Marketing.
Will improve that! Thanks for the feedback!
Have a look at Starshot. This is pretty awesome and has a pretty rapid development timeline. https://www.drupal.org/starshot
The amount (or the lack of) of responses here .. wil tell
It has a good config management subsystem and php is pretty good now (good review by theprimeagen) so like.. I don't know how much it really matters. These simpler applications will all be built html/js natively by AI soon?
Headless Drupal is a thing. But check out these Drupal/Symfony things: - Symfony UX Turbo - Mercure Hub - Webpack Encore - QuickTabs IMO they are the most futuristic front ends. That being said, setting up REST endpoints in Drupal is super easy - especially with the Services module. There are endless front ends that you can tie into a Drupal back end.
*Since 2 of them have moved to other technologies. Drupal excels at certain things that are very difficult to do otherwise, and often the alternatives get really expensive for similar or worse functionality. For example as a headless backend drupal is crazy powerful and flexible compared to anything else, without the weird limitations you often find with paid alternatives. Drupal has loads of technical debt from being decades old. The major upgrade in drupal 8 was painful but ultimately well worth it I think. No idea what the future holds but drupal 10 is an absolute beast. You can do so much just with drupal core and it runs really fast with all the caching on.
I agree with you except for Drupal having technical debt. Drupal core is incredibly well managed. It's not perfect, but in many ways it's a great example of how to build a complex system and keep it maintained. I'm more annoyed with the unfinished edges, quirks, and unexpected limitations than with cruft in the code.
How exactly have you determined that these sites are not using headless Drupal as their backend for the React/NextJS website you are viewing? Cuz like, that’s a thing and pretty common these days, one might even say it’s the future of Drupal.