I will say, I liked Drupal more than I expected to the last time I used it. But... it's still Drupal.
It feels dated. Even the "new" designs they're rolling out still feel old. They're working with a dated design system, and honestly, it feels like they had developers build it without bringing actual designers into the process. The result is always functional, but somehow a little awkward. Not unified. There's still like 3-4 different ways to do the same sorts of actions depending on where you are. It's clumsy. It's Drupal!
And true to its roots, Drupal still requires way too many third-party modules to get a build working the way I want. Half of those don't even have the "new" design system applied. So even for a CMS that cares about WCAG, they're still falling short. I'm not sure they'll ever get all the open-source developers on the same page. (I know they have a stated goal of 2027... I don't see it happening.)
More broadly, I don't have much confidence that Drupal modules will be maintained beyond a version or two. That makes anything you build on top of them inherently disposable. Which is fine; a lot of the web is disposable. But it also means I don't want to take ownership of long-term maintenance for projects built on Drupal.
Every time I have to install a third-party module in Drupal, I cringe a little. I know that two or three years down the road, when a new major version comes out, I'll be hunting down the guy who wrote the module, hoping he'll update it. Otherwise, we're forking his repo and taking responsibility for maintaining it and applying security patches ourselves. Cringe.
Meanwhile, I've really enjoyed working with Contentful, Directus, and even Statamic. There are a lot of great CMS options out there these days.
One platform I'd actively warn people away from, though, is Strapi. I've had two false starts with projects where people wanted to use it, only to run into some fundamental flaws.
Like, "Oh, you want to associate one of your 10,000 files with this page? Sure, we'll put them all in a dropdown for you to sift through... and that'll make pages take 2 minutes to load." Cringe. Run. (Ha, wait... and the whole, "We are in France, so we don't answer support emails in August." Literally what their support email told me. Yikes.)
In the last five years, Strapi is the only CMS I've built with that I just couldn't get behind on any level. I would have rather used Drupal for those projects. Ha!
Drupal CMS is working to solve some of this - from better designs to confidence in the choice of modules. Any truly open and free choice is going to have this sort of concern though - but unlike a closed ecosystem, at least you do have a choice or path forward when the situation arises.
We've been hearing this for years. On the Drupal site, it says it's a trial and makes you register to download it. Last time I downloaded the Windows package, it gave a Drupal white screen of death. I'm not planning on registering again to try it again. Nor do I want to use AI to install and manage my CMS.
That trial form is if you want a desktop installer from the Drupal Association. You can still install Drupal CMS directly with no form by clicking the "Download the Composer package instead" button next to that.
It isn't quite as bad as when the codebase was switched to Symfony, but the Drupal project has just kind of abandoned it's core presentation system in favor of the new Canvas tool, and compatibility with the rest of the core seems like an afterthought. So now you have at least 3 competing display configuration solutions, which don't necessarily work together, or entirely work alone.
It's a situation entirely inline with Drupal's reputation: they couldn't just get it right, and now serious Drupal teams don't know which way to go in the ecosystem.
Using Claude to build things quickly is great - but once you hit a certain level of scale, or have a need for governed workflows & oversight, you're more or less going to want some sort of CMS. When that happens, you can either go it alone, or build on top of a lot of well discussed well thought through solutions to these sorts of problems that the Drupal community has dealt with for a couple of decades.
> you can either go it alone, or build on top of a lot of well discussed well thought through solutions to these sorts of problems that the Drupal community has dealt with for a couple of decades.
That isn't needed anymore. One person can maintain an entirely in-house solution and easily make changes and adaptations.
>You can just Claude Code all kinds of shapes of software.
Drupal is used at large organizations with hundreds of sites, thousands of users, and multiple more-or-less coordinated development teams. It's actually a great target for agentic coding, because it has such a well-established internal API. It can definitely feel like an anachronism, but I think there are few projects that could replace some of it's use cases. It's the B-52 of CMSs.
