Sadly, it is goodbye Drupal for me

best of luck in your endeavors.

Sorry to see you go and wish you the best.

The situation you describe strikes many of the same chords that led to the fork of Drupal known as Backdrop. I'm curious if you heard of (or explored) that option of staying in the wider Drupal family via Backdrop, as you were deciding which direction to go?

Thanks for the story. I came to similar conclusions.

I know how to program - I am writing code 95% of the time, but it costs too much. WordPress is so much cheaper/simpler/faster, and low price is what my clients want.

I also want low price so I could do more as a simple freelancer instead of big business (so one of the reasons I worked on https://www.drupal.org/project/aidev to make development more efficient)

Drupal became enterprise focused, because Drupal is developed and financed by the enterprise and government with larger budgets. Drupal does what enterprise wants, and sadly Drupal does not have other business model.

For comparison, wordpress earns money from many many small clients, so they provide good service for them.

Since enterprise is what funds it, Drupal sadly will remain focused for enterprise.

So, I am too migrating simple sites to website builders (probably 100x quicker/cheaper than Drupal), middle size sites will do with wordpress (probably 10x quicker than Drupal), and complex custom sites Drupal is still best for me (because of 15 years working with Drupal). But I am looking forward for AI developers and will migrate to some new AI driven platform as soon as it becomes more efficient than Drupal in my case (example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zlgkzjndpak). It is super promising.

As a freelancer, I tried to improve Drupal efficiency with AI, spend tons of time, but nobody want to fund it - AI doing their job is not in the interest of Drupal developer or Drupal business. This is very similar to what you said about different interests of the developer and the end-user. I am the end user too, I want features instead of coding and looking forward to outsource the development to more efficient tech (aka. looking forward for AI driven platforms).

Sadly I am coming to the same conclusion. I have a couple of Drupal sites, two on 7 and one 10, installed by installatron on shared hosting, but I think I may migrate them all to Wordpress. I feel that, by for example pulling the rug from under us by making it impossible to migrate views, constantly changing the default theme, and wanting us to use Composer which is a pin on shared hosting, makes Drupal so much work.

Looks like you're living in the past...Contemporize...man.

There are huge downsides to D8 vs D7, but the upsides are greater. The switch keeps Drupal from becoming like COBOL or Fortran.

I am a website builder and SEOer and not a PHP programmer or a Twig themer.

I do write JavaScript and CSS and it helps me a lot with Drupal but indeed there is a problem that Drupal is doesn't have any node frontend automation tool like Elementor and I believe that at some point it will backfire at the community big time.

Such a relief to come across this post.

In 2010 I formed a company with a client after he managed to get an important geo domain.  At the time I had only built static html/css sites.  I had/have no coding knowledge beyond html/css.

So the idea was to build a community website and monetise it through advertising and commissions on tour sales etc.  I checked out Concrete and Wordpress and Drupal and Joomla and others and decided on Drupal.  I'm OCD on security and it seemed that Drupal had the best fundamental architecture for security.

The White House was on Drupal at the time (now on Wordpress) and the Australian Government was converting 400± sites to Drupal (still on Drupal).  I took 4 of us to a Drupal meet in Melbourne around 2012 maybe and we were led to believe that, while headless Drupal was happening for coders, there was a promising future ahead for non-coders as well.  We met Dries Buytaert.

The decision to go with Drupal has negatively impacted the past 14 years of my life.  It always seemed to hold out the promise that "it would be solved in the next upgrade or patch or release".  I built the site but every now and then the whole site would go down and I'd need to recover from backups.  I gave up around 2015.  I lost the client and others and I believe that it has affected my confidence in this space although I am beginning to recover with Wordpress/Wordfence installations.

I believe that the product was misrepresented.  I'm sorry for you that after so long you had to make this incredibly difficult decision.

