What killed Drupal?
Drupal has been one of the most active and vibrant projects of last two decades, and especially the D6 and D7 iterations had sort of created a robust ecosystem and community of their own. These days, we don't hear much about Drupal ever since D8 version came out, so what happened to it?
I came across this interesting reddit discussion thread today morning which tries to answer that question. There is no doubt that many factors have been jointly responsible for the fizzling out of Drupal community, ranging from diminishing importance of PHP CMS systems in general to the inclusion of things like symfony components and composer packages which may have raised the entry bar for a new developer interested in learning Drupal. Let's look at these reasons one by one:
Increased migration of developers from PHP to Node.js (server-side JavaScript) systems
The phenomenal and outstanding rise of JS ecosystem and frameworks like react, angular, etc. has no doubt caused a huge dent on PHP ecosystem in general and perhaps Drupal is just one of the systems who had to bear this brunt badly. There has been a huge shift in developer interest from PHP to these newer JS frameworks without doubt and the simultaneous fall of activity in Drupal project can't be just coincidental.
However, some other PHP projects like Wordpress and Laravel are still thriving, so where did Drupal go wrong with D8 that developer interest was lost all of a sudden?
More focus on professional and "enterprisey" stuff
As noted earlier, shift to composer based packaging, introduction to symfony components and twig, etc. may have increased the entry bar for many a beginner developers. Its no longer possible for those who aren't familiar with composer or the veteran PHP developers who aren't used to object-oriented PHP to dive straight into Drupal 8.
Apart from that, D8 also comes with some major architectural changes which even existing Drupal developers aren't able to digest well, it seems. Some in the linked reddit thread try to defend it by arguing that Drupal is focusing more on "enterprise" users but is that really the case? Or is it just a case of bad strategy and planning by introducing this major break in backward compatibility without any clear goals in mind?
No longer easy to write modules or churn up content
As some users state in that thread, its no longer as easy to make your way through modules, filters, templates, hooks, etc. as a developer as it was in D7 and earlier. This is not just due to introduction of composer and symfony components, but also major architectural changes that went through the design of D8. The general consensus of developers seem to be that the cost-benefit ratio of these changes is very poor. Neither the developer, nor site builder or user gains anything by these new drastic and breaking changes. If so, the design decisions of those in charge of D8 development have been terrible (at least in retrospect) and we are just seeing the repercussions of those decisions now in the form of lessened developer interest in Drupal.
Having all of that being said, Drupal may not be entirely dead though it is rapidly progressing towards becoming the COBOL of our times! A handful of D8 projects do come up every now and then but not many of them are freelance or remote working projects. At least for now, the Gods of the web development world seem to be showing no grace or kindness towards Drupal, let's see what happens in future. Fingers kept crossed for those interested in seeing Drupal rise again!
Increased migration of developers from PHP to Node.js (server-side JavaScript) systems
The phenomenal and outstanding rise of JS ecosystem and frameworks like react, angular, etc. has no doubt caused a huge dent on PHP ecosystem in general and perhaps Drupal is just one of the systems who had to bear this brunt badly. There has been a huge shift in developer interest from PHP to these newer JS frameworks without doubt and the simultaneous fall of activity in Drupal project can't be just coincidental.
However, some other PHP projects like Wordpress and Laravel are still thriving, so where did Drupal go wrong with D8 that developer interest was lost all of a sudden?
More focus on professional and "enterprisey" stuff
As noted earlier, shift to composer based packaging, introduction to symfony components and twig, etc. may have increased the entry bar for many a beginner developers. Its no longer possible for those who aren't familiar with composer or the veteran PHP developers who aren't used to object-oriented PHP to dive straight into Drupal 8.
Apart from that, D8 also comes with some major architectural changes which even existing Drupal developers aren't able to digest well, it seems. Some in the linked reddit thread try to defend it by arguing that Drupal is focusing more on "enterprise" users but is that really the case? Or is it just a case of bad strategy and planning by introducing this major break in backward compatibility without any clear goals in mind?
No longer easy to write modules or churn up content
As some users state in that thread, its no longer as easy to make your way through modules, filters, templates, hooks, etc. as a developer as it was in D7 and earlier. This is not just due to introduction of composer and symfony components, but also major architectural changes that went through the design of D8. The general consensus of developers seem to be that the cost-benefit ratio of these changes is very poor. Neither the developer, nor site builder or user gains anything by these new drastic and breaking changes. If so, the design decisions of those in charge of D8 development have been terrible (at least in retrospect) and we are just seeing the repercussions of those decisions now in the form of lessened developer interest in Drupal.
Having all of that being said, Drupal may not be entirely dead though it is rapidly progressing towards becoming the COBOL of our times! A handful of D8 projects do come up every now and then but not many of them are freelance or remote working projects. At least for now, the Gods of the web development world seem to be showing no grace or kindness towards Drupal, let's see what happens in future. Fingers kept crossed for those interested in seeing Drupal rise again!
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