This is how I view it. If you're going to be hosting dozens or hundreds of sites having a consistent platform like this is important even if Claude Code is doing all of the implementation work. It has understood and workable flows for things like content approval, timed releases, etc. All the things people think about when they talk about "managing content" and for the most part organizations still want human in the loop, especially for gated approvals and auditability.
If I'm thinking of building a single one off site, then yeah I'd probably opt to just let CC handle it without worrying about a framework which is overengineered for my current need. That's what I do with most of the personal projects I work on these days. But I do have a skill to build consistency around the parts that should be consistent for everything I host. Like package shape and types of hooks available for deployment. How sites are publicly exposed and DNS management.
not a whole lot of documentation, I feel like a lot of knowledge is held within orgs. At my first job I often had to venture into the source code to figure out how something is supposed to work. Copilot has just came out then and it was terrible at helping with a Drupal 10 migration for example because the training data only had 8 and below and a lot of stuff obviously changed in-between.
I reckon AI must be much better now at this since it's doing all sorts of things, but I wonder if you still would need to have the repo cloned so that it can crosscheck with the source code. Since the knowledge cutoff should be around 2025, most of the stuff it knows should be plenty
> Drupal is used at large organizations with hundreds of sites, thousands of users, and multiple more-or-less coordinated development teams
Sadly none of this applies to me, so I wonder whether it makes a good argument when my question is "should I use Drupal for my personal hobby website".
I'd say no, at least to start - there's an inherent cost in using a CMS a framework etc. If what you're building is simple enough that a flat file hosted on cloudflare etc, works, then start there.
Once you find you do have a need for something more complex (i.e. you have a team, want to give agents governed access etc), then it's pretty easy to go from a flat file to something more complex.
One of the appeals of LLM-generated code, to me, is that you can often write things without a framework and reduce the total amount of code in the system, which tends to make it much more understandable overall.
LLMs are infamous for generating unnecessarily complex and inefficient code. And it was always possible to write things without a framework, people just refused to do so.
In my experience LLMs are mostly very keen to write a function themselves instead of reach for a library. The code itself tends to be pretty straightforward and if anything is characterised by a lack of extra abstractions. What that usually means is that you have more code that the LLM has written and less code that you are depending on in libraries. If you are concerned about understanding the system as a whole this is less total to deal with. Previously, you could also write this way (i.e. without a framework and with relatively few libraries), but it would be a lot slower.
One of the best things about Drupal (years ago, when I used to write plugins and themes), was that you could completely customize the backend, as well as the frontend, and that was a good thing, if you have low-tech users that author content. I despise having to walk people through WordPress' backend.
But that rewriting the base system, every couple of years, was why I dropped it.
Nowadays, with LLMs, it may be time to look at it again...
As someone who has recently started Pair Programming with LLMs—something I never managed to bring about with a human, sadly—I'd like to say: Sure you can do it. Sure, team up with a bunch of friends, a forest next door and build your dream cabin. Then compare that to a prefab from the Sears Modern Homes line. It's still 30'000 parts, 25 tons, est. 90 days build time, but it will be vastly easier, especially if one of your pals happens to be great at digging up and bringing together assembly instructions, general technical infos and past experiences from other builders for all the many snags you'll still hit when erecting that thing.
Can't answer the specifically "Drupal" part (as for me I once had a certain pressure behind me to use it, found it atrocious at the time and won't look to repeat that; if their software is much better / much more to my taste now, good on them). But in principle, at least from a certain app size upwards, I'd rather start with something working in principle, then improve on it.
That said, it might still be more difficult to get things right with Drupal than with some other softwares where you have better continuity between versions. At least traditional search engine results tend to handle version changes rather poorly meaning you'll get tons of advice that don't really apply anymore because they're years old. That happened a lot to me when trying to help out a friend with a WordPress installation.
I'm partial to Drupal because I use it a lot - but if you have a large team with a lot of rules around content and making a mistake is a big deal - you don't want to re-invent the wheel with CMS-like functionality.
