The 20 year old CMS is far from dead
No time right now?
It’s Drupal’s birthday. The open source CMS has been around since 2001. Development is less rapid than other CMS, but the user base is solid. Congratulation.
In the world of content management systems, there is one factor that is distorting the market – namely WordPress. Matt Mullenweg’s system has huge market shares. 40 percent of the world’s top 10 million websites in Alexa use it. That corresponds to a market share within the CMS cosmos of 64.3 percent. No other system can match that.
Since WordPress leads by such a large margin, all competitors look like dwarves and one would be tempted to marginalize them. But on closer inspection, that’s not true.
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Drupal is in the top 5 most popular CMS worldwide
Let’s take a look at Drupal. The system from Belgium is “only” used by 1.5 percent in the ten million most popular websites in the world. However, that is still 150,000 websites in the ranking under consideration. The distribution in the rest of the network is unclear. The market share in the CMS cosmos is 2.4 percent.
This means that both share values ​​correspond exactly to those of the website builder Wix, which, along with Squarespace, is a market-leading example of success. How can one be an example of success and the other a marginalized CMS dwarf? It is only the relation to WordPress that feeds this misinterpretation.
In fact, apart from WordPress, no other CMS has double-digit market shares. The most important CMS according to Mullenweg’s system is Shopify – which one might also ask to what extent it should even be counted as a general CMS – with a usage share of 3.3 and a CMS market share of 5.3 percent.
This is followed by Joomla with 2.1 (3.4), Squarespace with 1.6 (2.5) and then Drupal and Wix with the same proportions. Then we see Bitrix and Blogger with a one before the decimal point, all other systems are in the range of less than one percent.
Drupal 9: biannual release cycle, big ambitions
If you look at it correctly, Drupal is one of the world’s best. The development team reaffirmed this claim with version 9 released in June 2020.
Drupal 9 (D9) is a version that lays the foundation for the future of the popular content management system. It does not bring any new features that are important for everyday use, but rather concentrates entirely on rejuvenating its technical substructure. The updates of the underlying PHP framework Symfony to version 4.4 and the template language Twig to version 2 testify to this.
With the D9 release, the team committed itself to a six-month release cycle. So far it has been able to be adhered to. The current release is version 9.1.4, which was released on February 3, 2021. With version 9.1, a new front-end theme called Olivero as well as improvements to the presentation and content workflow were introduced. The system also got PHP 8 support.
The semi-annual iterations are consistently incremented by one point after the main version number, i.e. 9.0, 9.1 and so on. Each subsequent version in the main strand will be backwards compatible with all previous versions up to 9.0.
So Drupal can on his 20th birthday Not only looking back on a successful past, but also looking forward to an equally promising future, if the chosen path is consistently pursued.
That’s why Drupal is called Drupal
A little anecdote for those who still knew it: Drupal is an Anglicitation of the Dutch word Druppel, which means drop in German.
The name came about by mistake. Originally, Drupal inventor Dries Buytaert wanted to name his system Dorp, in English village, but made mistakes when registering the domain and incorrectly registered drop, the English word for drop.
Buytaert made a virtue out of necessity and called his system not Dorp, but Drupal, which was certainly the right decision in the long term from a brand perspective. This also explains the system’s cute mascot, a friendly drop of water.
