[zhte415]

I'd argue that Drupal has been quite successful. It lost the war of platforms for blogs and, to some extent, forums, but has one a foothold for large projects which require a CMS. I'm not sure it was ever competing.

4.7 and 5.x (the first versions I used) didn't have many nice themes or a particularly friendly interface for content creators, which Wordpress had and won. But the Drupal community weren't much into making simple sites (though they could be made).

Drupal has always struck me as a CMS for non-coders to create something quite complex, and when scaling something for a coder to pick up and adapt as they need, with a lot of stuff built-in. And it has definitely won on that front, with perhaps the most comparable system being Django, but even then Drupal is more Swiss Army Knife like: It can't open a tin of beans perfectly, but it can do it quickly, and a few hours in the tool-shop improve it a lot. Likewise it can cut down a tree (if painfully), cut your fabric and has a neat nose-pick built-in.

Numerous media, government and commerce sites use it. It is quite adaptable, gets the 90% done quickly (yes, the learning curve is greater than Wordpress, but a lot more is happening), and allows anyone with some PHP and CSS expertise get the remaining 10% done reasonably well.