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By natalie_wright on
The following blog was written by Drupal Association Premium Technology Partner, Lingotek.
It wasn’t a question of if, but a question of when and the Drupal.org weekly usage statistics are showing it’s happening now. Usage of Lingotek’s Drupal 8 Module finally caught up to and exceeded that of Drupal 7. Is this the tipping point? Is the community finally making the switch to the latest Drupal module?
The Drupal.org Usage Statistics for Lingotek Translation provides information about the usage of the Lingotek Translation project--Lingotek - Inside Drupal 7 Module and the Lingotek - Inside Drupal 8 Module--with summaries across all versions and details for each release. It shows the week and the number of sites that reported using a given version of the project.
The usage figures reflect the number of sites using the project/item that week. The results can give an idea of how popular the different projects are and may help users choose modules and themes for their own sites. The figures are an indicator of which modules are being used. Note: Only Drupal websites using the Update Status module are included in the data.
In the past 6 months, the Drupal.org weekly statistics showed Drupal 7 usage was still going strong. There were twice as many users using the Drupal 7 version in April, May, June, July, August, and September. But starting in October, Drupal 8 usage began to tick upward. In the first week, only 269 reported using the D8 version. Then the momentum quickly shifted. By the second week of October, they were almost equal with 441 users of Drupal 7 and 420 using Drupal 8; they were a scant 19 users apart. Then came the tipping point.
In the third week of October, Drupal 8 usage overtook that of Drupal 7. In a huge turnaround, 772 reported using Drupal 8 when compared to only 447 using Drupal 7.
Since then, the gap narrowed somewhat, but regained a solid lead once again in early November with 894 D8 users and 416 using the D7 version. We’re predicting the lead is here to stay. The tipping point was inevitable.
The support is likely the result of the growing need for localized content. Multilingual web content is critical to engage a global audience that wants to search, shop, and buy in their own language. The Drupal 8 version, with its built in multilingual capability, makes it easier than ever to create content for a global audience. The module supports translation of any content and configuration, including:
- Content entities - nodes, comments, messages, taxonomy terms and even paragraphs (including nested ones)
- Configuration entities - fields, blocks, taxonomy vocabularies, views, fields, etc.
- Configuration items - site name, system emails, etc.
The Lingotek - Inside Drupal Module is the only Drupal module to integrate a Translation Management System directly into Drupal, allowing the Drupal community to use professional-grade translation technologies (e.g. machine translation, translation memory, CAT tool) without ever leaving the Drupal environment. It is built on Drupal's standard multilingual modules (Locale, content translation, entity translation, internationalization, etc.) and helps Drupal administrators, agencies, and web marketers get a Drupal site multilingual-ready within minutes, instead of days.
Many Drupal users have strong opinions about which is better--Drupal 7 or Drupal 8, but one thing is clear: Drupal 8 is the future. The level of innovation and improved functionality available in each new release will be hard to ignore. These usage statistics reflect that the community has begun wholesale migration to Drupal 8 and that we’ve finally reached the tipping point.
Comments
Please refresh your page
Please refresh your page https://www.drupal.org/project/usage/lingotek.
I see statistics to january 14, 2018. Does it change your analysis?
Composer is a tool for dependency management in PHP (see https://getcomposer.org). It is not a website development tool.
Allow webbuilders using to choose their own building strategy. Do not require composer for webdevelopment or production websites.
Stats
As the blog post suggests "Has Drupal 8 Usage Hit a Tipping Point?" we put in the question mark as a question to the community, are we (the community) seeing the tipping point of Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 adoption. At the time this was written (November 2017) we were seeing the download numbers start to intersect. As you can see at this point in time the downloads are going in the opposite direction. This could be for a couple of reasons. More folks are updating Drupal 7 then 8. The reporting could be off. These downloads are self-reported and folks could have turned off the report on their sites. So at Lingotek, we are excited to see the adoption of Drupal 8 is starting to look much better.
When was this post written?
When was this post written? The usage of this D8 module has been below D7 since the second half of November 2017...
When was this post written?
This was written at the beginning of November.
The October and November spikes seem suspicious.
There seem to be 500 or so extra hits of whatever this is measuring being picked up, all coming from Drupal 8 sites. I don't know how these hits are made or what they are measured are, but I'll take a shot in the dark: It looks like someone was doing some heavy automated testing for about 6 weeks and then stopped, consistent with a large site rollout - possibly Massachusetts' Drupal site which was launched around the same time. If so this is just a bug where test sites are being picked up and logged as enduring sites.
Drupal Modules
I am just wondering with the adoption of Drupal 8, what will be the impact on legacy modules associated with earlier versions of Drupal that were needed to make work or function in a specific way to provide UI and other functionality to multiple sites?
Betteridge's law of headlines
Betteridge's law of headlines.
nice headline
but title and some graphics inside blog post implies that we are talking about Drupal 8 here, but really you're talking about one (not really popular) D8 module
sorry but for me Your headline is very close to "fake news"... and it's promoted on front page of Drupal Project... sad that we need to use that kind of tricks :(
if we need a proof that D8 is popular let's look at some module that has bigger numbers, so it should be statistically more accurate, Google Analytics maybe?
https://www.drupal.org/project/usage/google_analytics
or maybe just look at Drupal project stats?
https://www.drupal.org/project/usage/drupal
this shows how "fast" is D8 adopting amonf users... :(
--
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what people think
Thanks for posting what people are thinking. This is precisely what I was thinking while reading the article.