Remember a while back when the world first heard about Mythos because there was a mismatch between what the "CMS" said was publish, what was shown on the site, and what was "really" available? Those types of problems haven't gone away and if anything are more critical when an army of agents will seek out and find any but of information they can get their hands on.
I'd recommend Drupal specifically when you have the need for strong governed management of users + content + workflow and you want something that is battle tested without having to make all the decisions that get you there.
This one goes back 19+ years and has to do with 404s when a visitor looks for favicon but doesn't fully follow the standard of where that file could be. It happened with ie6 back then, and happens with some agents and services today. The easy fix is to put a favicon in the root, but that's a bandaid that runs into a bunch of edge case issues when creating a platform or doing something non-standard. Suppressing the error message is another option, but there's a performance and delivery cost into how that's done. If you ask a frontier model today how to fix this on your site, you'll likely get the easy "simple" answer.
Long way of saying, Drupal is an accumulation of battle tested decisions from a bunch of smart people over a long period of time - and if your need matches the usual intent of Drupal - users + content + delivery + rules around that - then that's a strong reason to explore it for your use case.
Not a best reason, but the reason is often because, in the enterprise, marketing hired dozens of people between 2018 and 2023 from the same handful of Drupal consultancies.
Yes, usually when you have a team and need governance over users / content / state. i.e. a publishing workflow that might have specific regulatory review requirements etc.
We're finding that this is becoming even more critical when users are using agents and the scale of changes / publishing increases. Pair that with things like AI regulations that require records of human providence etc, and a CMS becomes even more important.
In my experience, unless your non-dev CMS contributors are strictly filling in blanks with text (sometimes not even then), much of the work ends up delegated to the devs anyway. They are much better off working on a static build that deploys from CI pipelines in gitlab/github.
The benefits are massive ranging from better versioning, free choice of any tools under the sun, strict access control far away from people who don't even understand text encoding, clean CDN deployments, complete elimination of clunky SSR and its footguns, more precise control of the web server configuration, etc.
It's very rare nowadays to see any web devs who don't know the "full stack" from bare Apache/Nginx up to React (or even writing the exact necessary modern plain HTML/CSS/JS). That's why I distinguished the devs who prefer a CMS as "that kind of web dev".
This shift happened in the mid-2010s and I don't know anyone who ever looked back unless they're stuck slow-maintaining something older from before that point in time.
Licensing a CMS now seems like a pointless middleman cost for a subpar product from a time before we had good web standards that were well understood and supported. Every CMS sales pitch seems to be aimed squarely at middle management fearmongering for the most trivial and basic stuff any web dev already knows how to do a lot more efficiently and reliably without a CMS. All devs I see now have experience with these standards using more modern tools at large scale and with the full SDLC and business requirements in mind for over a decade.
> It's very rare nowadays to see any web devs who don't know the "full stack" from bare Apache/Nginx up to React
citation needed. Pretty much every single React/JS front end dev I've dealt with, doesn't know, understand, or care about the web server aspect itself "Not my problem".
> much of the work ends up delegated to the devs anyway
For many implementations though, requiring a dev to make the changes is the failure state.
I love static builds and use them all the time when they're the right fit for the project, but in many cases they are not. I'm also finding that I'm starting to lean towards a CMS more even when it's "just me", but I have a team of agents. i.e. I want the ability to have a voice conversation with a dot / grok bot / etc. and have it update content without it having the ability to do dev type things.
It's the inverted pyramid that has always been sort of Drupal's niche... a small number of all sites, but a large percent of the largest sites in the world.
And fortunately those of us in tech, the amount of software in the world is exploding so all those lanes are getting bigger, even within their niche.
Unless we're talking about figma-like web apps, Content is usually a different department than development.
I know it's becoming more and more outdated nowadays, but if a magazine or a news website is still written by humans rather than AI they need a way to provide formatted text and media, and preview the output.