Back in 2010, after coding in LAMP stack, after much deliberation and research, I switched to Drupal as it was top-notch  .. until 2015 never gave a shit bout WordPress .. even now although I use WP for most of my projects it's just coz out of business decision .. gotta make the dime and small shops like mine ain't got much time to dwell into the every so compounding complexity of the Drupalsphere .. until D7 it was all so cool .. but after that .. people like me ended up becoming a fool .. coz of the unnecessary complexity of Drupal!!! Maybe they forgot the ultimate premise of Computer Science .. and that's .. IF IT'S WORKING DONT TOUCH IT!!!

I know .. I know .. Drupal this .. Drupal that.., against WordPress.. if we just talk about ACL .. Drupal smashes WordPress right there.. But as it stands today .. it seems to have morphed into a corporate tool.. not much there for a small fish like me... doesn't fit into daily use case of my biz .. not much theme to choose from .. even in themefoest .. no popular page builder, backward compatibility etc!!!

Despite being from a so-called 3rd world country, till this day .. since 2015 .. i have continued to donate to Drupal .. even though it might be a tiny amount .. and now no matter how much I want to use it .. I have no choice but to forsake it!! I will continue to donate my tiny contribution to Drupal.org, as a token of gratitude ... maybe someday I will use it again in one of my project .. but for now ... time to bid it adiue!!!

For everyone coming to this blog post that would like to continue working with D7 because you have customers still on D7 without the budget to move to modern versions of Drupal, or because you don't want decades of acquired knowledge to go to waste, or if you are yourself a D7 site owner, then you should definitely give Backdrop CMS a go. You can spin up an ephemeral 24hr sandbox site in less than 10sec and look around: https://backdropcms.org/demo ...it should feel right at home straight out of the box!

You will be happy to find that so may things have been bundled into core, so you can reduce the time to start working on the site. ...you get updated versions of things like jQuery and CKEditor 5, plus functionality previously provided by separate modules like Views, Media, Pathauto, Token, Admin Menu, Entity API, Display Suite, Panels, Nice Menus etc. ...all there without having to lift a finger! And this was not just a quick "chuck every contrib module in core and call it a day" thing - everything was carefully integrated and became part of the core CMS + sensible defaults that work out of the box for the majority + so many UX improvements and fixes over the past 10+ years that you will realize all the love, time and effort by people that come from the Drupal community that went into that fork of Drupal 7.

Most of the Backdrop CMS community are smaller shops or individual freelancers and they have been working with both Backdrop (for customers with smaller budgets and no complex requirements) as well as with modern versions of Drupal (for more complex sites and organizations that need and can afford that). This is a really good combination of a "dual toolset":

• You don't have to hire new developers that are familiar with whatever other technology/CMS you might be considering, as your existing developers do not have to re-learn anything from scratch. If they know how to work with D7, then they should be able to do just fine in Backdrop.
• If your existing customers don't have the budget or the need to move to modern Drupal (which is practically a total rebuild of their sites), then move them to Backdrop (which is more like an upgrade) and keep them happy. They get security coverage + new features+ they won't need to re-learn how to use a new CMS either. Perhaps in time they will grow and have the budget to move back to Drupal, perhaps they'll just stick with Backdrop - either way, you should be able to accommodate them and not lose customers.
• What's more, you are keeping everyone (yourself, your developers, your customers) within the same wider community, which will benefit the wider Drupal community in the long run.

Lastly, for those that still think that only modern versions of Drupal are the only right fit for the enterprise, I have (old) news for you: enterprise and larger/complex sites have been running securely and performantly for decades on D7 and now on Backdrop, achieving complex and "ambitious" requirements just fine. In the past 1-2 years specifically, we have seen many rather larger Drupal agencies like Lullabot, Aten, and recently Giant Rabbit to start moving "large" customers to Backdrop with great success, and they have started including Backdrop as an alternative option in their RFQs. You really need to read up on these posts if you have not done so already:

• Why we moved two Stanford websites to Backdrop CMS (and watch the case study presentation)
• Making the case for a Drupal 7 to Backdrop CMS upgrade
• Stanford University Bio-X: Decision to move from Drupal 7 to Backdrop
• Case study: Moving six sites (and counting) to Backdrop at Penn State University

So yeah, don't give up on Drupal just yet ;)

To make Drupal more friendly for site-builders, I am thinking site builders have to participate in development of Drupal more. And a lot more of site builders should participate, because one person influence little in grand scheme of things.

