Drupal drops first big upgrade in five years and looks forward by looking backwards
- Reference: 1594622828
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/07/13/opensource_cms_drupal_releases_major/
- Source link:
The biggest update is backwards-compatibility from version 8.0: the project's developers have styled the upgrade as not much more complex than adopting a point release.
"If you've kept your Drupal 8 site up to date, and have experience with updating your site to the latest minor version (e.g: 8.9.0) then you know everything you need in order to successfully upgrade to Drupal 9," says the release [1]FAQ .
Upgrades are more complex for those using Drupal 7, the other currently-supported version of the CMS. Users are advised the 7-to-9 move "... can be thought of as a migration or re-platforming, although not as severe as moving to a complete different platform."
"Though there are major differences under the hood, the fundamental approach to managing structured data is quite similar. Significant work was also put into the Migration APIs over the course of the Drupal 8 life cycle, so the upgrade to Drupal 9 is easier than upgrading to 8 was a few years ago."
Drupal 9 also includes a new layout builder, which allows users to design pages without engineering help. An API-first architecture employs the JSON:API to enable building decoupled and headless applications. An enhanced media library improves management of images, video and other assets.
"One of the key reasons Drupal has been successful is we have always made big, forward-looking changes,” says Dries Buytaert, Drupal's founder and project lead. “As a result, Drupal is one of very few CMS platforms that has stayed relevant for 20 years."
But a little less relevant, perhaps, than Wordpress which enjoys a 38 percent share of the CMS market, Drupal's market share has dropped from 2.3 per cent 2018 to 1.6 per cent in June this year, [2]according to W3Techs .
However Drupal remains relevant because it counts many government agencies among its users. Gov.uk started life as a Drupal project, and was then shared with Australia and New Zealand among other nations. The US Federal government is also a big user.
Support for previous versions of the software, including Drupal 7 and 8, will reach end of life in November 2021. After that date, users who are unable to upgrade to Drupal 9 will be able to extend their support until 2024 for an additional fee. ®
Get our [3]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.drupal.org/about/9/faq#migrate-8to9
[2] https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_management/all/y
[3] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
So Drupal is still relevant, at less than 5% of the market
Well it's a good thing that Drupal has captured governmental use, that way it can have only 1.6% of the market and still boldly claim twenty years from now that it is still relevant.
As long as governmental organizations keep working with it, that is, because apparently the day they decide to go elsewhere, Drupal is wiped out.
Re: So Drupal is still relevant, at less than 5% of the market
Sort of depends how you define the market, but that's still a lot of websites and they generally come with juicy support contracts.
Getting whitehouse.org a few years ago gave Aquia the licence to print money and establised Drupal as the "IBM" of CMS for a lot of people. I know several companies that have since moved to it largely as a result of this.
EOL for Drupal 7
End of life has been extended to 2022, not 2021. Please see [1]PSA-2019-02-25
[1] https://www.drupal.org/psa-2019-02-25
Re: EOL for Drupal 7
Also see https://www.drupal.org/psa-2020-06-24, which updated the PSA-2019 announcement to move the date to 2022.
Note that Drupal 8'd EOL is still Nov 2021.
DrupLOL
With the level of caching infrastructure required to get anywhere near acceptable performance Drupal may as well just be considered a really poor static site generator.
Does Drupal's built-in caching still pre-build the template/addon PHP into the database then eval() it back out on page load? Truly dreadful.
Any you thought Linux updates were a pain...
Back in the day when I ran various systems for a government shop, updating any flavor of Linux was a pain, but updating Drupal was tempting the apocalypse.
Experience Drupal users know you either stick with the version that runs your site reliably, or your rebuild it from scratch on a newer version if you really have to have some of the new bells and whistles, people would just laugh when you even suggest upgrading from one version to another.
Please no!
Thought I was finished with this nightmare.