On the other hand I should add that i've also seen an upward growth in CMSes like WordPress being used exclusively as Online Editors, with content ultimately being exported trough REST to completely different backends and frontends, like a Firebase/NextJS infra.
I'd argue that content written by non-humans makes this even more important. You still likely have a need for a publishing / review workflow & attribution and a way to ensure standards are enforced and not just left to the end-user's own judgement.
Separating delivery from content management also reinforces this. Set up a governed content / user workflow and then let an agent focus on just the presentation after pulling in the content. I'd say this extends well beyond rest as well. A user interacting with something like a voice assistant in an agent might actually be using many interfaces at once (mcp from the assistant, HTML in a card, WebMCP alongside the HTML, browser open on another device for the human.) When that happens you want one canoninical system for the content.
Drupal made me care about abstraction with every feature in any language I worked with. Drupal made me faster by being a little slower. While working with teams where people were doing one off solutions as fast as they could, I never painted myself into a spaghetti code corner.
There isn't a day I don't ask Claude "What would Drupal do?"
I would not be surprised if approaching vibe engineering from the Drupal perspective is the way out of AI slop.
Nonetheless, although I had a blast one evening building custom modules using Claude wishing I had this tool during those hours of stress I suffered 15 years ago, I don't think there is a place for Drupal outside of higher educations marketing.
The problems agents bring to the table are the same problems that UGC brought to the table - new scale, untrusted users, an increased need for governance.
From a user experience perspective:
You can't ever really know if it's a human, an agent, a human driving an agent, or an agent driving a human - so stick to information architecture and accessibility best practices.
beyond that though, we're in new territory when it comes to change / scale / security / etc, so if there is a strategy it'll be out of date tomorrow.
It's too late. Drupal 6 turned me off ever using a CMS again. Now I purely use html files in folders with other files in folders. It's great. No maintainence burden, no attack surface, no resource eating always running programs or database that can get corrupted or otherwise in a bad state. And especially no migrating to the new version and everything breaking (especially with non-core stuff).
A lot of developers got burned by Drupal in the 2010s. "The drop is always moving" may be gone, but having to do a massive rewrite of a site's template every couple of years and rebuild its plugin ecosystem—even if all one wanted was a secure site—was a lot to manage. Add to it a community that was oriented toward only listening to folks who contributed to the project or made plugins and the bad reputation was earned. I'm not a professional web developer, but I know a few who gave up on Drupal during this time, just as I did. My nonprofit now runs on Wordpress, which isn't perfect, but can handle 1,600 paid members (via a paid plugin) and just works from day to day. My personal site is vastly more sophisticated than it ever was under Drupal since the maintenance is so much less. It's going to take a lot to rebuild this reputation. A lot of love was lost.
yeah, that's the double-edged sword. Drupal can do what it does today because it continually rebuilt it's foundation - but at the same time that sort of movement did cause a lot of pain along the way. At the same time, in the world of "I'll just have my agent rebuild it" makes that sort of change a whole lot easier to deal with - if not the standard everyone may need to adopt.
> React has one of the world's largest developer communities. Drupal Canvas code components are written in React, and we designed the developer experience around the tools, patterns, and workflows front-end JavaScript developers already know. They can use their preferred development tools, including modern AI-assisted workflows, without having to learn Drupal-specific concepts or conventions. We've continued to make that experience better, lowering the barrier for a much larger community of developers to build with Drupal.
Ok. As someone who hasn't shipped a Drupal site since halfway through the D8 cycle: is this better or worse than the tumor that is Gutenberg?
Drupal earned that reputation for so many architectural upheavals and pointless version churning. I grok innovation, but one of the core properties of web infrastructure is that it's relatively (in a software sense) architecturally stable. Drupal was not that.
That seems more like an implementation opinion vs. a core property.
Agree that it was a pain to keep up with sometimes, but if software doesn't evolve over a 25 year timespan - it's likely going to be stuck in the past.
The reason Drupal can do what it does today is because of this willingness to rebuild - otherwise it'd just be a CMS that solves problems from the early 2000s.