Misleading?
Not only does the data not hold up anymore, but the very premise seems misleading. This is not what other discussions are saying. Here's a counterpoint: Sluggish Drupal 8 Adoption Lags Even D6, particularly the diverse opinions in the comments.
Great One.
Great One.
wishful thinking
I'm rooting for Drupal 8, but the numbers just aren't there yet. Not even close.
In my opinion even if D8 get
In my opinion even if D8 get's better with D8.50 and media pinkeye hits core for example there will be still so many websites out there that will have requirements Drupal 8 cant fulfill.
And even if there are ways to fulfill them the concepts are so different because of the desiccation to use symphony that many people are not willing to migrate yet. Perhaps e see them on board in 2020, when d7 will get out of date and more modules are stable and documented. Media-browsers Modal/Iframe-Bug is a good example of the fact that things in d8 do not work as expected. People don't care about some numbers in stats that much they are interested in fulfilling there needs in the way they expect that.
support forum
The questions you're asking apply to both 7 & 8 versions of Drupal. The big difference between the two is the underlining framework (proprietary vs. Symfony).
That said, this isn't the place for development questions. You should try posting your question in one of the support forums.
Self-promotion
As much as I'm happy to see the use of D8 growing (looking at the core stats), I think any article posted in the front page of Drupal.org should be approved by a team of moderators. Every Drupal user/dev and especially Drupal Association members should not be fed self-promotional and misleading contents even from a "premium supporter". My apologies to Lingotek who took the time to write this article.
Agreed.
Internal sniping between 7 and 8 doesn't benefit the Drupal community at all. And the more I think about this article, the more I have to conclude that it's only real purpose is to stir the pot with some misleading, likely falsified given the 6 week spike, information.
This headline is pure clickbait
Just for anyone confused, this article is about the statistics for ONE MODULE.
Despite being launched over two years ago, Drupal 8 represents less than 25% of Drupal sites.
Official statistics here:
https://www.drupal.org/project/usage/drupal
I encourage readers to check for themselves and form their own conclusions about what this means for the Drupal project.
For those talking about the
For those talking about the statistics, one practical insight as to what could be going on behind the D7 to D8 move. I manage a D7 site for a community and we're only now just starting to build a D8 site, I also work for a large university, and we're only now investigating the move from D7 to D8.
The reason for the slow adoption in both cases comes down to D8 having a lot of architectural changes compared to D7 and with the more rapid development cycles that are introducing new features in core every 6 months we've been holding off for things like Media in Core.
So essentially what it comes down to in both cases is we've taken the opportunity to re-evaluate our Drupal sites and re-develop them which along with the changes mentioned above means it's taking longer to move.
So I think overall for most people the desire is there to move to D8, and people recognise there's a lot of nice new features and benefits in D8 compared with D7, and so the statistics shouldn't be interpreted as worrying sites not wanting to move, instead they should be looked at as most websites taking the opportunity to wait and evaluate what their site should be like going forward.
I suspect in the coming year or two we'll see D8 adoptions pick up a lot more;
What big sites use drupal, Anyone knows?
I'm very new to this. We currently run our site with wordpress and i was wondering is drupal is faster.
Depends...
Wordpress is for blogs. It is so flexible that it gets used for many purposes it wasn't originally designed for. The heart of its code base is pretty old and unoptimized and it's slower than almost everything out there. That said, you can usually be fine just putting a Varnish cache in front of it, and most sites don't get enough traffic or have enough content to make it an issue. So it's fine for what it does, but it isn't scalable.
Drupal is much harder to use out of the box, but has caching inbuilt. The core code is newer (even 7 is several years younger than WP core). The code base can scale much easier than Wordpress.
This is not even a click bait article this is absolutely wrong
In 2001 Dreis had a dream. A Software Platform for everyone interested in web technology free to download and with the ability to create an eco-system around it that may feed his children. At least I guess so.
But nowadays Drupal and Aquia as well have their fingertips in big business. And that’s basically a good Idea. It is good to have testimonials from Brand like Viva, the MSNBC and even the White house because it's generating trust. But what about all the people that had made Drupal famous in the past. Freelancers hobbyists and just Drupal fans.
Since we have Symphonie and twig it is absolutely easy for big companies to hire a developer and develop something that fits in a need of a customer. But is it really given back to us. To the community. When Drupal changed from 6 to 7 it tooked literarily six or seven month to port all the great stuff to the next version and more modules and therefore more grate functionality came out.
By now development of functionality is driven by companies with the manpower to learn twig and symphony or the many to buy just a well talented programmer with the knowledge is needed. And what is the result here.
We are almost at Drupal 8.50 so almost on the half way to Drupal 9 and many modules that did a great job in Drupal 7 are just not done. Rules, Geolocation-Fields proximity filter, Ical, and so on just to name a few but the list is literally endless.