One way to do, is participate yourself and encourage other site-builders to work with Drupal development too.

How does one can participate most effectively?

1. Find feature you want to see the most, find people who worked on that feature, contact them, help them and support them.
2. Encourage others to do the same.
3. If many people worked on similar ideas in similar different projects, maybe find ways they can work together. It very rarely works, but I think its good idea in theory.

Another idea, which is at least very helpful to me for development of Drupal open source, is ask for AI help, because its very useful expert always at your side to help, increasing productivity and enabling to do new things one was not an expert to do before. We need more non expert to be involved with Drupal development, to shape Drupal how regular users want it to be.

Dries posted the following on X today:

The #Drupal community will evolve the Layout Builder into the Experience Builder, enhancing its intuitiveness, expanding out-of-the-box functionality, and introducing in-browser theming capabilities.

Ref: 

• https://twitter.com/Dries/status/1782882388831359123
• Evolving Drupal's Layout Builder to an Experience Builder

"It all just worked and I NEVER have to worry about updating it."

Updating on Wordpress just worked? Automatic update on Wordpress is turned OFF by default.
Look how many topicks on wordpress comunity site about updating https://wordpress.org/search/update/.
Sory, don't expect for miracles. Everyone hwo own big wordpress site have trobles with updating.

Can you add on Wordpress new content types, fields, categories? Can you create lists of this types (i talk about views)? Yes. But with Drupal its match more easy. Without programming and paid modules.

"It wanted me to learn all sorts of stuff like Composer and have special environments on my server."

Composer require knowledge only 3 commands to use: require, update and remove.
What environment? PHP, MySQL and... what else?

I have been using Drupal for 20 years and created several specialized modules. With the emerge of D8/9/10 I ran into several problems:
Several modules I use are not available (yet) and basically had to find replacement or write the module. Also had to reprogram most of my custom code to be able to work in D8+ Which is simply not doable, not only because of some learning curve needed to understand all hooks in D8+ and be able to use them, but also just time which is not paid and will be many many hours. (that apart from the migration problems.) I migrated from D4 to D6 and to D7 and that was reasonable simple. But with D8 I basically had to start all over again to lern the internals of Druapl.
For now I just stay with D7.

Might be I am just getting to old for this shit and sticking in the past, not flexible anymore. I just wished it was easier to migrate. Thing is that with a lot of other platforms you can migrate without rewriting custom code and often not missing modules. Just hope D7 will be there for a while longer.

I haven't commented on a forum post in eons, but somehow stumbled upon this.

All very valid concerns are noted here, for sure. I've been working with Drupal since 2004 and have seen it all.

One big hope I have for Starshot is to bring back smaller organizations, less technical users, and hobbyists. This is our roots.

Keep an eye out for an MVP release in early 2025 and see what you think :)

Kristen Pol hello !

I work with Drupal continuously since version 6 and now working with version 10.

I am a scripter who knows a bit of Bash, JavaScript, HTML-CSS and various CLUI/GUI utilities, but when it comes to Drupal, I am nothing more than a website builder; I have absolutely no desire to theme in Twig for example and I don't like PHP as much as I like JavaScript.

My problem in recent years is not with Drupal as a program (and it is a wonderful program), but with the deterioration of the community; there is a toxic atmosphere that non Drupal programmers feel even if they don't know how to express well; this is felt here in the forums and in "Drupal Answers" as well (good luck getting your legitimate simple question not down voted and closed without any sensible reason there). Slack may not have that much of toxic atmosphere but support there for non programmers can be futile.

