I think conversely that Drupal 8 is the swan song. Too late to the party. Everyone who was really unhappy with the spaghetti bowl of code in prior drupal versions has already moved on. Those who have not, are not interested in rebuilding their sites on a new platform. They just want Drupal 6 to keep working.
Drupal 8 is not a gentrified neighborhood, it's more like the ghost cities in China: clean, modern, well-designed -- and empty.
What have they moved on to? I'm investigating CMS's for a client (an task I have entirely no experience with). Is Joomla any better? Or is the whole concept of CMS dying?
I wonder what you base this statement on. As someone who has worked almost exclusively with Drupal, I have been always been conscious about being on an island, concerned about my lack of understanding regarding other frameworks, languages etc. Because of this, I am constantly looking for the signs that would indicate that Drupal is falling, yet I still have to find these. Admittedly, since I work for a company which has Drupal as its core business, I am biased.
To avoid this bias I was doing a little research for statistics. I checked the usage of Drupal core [1] and I found it somewhat misleading (e.g. there is a significant jump around the time of the release, so the statistics on such short term must be skewed due to test installs). Instead I looked at ctools, which is a dependency for several contributed modules and is the top used module [2]. This shows significant growth since the start of 2016. So it is growing, people are using it. But most importantly, the numbers for Drupal 6 stay the same. So it seems that people who have a stable website are happy with it, and new users are likely to jump on the Drupal 8 train.
Also let us not forget the same voices were heard when Drupal 7 came out, coupled with the unexpected lag of contributed module availability. With a lot smaller API change, people found they have to wait 6-12 months after D7 was released to start building Drupal sites. Contribs, e.g. Views has released an RC for Drupal 7 on June 17th, 2011 [3], when D7 came out on the 5th of Jan, 2011 [4]. Views is just one of the important contrib modules (now in core), and people had to wait 6 months to use it!
The contrib upgrade curve seems similar, if a little bit faster for Drupal 8. But having most of the important contrib modules in core, this impacts new builders less.
About the state of the spaghetti: frankly I don't think that customers care too much about it (after all, Wordpress does own a significant share of the market ;)). Developers do. Customers care as well, but mainly to the extent of maintainability and cost implications. And I think with personal bias aside, Drupal 8 is much better on this front, than Drupal 7 (although there is still work to be done, procedural code to kill), it does deliver a framework, which allows a wider range of developers to start working with it, using familiar patterns and frameworks (PSR-4, Symfony).
Long story short, I don't hear the swan song. But I'm happy to keep my ears open :)
[+] [-] ams6110|10 years ago|reply
Drupal 8 is not a gentrified neighborhood, it's more like the ghost cities in China: clean, modern, well-designed -- and empty.
[+] [-] ogsharkman|10 years ago|reply
I'm digging this analogy.
[+] [-] daxfohl|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thesnufkin|10 years ago|reply
To avoid this bias I was doing a little research for statistics. I checked the usage of Drupal core [1] and I found it somewhat misleading (e.g. there is a significant jump around the time of the release, so the statistics on such short term must be skewed due to test installs). Instead I looked at ctools, which is a dependency for several contributed modules and is the top used module [2]. This shows significant growth since the start of 2016. So it is growing, people are using it. But most importantly, the numbers for Drupal 6 stay the same. So it seems that people who have a stable website are happy with it, and new users are likely to jump on the Drupal 8 train.
Also let us not forget the same voices were heard when Drupal 7 came out, coupled with the unexpected lag of contributed module availability. With a lot smaller API change, people found they have to wait 6-12 months after D7 was released to start building Drupal sites. Contribs, e.g. Views has released an RC for Drupal 7 on June 17th, 2011 [3], when D7 came out on the 5th of Jan, 2011 [4]. Views is just one of the important contrib modules (now in core), and people had to wait 6 months to use it!
The contrib upgrade curve seems similar, if a little bit faster for Drupal 8. But having most of the important contrib modules in core, this impacts new builders less.
About the state of the spaghetti: frankly I don't think that customers care too much about it (after all, Wordpress does own a significant share of the market ;)). Developers do. Customers care as well, but mainly to the extent of maintainability and cost implications. And I think with personal bias aside, Drupal 8 is much better on this front, than Drupal 7 (although there is still work to be done, procedural code to kill), it does deliver a framework, which allows a wider range of developers to start working with it, using familiar patterns and frameworks (PSR-4, Symfony).
Long story short, I don't hear the swan song. But I'm happy to keep my ears open :)
[1] https://www.drupal.org/project/usage/drupal [2] https://www.drupal.org/project/usage/ctools [3] https://www.drupal.org/node/1192186 [4] https://www.drupal.org/node/1015392