This is not a bad article and I like what lingotek is doing to not be misunderstood but it doesn’t cover the real problems that Drupal has and will have in the future.
So in my opinion the question in the headline is just wrong. The right question must be „Why are we not almost as famous as WordPress“ when it comes to market share We had 17 Years guys. Does it really come from the famous sentence „With Drupal you can do almost everything“ Even if this may be ture here is just a hint. It get harder and harder for all them folks that made Drupal what it is today.
I just asked some people here in Germany what they thing about it. And I am sorry to say that this is not just my opinion. Drupal is great Drupal is localized Drupal is international but Drupal isn’t for everybody anymore. Drupal is more and more for big business and all the others tend to head over to something different like WordPress or Joomla just to safe their income. Even if you have to pay there for stuff like premium Modules. That’s a really bad sign.
spot on
Really great post, Joachim Namyslo.
Drupal has indeed become big business (no doubt driven by Acquia). Much of the development for Drupal 8 is bankrolled by big established development shops and agencies. Freelancers and independent developers are finding it increasingly difficult to contribute in meaningful ways.
Drupal 8 is very powerful, but everything takes more time to develop. Hooks are depreciating and their usage is discouraged. I love Drupal and open source, but Drupal 8 is starting to feel like work. Which is why some of my Drupal developer peers are now looking at other PHP frameworks like Laravel. It lets them get back to the fun of building stuff without the large footprint and bloat.
Sorry, but I call BS.
During the development of 8.0.0 I introduced the run time assertions concept to the code base without any prior involvement with the project. It took a lot of talking, explaining why the feature is worth using, and patience but it was added. So when you say " Freelancers and independent developers are finding it increasingly difficult to contribute in meaningful ways. " I call BS.
I'll allow that the quality bar has been raised on what will be accepted, and that frankly a lot of developers can't write code that meets that standard, but that doesn't mean those who can write good code are unable to contribute.
Good for you
It's not a matter of quality code, it's a matter of time.
Employees of companies (or government entities) have the luxury of being paid to learn. Their contributions are largely paid by their employers during company time.
Freelancers are typically not paid to learn, rather they're paid to produce. Any contributions to the community are made on their own time, which is often not conducive to a healthy work/life balance.
So good for you. Thanks for your contribution.
That's a choice
@johnhanley, while I don't necessarily disagree with your general sentiments, I don't think this specific argument is very accurate.
If you're a freelancer you are choosing to be a freelancer, for whatever reasons.
If, as a freelancer, you want to be able to learn on the job, then you have to build that learning time into the price. Otherwise you need to learn in your own time, or find another job where they pay you to learn.
In my experience, being "paid to learn" in a company means learning during a project (which you can do as a freelancer, although maybe not to the same extent as in a large project with a lot of developers to take up the slack and mentor) or learning in your own time after work (which you can do as a freelancer).
Deciding to be a freelancer comes with some tradeoffs, like with any other job. If one of those tradeoffs means you need to spend more personal time learning, then that needs to be part of your decision when you make it.
There aren't many jobs around that would pay you to spend a large amount of work time learning or working solely on community contributions.
Duly noted
I've been doing contracting for 15 years and am well aware of the trade-offs. However, I just became an employee for the first time in a long time and will indeed be paid to learn and contribute back to the community. As the Unabomber famously wrote, I will eat my cake and have it too. :-)
That said, work is just a means to an end. While work is rewarding, I'd rather be outside jogging or spending time with family.
Nice!
That's awesome.
Absolutely.
Drupal9
This is simply wrong. Drupal 8.6 can be Drupal 9, but also Drupal 8.42 can be Drupal 9. There is no date yet when Drupal 9 will be released.
https://www.drupal.org/core/release-cycle-overview
There's a blog post by Dries
There's a blog post by Dries that talks about the development cycle, I can't find the exact one, but basically he talks about making incremental changes in minor releases (8.5, 8.6, etc), deprecating APIs and adding new ones, then when enough has changed the Drupal 9 release will just be removing the old deprecated code.
That will be why there is no defined release point for D9, and this approach will support continuous development and will mean the 8 to 9 move will be fairly painless and quick.
D9: FYI not how versioning numbers work
Actually, that's not how version numbers work. They're not decimals ... so, current Drupal 8 version is "8.5" (spoken "eight dot five") not "8.50" (spoken "eight dot fifty").
Should go like this, for those following at home:
In order ... 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4, 8.5, 8.6, 8.7, 8.8, 8.9 ....
THEN ...
8.10 (eight dot TEN)
8.11
8.12
etc.
So, they could go to "8.2000" (eight dot two thousand) before they up to 9.0 ... though hopefully it doesn't end up with there being that many 8.x releases ... it's infinite. Even within each of those is an infinite set of potential releases (8.5.1, 8.5.2 .... 8.5.10, 8.5.11, etc).
Didn't Linux get up to 2.46 at one point.
When Linus finally said, "3" there was no actual change on that version. It was getting quite ridiculous there for awhile as software written for 2.0 or 2.1 could have considerable trouble running under 2.40 or so. No one change was massive, but cumulatively....