I agree that time and again we hear about "aims to make Drupal more accessible for site builders and marketers" but it just never really happened, sadly; the lack of inclusion of WordPress Elementor or an extremely similar tool contributed to that, but now, moreover, it is the mentality of some in the community and those above should do something to ensure that website builders would get the support they need and much more nicely, if they want to make Drupal more accessible, and shall I add, more marketed.
Some of my claims may be hard to prove because in "Drupal Answers" for example, the redundantly heavily down voted posts are automatically deleted along with all the comments.

Our dear Kristen, I work with Drupal since year 2010 as a website builder and generally get everything I need and more from Drupal. I never expected perfectness.

What would that place to be to get the support that we Drupal website builders often need? I think many will agree that the wider Drupal community is shrinking in manpower (in my passport country Drupal companies went down from about 25 to about 2.5) so in my humble opinion it is now more than ever required to actively encourage Drupal users to give and ask support in just one well supervised place without phenomena such as elitism and legalism (as common from my experience in "Drupal Answers" and often here in the forums).

For example, instead of all the following:

• The core issue queue
• The Drupal forums
• The IRC or what may left of it
• The Drupal country-specific website communities or what's may left of them
• The various Drupal Facebook groups
• The "Drupal Answers" Stack Exchange website
• The Drupal reddit post board
• The Drupal Slack channel
• The Acquia services
• Possible other communities

Just one main place, mentioned and linked inside the different parts of Drupal itself.

I had to Google search Drupal CWG to get to know this team.

Drupal could charge

#3470344: ⚠️🚨 IMPORTANT: We're looking for sponsors to fund the migration to move Gin into Core 🚨⚠️

Let's back up a moment and recognize that the marketplace has matured since the release of Drupal 7. Frankly, many of the reasons a person might have wanted to use Drupal 7 are now easily handled by Wix, SquareSpace and the others.

At the same time, over time there are always new entrants into any field. Thus, it seems to me that Drupal was always going to lose market share. We are seeing that with electric cars and Tesla. The Chinese EV makers are coming on strong and it's not reasonable to expect Tesla to keep the market share it once had.

Back to the online tools. One often reads accounts online of how people/companies hit a roadblock with these tools that forced them to move to more robust and customizable solutions such as Wordpress or Drupal or the many other options, like Strapi and Contentful.

I see Drupal CMS (the now-official name for Project Starshot) as the perfect solution to handle the many valid concerns raised in the initial post. It's literally taken years for critical components such as automatic updates and recipes to come to fruition. I haven't tried automatic updates yet but I've been playing with recipes and they are fantastic.

Add to the above the Experience Builder Initiative, the modernized themes, the thorough adoption of composer (a package manager is not optional nowadays if one wants access to the wider world of open source libraries) and more and Drupal CMS will be positioned very well.

Agencies will start saying one of two things to smaller entities:

"Dear customer, your needs can easily be handled by the online tools such as Wix and SquareSpace."

or

"Dear customer, you need more headroom than the online tools provide because I foresee some custom programming for this project or in the near future. It doesn't make sense to put you on Wix because we'll simply have to move you off of it in 18 months. We recommend starting with Wordpress/Drupal CMS/Strapi/etc."

In this world, Drupal CMS will be a viable contender. To be clear, it actually isn't right now—I happen to agree with the OP's views.

Can I foretell the future? Not reliably. But I am willing to bet money that by 2027 Drupal CMS will have a thriving ecosystem catering to smaller builds. To further that goal, I for one am going to have a set of end-to-end tests written in Playwright ready for Drupal CMS (aka Starshot) by January 1, 2025. 

André Angelantoni
---------------------------
PerformantLabs.com
Check out Automated Testing Kit
https://www.drupal.org/project/automated_testing_kit

Application security is the new Drupal paradigm in .gov space. It's critical for Drupal developers to adopt and learn Symfony framework and learn how to properly harden Drupal.
Drupal's original extensibility was both an advantage and a detriment, because it let inexperienced devs build out quickly with no regard to application performance or security. These applications stand for years, and then when they get hacked or ddosed to death, the clients point to Drupal and say; "Drupal is non performant."
The numbers do not lie.
You can build the best car ever invented, but if no one can drive it or fix it, what is it's perceived value?