I don't have a strong opinion on Drupal (last used it 15? years ago, it was fine) but the people who make don't get to say "Drupal is now light-years ahead of its reputation.". That's what everyone says of their own stuff, just no.
Why wouldn't the makers of something be able to state their opinion on it? Especially an open, collaborative project with many people, and opinions, behind it.
If you disagree with the sentiment, it'd be interesting to here why - that's the sort of information that's extremely useful for makers.
Drupal is now a very different animal than it was in the Drupal 7 heyday. It's confusing for folks used to WordPress and similar as you're not gonna be uploading it to a regular old shared hosting provider. There's no way you're using modern Drupal without SSH access and using command line to install and update. And thoroughly learning how the Drupal bits all work together.
Drupal CMS is what a lot of people suggest for new folks, but it isn't explained what it is on the Drupal website. It's apparently a set of pre-configured extensions, templates, AI, and settings. Drupal has a version on their site to download but it says it's a "trial" and requires registration to get it, further increasing friction: https://new.drupal.org/drupal-cms/trial#:~:text=start%20your...
Once you do get it, it may or may not work. When I last tried the Windows version, it didn't work and just gave the old Drupal white screen of death in the browser.
When I've seen discussions in the Drupal sub-reddit, most of the recommendations on how to do something seem to be some version of 'have Claude do it for you'. And the Drupal homepage is very AI forward and mentions AI 9 times.
Drupal's largest install base was back in the Drupal 7 days, which was the last major version that supported upgrading in place from the previous versions. Major compatibility changes started with 8 and continued. About 1/2 the sites that used to run Drupal 7 migrated to WordPress rather than upgrade. Today, there are about the same number of sites running Drupal 7 as the current Drupal 11, which speaks volumes.
As someone that still uses a paid, extended-support version of Drupal 7 and is likely switching my big legacy site to Backdrop CMS (actively maintained Drupal 7 fork) and my other two sites to another CMS, it doesn't seem like there's a place for folks like me in the current world of Drupal.
> which was the last major version that supported upgrading in place from the previous versions
This isn't correct. Yes it was true from Drupal 7 to 8, but one of the primary goals of that change was so that every major version after could have seamless in-place upgrades - which they have. Yes there's deprecated code etc. that you might run into in contrib. or custom modules, but the site upgrades themselves are easier than ever.
dbg31415 | 22 hours ago
It feels dated. Even the "new" designs they're rolling out still feel old. They're working with a dated design system, and honestly, it feels like they had developers build it without bringing actual designers into the process. The result is always functional, but somehow a little awkward. Not unified. There's still like 3-4 different ways to do the same sorts of actions depending on where you are. It's clumsy. It's Drupal!
And true to its roots, Drupal still requires way too many third-party modules to get a build working the way I want. Half of those don't even have the "new" design system applied. So even for a CMS that cares about WCAG, they're still falling short. I'm not sure they'll ever get all the open-source developers on the same page. (I know they have a stated goal of 2027... I don't see it happening.)
More broadly, I don't have much confidence that Drupal modules will be maintained beyond a version or two. That makes anything you build on top of them inherently disposable. Which is fine; a lot of the web is disposable. But it also means I don't want to take ownership of long-term maintenance for projects built on Drupal.
Every time I have to install a third-party module in Drupal, I cringe a little. I know that two or three years down the road, when a new major version comes out, I'll be hunting down the guy who wrote the module, hoping he'll update it. Otherwise, we're forking his repo and taking responsibility for maintaining it and applying security patches ourselves. Cringe.
Meanwhile, I've really enjoyed working with Contentful, Directus, and even Statamic. There are a lot of great CMS options out there these days.
One platform I'd actively warn people away from, though, is Strapi. I've had two false starts with projects where people wanted to use it, only to run into some fundamental flaws.
