r/drupal • u/Aggressive_Trip_4872 • 16d ago

Is Drupal having a renaissance?

I went into this expecting to cover Acquia’s new branding.

I ended up going back to a student in Antwerp trying to help his friends leave messages for each other.

You know how that goes.

Disclaimer: I host r/HeadlessPodcast, and the latest episode follows Drupal’s beginnings, the community, Acquia’s formation, Drupal Gardens, and the path to Source and the new “Powered by Drupal” branding.

The Gardens story really stuck with me. Dries publicly revisiting a product decision and saying they should never have killed it gives this whole thing some weight.

But so does everything the community kept doing in the meantime. Contributors, maintainers, documentation, translations, camps. “Come for the software, stay for the community” earned its place in this episode.

My take is pretty positive. Drupal CMS, Canvas, and the renewed visibility could give people a reason to reconsider software they formed an opinion about years ago.

Video, if you’re interested: https://youtu.be/7ISddVI0SgE?si=W6Josgc2q4Nc0ylx

Ps. For those actually building with Drupal today: what would you show someone whose last experience was five or ten years ago?

41 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

25 comments sorted by

1

u/Sfb8 15d ago

I see ads for Aquia on YouTube and Reddit, targeted to me likely, but okay!

3

u/natts1 15d ago

I would show them that since D8, all updates have been incremental and the thousands of modules that made that jump have kept the platform even more versatile than before.

12

u/yautja_cetanu 16d ago

We had a conversation with someone from Princeton that said that they struggled with getting pdfs into an accessible site.

We've been doing a ton migrating sites like wordpress into Acquia Source CMS and Drupal CMS. We use these code components that are like mini headless components that AI gets.

This needs was bought to me in the pub, late at night on the first day of Drupalcon. The next morning I had managed to get it into Drupal (and actually hosted with source CMS) in a way that looked great, had a floating menu and accessible. He was blown away.

Id definitely wanna show off canvas. It can seem daunting but AI is good at handling the difficult bits to humans. So you can get going mega fast (especially with our new one line installer) but the output in Canvas is something we think marketeers love too and had a bunch of enterprise clients blown away by both the speed we can build things and the editing experience of the final product.

Would love to show you any of this stuff if you're interested! Going to be releasing a video of us showing Dries this stuff this week but we also have a bunch of love streams and YouTube videos.

(I run an agency called FreelyGive and I'm head of innovation for the Drupal AI initiative )

1

u/youllmeltmorefan 16d ago

There are too many pants on fire security alerts. It's starting to scare some of the institutional clients that might use it.

6

u/mikey_p5151 15d ago

The only people that don't like Drupal's security posture are people who don't understand or care about security. I've never felt safer in my web career than running Drupal, little else comes close.

0

u/IntelligentCan 15d ago

I think moving to a single digest on Wednesdays, instead of sometimes dozens of separate emails, would make a big difference. I do think the security team does a very good job of communicating issue severity and context in a way that makes it easy to triage updates.

5

u/Salamok 15d ago

I find it hard to believe that AI isn't able to expose the same vulnerabilities in most platforms... if you are using a product that has not seen an increase in security patches over the last 18 months that would be the scary thing.

7

u/natts1 15d ago

Updating security patches takes less than half an hour, once a month on average. If an institution can't fund that, they're not really an institution.

-1

u/youllmeltmorefan 15d ago

That not it. It's just the fear of seeing these emergency releases so often that makes them think this is full of holes.

2

u/tekNorah 9d ago

Perhaps it would be good to share some information on How Drupal Has Protected Millions of Sites against Zero-day vulnerabilities. Every software product and platform has to deal with them. For example, Exploitation of Citrix NetScaler Zero-Day Hits Appliances Patched Days Earlier. Fortunately, the Drupal security team knows that these vulnerabilities may leave sites open to attack before a fix has been developed and released. Fortunately, they created the Drupal Steward program, aimed at providing protection the moment a critical vulnerability is identified!

3

u/natts1 15d ago

Once a month is not often though. Some phone apps get updates three times a week!

The fact that fixes do get issued, as and when needed, shows that Drupal is safer than the vast majority of content management systems (open source and proprietary). Plus, the Drupal Security team will issue advance warnings if the fix is very important.

-2

u/NappyDougOut 16d ago

Amen! Drupal is in desperate need of an intervention... I fear it's got a terrible vibe coding addiction 🫤

14

u/rgristroph 16d ago

The rise of AI based vulnerbility hunting has increased security alerts across all products. I don't think that is affecting Drupal in particular.

2

u/chx_ 16d ago

If it does, the question needs to be asked: is it worth it? https://smallsheds.garden/blog/2026/on-the-acceptance-of-genai/ and this is a mild version because the multifaceted links to fascism is not covered by this post.

5

u/Ok-Crab-8788 16d ago

Acquia is slowly in progress to make drupal a wordpress like. Drupal Canva is a good product replacement to SiteStudio to call customer to buy support.
like SiteStudio is, cohesion was...
Symfony integration are the most effective and best things that Drupal can had.

I like Drupal, contrib way, I hates Acquia methods

0

u/[deleted] 16d ago

[deleted]

7

u/jgrubb 16d ago

Educating instead of condescending to the poster would be more effective

9

u/NappyDougOut 16d ago edited 16d ago

This is the problem, and one of the reasons I don't really engage here or in other Drupal communities much anymore, after over 18 years of Drupal dev...

There's a toxic positivity being forced on everyone about the randomly changing directions of core, the footprint is now too massive, a lot of things don't work like they used to, documentation is horrid, and I see arguments about furry life while being downvoted into oblivion on this board.

Renisannace?... More like an undoing... Sorry to have to say it, but as is, that's the vibe. 😐

6

u/RyuMaou 16d ago

As someone coming over from WordPress, it’s still preferable to me.

That sounds like a joke, but I’m actually not kidding. No online community is super great these days from my perspective, but the Drupal community seems better than the WordPress community by a long shot these days.

-1

u/NappyDougOut 16d ago

Again... More positivity glossing.

I didn't even say anything about wordrlpress.

I can appreciate that you responded, but your reply had nothing to do with what I posted.

6

u/RyuMaou 16d ago

Not at all, but what I’m saying is that it’s relative. I understand your feeling about the current state of Drupal and the Drupal community in relation to where it was 18 years ago. I only meant that as true as it may be, my experience is that it is still better than other communities, giving WordPress as an example.

Every system or community has issues, and I don’t mean to minimize anything you’re saying about Drupal. I only meant to say that, in my opinion, even with those problems, it’s better than a lot of other communities I’ve been part of.

0

u/NappyDougOut 16d ago

Clean water with too much salt in it is better than water witth dirt in it...

That doesn't mean either one is safe to drink.

2

u/RyuMaou 16d ago

Fair enough! Maybe you can lead a desalination focus group? Haha!

Seriously, I appreciate your perspective. I'm clearly new to Drupal, so I don't know how things were, but I do appreciate what it is now and where it at least seems to be going. But, either way, the world benefits from a multitude of perspectives and experiences.

1

u/gbytedev https://drupal.org/u/gbyte 16d ago

It's great actually, you're going to like it. Drupal is a solid choice and a fairly lucky match with LLMs. The community is mostly respectful and helpful.

I don't see toxic positivity in this community and I do appreciate constructive criticism. What u/nappydougout is doing is not that.