[ChrisMarshallNY]

Is Drupal still a thing?

I have always considered Drupal to be a pretty industrial-strength system, but quite complex.

One of the nice things about Drupal, is that you could customize the backend. I have always hated WP's backend.

[ervine]

Drupal is still a thing. It's actually really great, but it suffers from two things:

1. You need a deep knowledge of Drupal to put together something good. It's not beginner-friendly, you will build a couple clunkers before things click.

2. The mind-share is not there like it was for Drupal 7 - the devs still contributing are great, progress is being made, but if you're used to Wordpress plugins or an NPM package being available for whatever you need, Drupal can be frustrating.

[Cyberdog]

> but if you're used to Wordpress plugins or an NPM package being available for whatever you need, Drupal can be frustrating.

On the other hand, Drupal does not have the WordPress ecosystem habits where many modules/plugins have paid upgrades and/or scatter ads all over your site. The WP plugin ecosystem feels so scummy in comparison.

I agree the switch to Drupal 8 really killed its momentum though. (Drupal was reimplemented on top of Symfony and all existing modules/plugins had to be almost entirely rewritten to work with it - which was quite a difficult hurdle for people used to the previous conventions. Also being able to implement a site's configuration entirely in code, a beautiful feature of D7 albeit one that required third-party modules to implement, was still not quite working properly last time I checked.)

[ervine]

I agree with your first point.

Configuration as code is actually one of the best parts of Drupal now. I think it's probably symfony as well under the hood, but you can just import / export your config with a CLI and commit as yml, makes moving configuration to higher / lower environments so pleasant.

But yes, I think with Drupal 7 there were a lot more "site builders" using Drupal, where D8 I imagine it's mostly just developers left standing.

[legitster]

Drupal is very popular with major enterprises, but it doesn't have the same ability to stand up sites quickly with plug-and-play features and update them automatically.

> you could customize the backend. I have always hated WP's backend.

Ironically, this is something the Wordpress Foundation has made worse over the years.

[KayL]

No. Drupal is only suitable if an organization requires open source. To develop a fully customized site still saves more time than using Drupal. And your maintenance path will be much simpler.