I think that once you get a grip of all the good modules supporting Drupal 10 & 11 out there (it takes a long time to find all the good ones), as a site builder you will get infinite powers on Drupal, all absolutely for free. Even the upgrading/deployment part nowadays is much easier thanks to automatic updates, DDEV and its integrations with hosting providers. It just takes longer to learn, but that is also changing thanks to recipes now, and Drupal CMS. Have you had a look into those?

Sad to read this, but I totally understand this decision.
Even more sad is, that googling for the Starshot / Drupal CMS Roadmap I found this: https://drupal.docs.cern.ch/roadmap-wordpress/

Even CERN is moving to Wordpress.

Therefore a reminder and quote from Jef Raskin (Apple, Author of "The humane interface"): "As far as the customer is concerned, the interface is the product."

Conclusion: no interface = no customer

Therefore please support making Drupal CMS the most accessible CMS ever by supporting the community here:

• [Meta] Audit each module to be included into Drupal CMS for accessibility issues: https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal_cms/issues/3475279
• [Meta] Improve the accessibility of the Klaro module: https://www.drupal.org/project/klaro/issues/3484978

As someone who's been following this mess for years now whose been on the Drupal train since version 6 and has since created a few projects with the latest iterations of Drupal, it's pretty clear that everyone's been jumping ship to get away from Drupal's maintenance obesity that a technical clique thought would somehow part seas back when they initially incorporated the Composer caltrops into its overall stack. Whoever believed that was a good idea did Drupal a major disservice, even if someone somewhere somehow got anything out of it.

I've seen Wordpress websites surpass the functionality that the Drupal 8+ apologists try to marginalize modern critics of whenever they resort to their claims about how anyone who wants to blog should stick to Wordpress and leave the heavy lifting to Drupal in their quest to keep rationalizing the cluster that Drupal has now become... And every time I see someone resort to that quip (or some variation thereof), I just shake my head because it's utter nonsense and myopic beyond belief. Adding to this, Drupal continues to suffer from Dries-itis: It needs new leadership and one which prioritizes the pursuit of balancing technical capability and control with end-user convenience. It's possible to have the best of both worlds, but these latest iterations of Drupal seem to focus solely on the technical alone, much of which haven't resulted in the gains that were promised. Dries plays a part in this because he speaks out of both sides of his mouth. One minute, he's prancing around on some stage somewhere lecturing everyone about an open internet, and in another, he's enabling the very mess we now have today. He needs to go.

The only hope Drupal has at this point is anything that the Starshot initiative can hopefully accomplish with all of this in mind. Last I understood, it was trying to reduce the maintenance fat and increase convenience. That's great! If that key group doesn't reduce the maintenance weight this bloated hog now suffers from, Drupal will die. They need to return to the grass roots of what originally made everyone fall in love with Drupal, which is SIMPLICITY. Throw it on a server, click a thing, type a few values, then BOOM: Installed and extensible without command lines, exterior apps, environment complication, etc. Since 8, they've erred on catering to the developer. From that strategy, maintainers have left in droves with overall Drupal adoption never being as bad as it is today. Those are just the facts. And all of those people who jump ship who have their bitter tastes in their mouths have opinions that spread faster than wild fire. Because of this, Drupal is in some serious trouble. The village idiot gets this. People were trying to stress this concern back when Composer, GIT, Drush, et al first got strong-armed, but the key clique just didn't listen. Well, here we are today and the piper's being paid.

But if the Starshot group can find a way to make Drupal easier to maintain and use--as in returning to what was the tried-and-true allure of updating both modules and core from an easy-to-use interface accessible from */admin without need of non-core apps one has to install and maintain outside of Drupal without sacrificing its enclosed sphere of overall implementation--then it'll return to its prior dominance. If that doesn't happen, then it's just screwed.