Like, "Oh, you want to associate one of your 10,000 files with this page? Sure, we'll put them all in a dropdown for you to sift through... and that'll make pages take 2 minutes to load." Cringe. Run. (Ha, wait... and the whole, "We are in France, so we don't answer support emails in August." Literally what their support email told me. Yikes.)
In the last five years, Strapi is the only CMS I've built with that I just couldn't get behind on any level. I would have rather used Drupal for those projects. Ha!
[OP] scottfalconer | 22 hours ago
JohnTHaller | 3 hours ago
We've been hearing this for years. On the Drupal site, it says it's a trial and makes you register to download it. Last time I downloaded the Windows package, it gave a Drupal white screen of death. I'm not planning on registering again to try it again. Nor do I want to use AI to install and manage my CMS.
[OP] scottfalconer | an hour ago
1shooner | 22 hours ago
It's a situation entirely inline with Drupal's reputation: they couldn't just get it right, and now serious Drupal teams don't know which way to go in the ecosystem.
talon8635 | 22 hours ago
echelon | 22 hours ago
I don't see how Drupal or anything like it survive. These types of softwares seem fitted to 2006, not 2026.
[OP] scottfalconer | 22 hours ago
echelon | 8 hours ago
That isn't needed anymore. One person can maintain an entirely in-house solution and easily make changes and adaptations.
1shooner | 22 hours ago
Drupal is used at large organizations with hundreds of sites, thousands of users, and multiple more-or-less coordinated development teams. It's actually a great target for agentic coding, because it has such a well-established internal API. It can definitely feel like an anachronism, but I think there are few projects that could replace some of it's use cases. It's the B-52 of CMSs.
tstrimple | 21 hours ago
If I'm thinking of building a single one off site, then yeah I'd probably opt to just let CC handle it without worrying about a framework which is overengineered for my current need. That's what I do with most of the personal projects I work on these days. But I do have a skill to build consistency around the parts that should be consistent for everything I host. Like package shape and types of hooks available for deployment. How sites are publicly exposed and DNS management.
asimovDev | 14 hours ago
I reckon AI must be much better now at this since it's doing all sorts of things, but I wonder if you still would need to have the repo cloned so that it can crosscheck with the source code. Since the knowledge cutoff should be around 2025, most of the stuff it knows should be plenty
DemocracyFTW2 | 12 hours ago
Sadly none of this applies to me, so I wonder whether it makes a good argument when my question is "should I use Drupal for my personal hobby website".
[OP] scottfalconer | 9 hours ago
Once you find you do have a need for something more complex (i.e. you have a team, want to give agents governed access etc), then it's pretty easy to go from a flat file to something more complex.
liveoneggs | 21 hours ago
PHP is, in fact, exceptionally good as a language for creating websites.
[OP] scottfalconer | 21 hours ago
rcxdude | 13 hours ago
krapp | 12 hours ago
rcxdude | 2 hours ago
echelon | 8 hours ago
ChrisMarshallNY | 21 hours ago
But that rewriting the base system, every couple of years, was why I dropped it.
Nowadays, with LLMs, it may be time to look at it again...
DemocracyFTW2 | 12 hours ago
Can't answer the specifically "Drupal" part (as for me I once had a certain pressure behind me to use it, found it atrocious at the time and won't look to repeat that; if their software is much better / much more to my taste now, good on them). But in principle, at least from a certain app size upwards, I'd rather start with something working in principle, then improve on it.
That said, it might still be more difficult to get things right with Drupal than with some other softwares where you have better continuity between versions. At least traditional search engine results tend to handle version changes rather poorly meaning you'll get tons of advice that don't really apply anymore because they're years old. That happened a lot to me when trying to help out a friend with a WordPress installation.
jeremyjh | 22 hours ago
[OP] scottfalconer | 22 hours ago
Remember a while back when the world first heard about Mythos because there was a mismatch between what the "CMS" said was publish, what was shown on the site, and what was "really" available? Those types of problems haven't gone away and if anything are more critical when an army of agents will seek out and find any but of information they can get their hands on.
graemep | 14 hours ago
Why Drupal rather than another of the many CMS's and frameworks that exist?
