Last July, Webchick posted some interesting data about Drupal Adoption going back to 2009.
Using her doc and the Drupal Core usage stats, I updated the stats through current date:
Google Docs.
We're now far enough past Drupal 8's launch to start making some basic comparisons.
7's adoption was sluggish until about seven months after launch, when it skyrocketed.
8 looks like it had a lot more early adopters, but now we're ten months on and adoption is still slow. It looks like 8 is gaining traction among 7 users, but thus far it doesn't look like it's attracting new users the way 7 did.
Up for discussion is if the stats can be compared directly. In particular, I'm seeing some server environments that are more picky about outbound traffic, which might block Drupal's automated reporting and artificially suppress the stats. If that's the case, it's possible that D8 is seeing more of it since it's probably more likely to be installed on newer servers.
Comments
Of course you can directly
Of course you can directly compare stats, but I'm not sure how useful that would be. D7 has some unique challenges, as does D8. That said D8 is woefully lacking in some areas despite years of development, and in all honesty I sense a palpable withdrawal of heavy hitting development coming from contrib as we stare down the barrel of semvar being used as an excuse to shift API from under our feet at any time...
Pimp your Drupal 8 Toolbar - make it badass.
Adaptivetheme - theming system for people who don't code.
... a complicated question ...
First, Drupal 8 presents challenges not encountered when Drupal 7 arrived.
Most importantly, as Drupal has matured, people with Drupal 7 website can't just "upgrade".
The tools needed to migrate a site from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 are very complex and incomplete.
Also, there aren't enough completed Drupal 8 contrib modules to make Drupal 8 feasible for most production sites.
I suspect that much of what may look like "adoption" is a lot of sandboxing, until Drupal 8 and its contrib modules mature more.
spritefully yours
Technical assistance provided to the Drupal community on my own time ...
Thank yous appreciated ...
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Contrib lag has occurred in every version from at least D5 forward. Unfortunately, the lag may be extended with D8 due to the changes in core and contrib developers who have moved on.
Yeah, totally agree, and I
Yeah, totally agree, and I think theres another factor (that Webchick has definitely identified) and that's user expectations. I said in my other comment that some things are missing and D8 is woefully behind in many regards, e.g. sophisticated media asset handling, which systems like WP solved eons ago. Why can't I just open up my asset library and drag a video to the editor and position it? Etc etc, so Drupal 8 launched and was pretty much outdated from the get go, at least from a content authors perspective.
Theres other things as well: Bartik is a joke, butchered in D8 and riddled with bugs. it's actually shameful how bad it is. Toolbar is pretty ugly, which is why I build Toolbar Themes module, and I could go on and on, the point being that not only is it an major uphill battle for developers to get up to speed with D8, from a site builder/content author perspective it's falling flat.
Pimp your Drupal 8 Toolbar - make it badass.
Adaptivetheme - theming system for people who don't code.
Contrib is a problem, amplified by twig
There are good reasons for Twig, of course. However, the fact that you can't put a bit of glue code in a php template file makes the lack of contributed modules much worse.
When I switched from d6 to d7, I could get around a bunch of missing modules with php snippets and custom php formatters. The fact that these are more difficult to implement makes d8 even harder to adopt.
PHP snippets are little bundles of technicla debt; and I got rid of them as soon as possible. But they smoothed over the transition in a way that twig templates can't.
Correct and we always knew
Correct and we always knew that twig would up-the-anti and force everyone to "do things properly", so to speak. I.e. build a module or use theming hooks. One of the driving motivators is security - sadly many PHP snippets open whopping security holes in peoples site, stuff you will see copy pasted over and over in the forums, i.e. printing field variables in a way that completely bypass output filtering - and often these are held up as "the way" to theme in D7! Scary stuff.
Pimp your Drupal 8 Toolbar - make it badass.
Adaptivetheme - theming system for people who don't code.
No magic bullets
>> 7's adoption was sluggish until about seven months after launch, when it skyrocketed.
I believe, that's when views was released for 7 ?
That graph does not look good for D8 and Drupal at large.
There is no single module that holds back D8, like views was in early D7. It seems to me that back then with D7, at about this same point in time in the cycle, we had much more contrib modules already useable when views became available.
With D8 it is the opposite: we have views out of the box, but a large part of contrib modules are missing, which makes building any larger sites real tough. And those missing modules will take a long time to catch up, given how different D8 coding is to D7/D6. So IMO, I believe D8 adoption will be much, much slower -- just like you can seen in the graph. Really, not surprising.
At lot of what drives contrib
At lot of what drives contrib is sites upgrading to the next major version of Drupal, so developers upgrade the site and contribute back the code they write.
I give you an example - I use a module called Money Suite, I am a maintainer, no one is even thinking about upgrade to D8 (our new maintainer is looking into it), because there is no way we're going to upgrade our sites to D8 - too difficult, a hell of a lot of work for almost no gain. Rebuilding Money Suite for D8 is impossible, its a total rebuild and will take a year of work.
We're a year into D8, and one more year to upgrade MS, BUT, heres the real kicker, the D8 maintainers are citing all these changes for 8.x-3.x and so on, so not only are we being asked to build entirely new modules for D8 (in effect thats what you need to do a lot of the time), but also to watch out for changes all along the way that might scuttle what we're doing!
Heres a palpable example - the absurd theme components initiative in D8, which in effect threatens to include two disparate and totally at odds theming systems in Drupal core (sorry, but WTF???). WORSE the new theme design for D8 is planning to use this untested and totally new system! That means that every theme is really going to have to update and use this new system, because it's going to cause chaos as suddenly most documentation will be deprecated and wrong etc etc.
Do you want to build a theme in D8 right now, then have to update it to a completely new components system in 6 months (at huge cost, again)???
And lets not forget we've all been burned, hard, before. Two years ago, yes, a whole YEAR before D8 was released Dries and Acquia asked us in contrib all to get ready for the impending release of D8, then suddenly it was decided to do a whole lot more in D8 which delayed it by a whole year. So two years ago we all rushed around writing our D8 themes and modules, only to be forced to chase head and make thousands of changes, all at great cost - personally it cost me thousands of dollars (tens of thousands).
And oh lets not look past Webchick deciding what a great idea to stick a whopping great WARNING message on any project that was in -dev, a thinly guised attempt to force developers to upgrade. That entirely backfired btw, I like most others objected to this meddling in OUR projects - so bad blood even more.
D8 - you've done this all to yourself.
End rant.
Pimp your Drupal 8 Toolbar - make it badass.
Adaptivetheme - theming system for people who don't code.