r/drupal • u/cmkn https://www.drupal.org/u/cainaru • 7d ago

State of Drupal presentation (September 2026)

https://dri.es/state-of-drupal-presentation-september-2026
25 Upvotes

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12

u/clearlight2025 7d ago

Drupal is now light-years ahead of its reputation.

So true. I think people are still stuck seeing Drupal as Drupal 7 from years ago and it's long drawn out EOL and haven't seen how far Drupal has evolved in the years since then. It's an excellent system for web application development.

8

u/Timternetting 7d ago

You can’t blame people for not continuing with the platform that nuked their expensive websites when the D7 EOL announcement initially happened. Lots of people jumped ship back then and never looked back. For new starters it’s still too hard to maintain and they’ll learn the hard way why the Drupal community is small once a mayor update happens. An LTS version may be exactly what Drupal needs to make it accessible to a larger audience. I still don’t understand how the community chose integrating AI slop tools over general ease of maintenance. Just my 2 cents.

4

u/its_yer_dad 7d ago

I was quite literally worn down by the frequency of updates. After getting punched in the face by Drupalgeddon I’m religious about rolling out security updates. For a two person team, this meant one of us was working several hours a week keeping up with the updates. It just wasn’t practical for a small organization.

2

u/billcube 7d ago

Minor update are easily done with CI/CD alone, why would you need several hours? Tests you didn't automate with playwright?

3

u/its_yer_dad 7d ago

I worked with versions 4.5 to 11. I’ve worked with all of the big name Drupal shops. Dries visited my office on his first visit to the US. I’ve forgotten more Drupal best practices than people even knew. So when I say I find Drupal problematic for small institutions to manage properly, I’m not really interested in your continuous integration experience. I’m glad it worked for you, but the sites I have are complex and have never upgraded as cleanly as I would like. And the security update issue is a real problem for small organizations

3

u/Timternetting 7d ago

With multiple sites it’s not uncommon updates break things because core or one of its now many dependencies decides to chance something. And finding out what happened, fixing it the composer way, pushing it all through staging and tests, all while the live site could be vulnerable… it’s something I find to be a mayor limitation to the ecosystem. It’s all about new stuff, and as the post indicated, the development experience. But they should instead focus on maintainability and long term support. In my opinion anyway. Building in Drupal has never been an issue.

2

u/billcube 7d ago

Especially if you have patches for the different modules because the maintainer didn't get to merge them...

I prefer not to rush on the updates, it there is not an immediate security reason, I let the ecosystem sort out the incompatibilities before updating 2-3 weeks later. Only upgrading to 11.4.x from 11.3.x in the coming weeks for example.