[OP] scottfalconer | 9 hours ago
I'd recommend Drupal specifically when you have the need for strong governed management of users + content + workflow and you want something that is battle tested without having to make all the decisions that get you there.
There's an old issue in the Drupal queues that I really like that exemplifies this: https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/174940
This one goes back 19+ years and has to do with 404s when a visitor looks for favicon but doesn't fully follow the standard of where that file could be. It happened with ie6 back then, and happens with some agents and services today. The easy fix is to put a favicon in the root, but that's a bandaid that runs into a bunch of edge case issues when creating a platform or doing something non-standard. Suppressing the error message is another option, but there's a performance and delivery cost into how that's done. If you ask a frontier model today how to fix this on your site, you'll likely get the easy "simple" answer.
Long way of saying, Drupal is an accumulation of battle tested decisions from a bunch of smart people over a long period of time - and if your need matches the usual intent of Drupal - users + content + delivery + rules around that - then that's a strong reason to explore it for your use case.
subpixel | 21 hours ago
mjpa86 | 13 hours ago
Until you define the project, you can't talk about what stack to use.
sublinear | 22 hours ago
Is it just the last remaining pockets of "that kind" of web dev?
[OP] scottfalconer | 22 hours ago
We're finding that this is becoming even more critical when users are using agents and the scale of changes / publishing increases. Pair that with things like AI regulations that require records of human providence etc, and a CMS becomes even more important.
sublinear | 22 hours ago
The benefits are massive ranging from better versioning, free choice of any tools under the sun, strict access control far away from people who don't even understand text encoding, clean CDN deployments, complete elimination of clunky SSR and its footguns, more precise control of the web server configuration, etc.
It's very rare nowadays to see any web devs who don't know the "full stack" from bare Apache/Nginx up to React (or even writing the exact necessary modern plain HTML/CSS/JS). That's why I distinguished the devs who prefer a CMS as "that kind of web dev".
This shift happened in the mid-2010s and I don't know anyone who ever looked back unless they're stuck slow-maintaining something older from before that point in time.
Licensing a CMS now seems like a pointless middleman cost for a subpar product from a time before we had good web standards that were well understood and supported. Every CMS sales pitch seems to be aimed squarely at middle management fearmongering for the most trivial and basic stuff any web dev already knows how to do a lot more efficiently and reliably without a CMS. All devs I see now have experience with these standards using more modern tools at large scale and with the full SDLC and business requirements in mind for over a decade.
PenguinCoder | 22 hours ago
citation needed. Pretty much every single React/JS front end dev I've dealt with, doesn't know, understand, or care about the web server aspect itself "Not my problem".
[OP] scottfalconer | 21 hours ago
For many implementations though, requiring a dev to make the changes is the failure state.
I love static builds and use them all the time when they're the right fit for the project, but in many cases they are not. I'm also finding that I'm starting to lean towards a CMS more even when it's "just me", but I have a team of agents. i.e. I want the ability to have a voice conversation with a dot / grok bot / etc. and have it update content without it having the ability to do dev type things.
sublinear | 21 hours ago
[OP] scottfalconer | 21 hours ago
And fortunately those of us in tech, the amount of software in the world is exploding so all those lanes are getting bigger, even within their niche.
dawnerd | 22 hours ago
liveoneggs | 21 hours ago
brailsafe | 21 hours ago
You mean the kind of development that powers nearly the entire web?
easyThrowaway | 13 hours ago
I know it's becoming more and more outdated nowadays, but if a magazine or a news website is still written by humans rather than AI they need a way to provide formatted text and media, and preview the output.
On the other hand I should add that i've also seen an upward growth in CMSes like WordPress being used exclusively as Online Editors, with content ultimately being exported trough REST to completely different backends and frontends, like a Firebase/NextJS infra.
[OP] scottfalconer | 9 hours ago
Separating delivery from content management also reinforces this. Set up a governed content / user workflow and then let an agent focus on just the presentation after pulling in the content. I'd say this extends well beyond rest as well. A user interacting with something like a voice assistant in an agent might actually be using many interfaces at once (mcp from the assistant, HTML in a card, WebMCP alongside the HTML, browser open on another device for the human.) When that happens you want one canoninical system for the content.
dataviz1000 | 21 hours ago
There isn't a day I don't ask Claude "What would Drupal do?"
I would not be surprised if approaching vibe engineering from the Drupal perspective is the way out of AI slop.
Nonetheless, although I had a blast one evening building custom modules using Claude wishing I had this tool during those hours of stress I suffered 15 years ago, I don't think there is a place for Drupal outside of higher educations marketing.
[OP] scottfalconer | 21 hours ago
Let's revisit the statement in a year :)
My gut is we're seeing the exact opposite. The scale of publishing + users + need for governance is exploding.
dr_dshiv | 21 hours ago
[OP] scottfalconer | 21 hours ago
From a site building perspective:
The problems agents bring to the table are the same problems that UGC brought to the table - new scale, untrusted users, an increased need for governance.
From a user experience perspective:
You can't ever really know if it's a human, an agent, a human driving an agent, or an agent driving a human - so stick to information architecture and accessibility best practices.
beyond that though, we're in new territory when it comes to change / scale / security / etc, so if there is a strategy it'll be out of date tomorrow.
superkuh | 21 hours ago
smoghat | 21 hours ago
[OP] scottfalconer | 21 hours ago
kmeisthax | 21 hours ago
Ok. As someone who hasn't shipped a Drupal site since halfway through the D8 cycle: is this better or worse than the tumor that is Gutenberg?
crisnoble | 18 hours ago
calmbonsai | 16 hours ago
[OP] scottfalconer | 8 hours ago
That seems more like an implementation opinion vs. a core property.
Agree that it was a pain to keep up with sometimes, but if software doesn't evolve over a 25 year timespan - it's likely going to be stuck in the past.
The reason Drupal can do what it does today is because of this willingness to rebuild - otherwise it'd just be a CMS that solves problems from the early 2000s.
wink | 12 hours ago
[OP] scottfalconer | 9 hours ago
If you disagree with the sentiment, it'd be interesting to here why - that's the sort of information that's extremely useful for makers.
JohnTHaller | 3 hours ago
Drupal CMS is what a lot of people suggest for new folks, but it isn't explained what it is on the Drupal website. It's apparently a set of pre-configured extensions, templates, AI, and settings. Drupal has a version on their site to download but it says it's a "trial" and requires registration to get it, further increasing friction: https://new.drupal.org/drupal-cms/trial#:~:text=start%20your...
Once you do get it, it may or may not work. When I last tried the Windows version, it didn't work and just gave the old Drupal white screen of death in the browser.
When I've seen discussions in the Drupal sub-reddit, most of the recommendations on how to do something seem to be some version of 'have Claude do it for you'. And the Drupal homepage is very AI forward and mentions AI 9 times.
Drupal's largest install base was back in the Drupal 7 days, which was the last major version that supported upgrading in place from the previous versions. Major compatibility changes started with 8 and continued. About 1/2 the sites that used to run Drupal 7 migrated to WordPress rather than upgrade. Today, there are about the same number of sites running Drupal 7 as the current Drupal 11, which speaks volumes.
As someone that still uses a paid, extended-support version of Drupal 7 and is likely switching my big legacy site to Backdrop CMS (actively maintained Drupal 7 fork) and my other two sites to another CMS, it doesn't seem like there's a place for folks like me in the current world of Drupal.
[OP] scottfalconer | an hour ago
This isn't correct. Yes it was true from Drupal 7 to 8, but one of the primary goals of that change was so that every major version after could have seamless in-place upgrades - which they have. Yes there's deprecated code etc. that you might run into in contrib. or custom modules, but the site upgrades themselves are easier than ever.