What happened to your Drupal website?

Or what happened to Drupal at all?

[explorador]

Yes I know, odd question.

Drupal is dead, sort of. It was the CMS of choice for some people, and the "right" alternative against Wordpress (in reality these two products are not precisely similar, very diff stuff but I guess you get the point), it had lots of great features, could handle heavy loads, known as a content framework, etc. but required some knowledge and structure (wasn't an out of the box product), suddenly a new version comes mentioning going the Symphony path... and it kills compatibility or easy migration, then Backdrop appears (sort of Drupal fork) and offers to keep the traditional work structure, including easy upgrades from Drupal 7. Yet, I don't hear the name Drupal or Backdrop anywhere, at all, it's been so for years.

I built several websites on Drupal years ago, they easily handled 3K, 5K and 7K daily visits each, easily. Well optimized they coexisted on the same server without issues. Then I left that company and as you might know, they had a REALLY hard time finding a local webmaster who could work with Drupal because at least here, Drupal was never common, it's Wordpress land.

Couple of years later after leaving that company, they later hired a big firm to take the largest website featuring tons of articles, funny enough I was offered a job at this firm (probably wanted me to deal with the migration to Wordpress for them, as I was the one creating that website myself). I wasn't interested for a variety of reasons, and being Drupal local knowledge something so RARE, they couldn't complete the task, so: they told the client (the big company), it was impossible to migrate and they should start from scratch. In the process they killed tons of well positioned content, lost tons of traffic, and went from 5K daily visits (unique), to 300-400. Yes, totally killed it and it never recovered.

I often thought there was market for Drupal migration services, I have no idea if this could still be a thing. In my mind I still wonder what happened to tons of websites built on Drupal. Were you one of those cases?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Didn't they rebrand to "Drupal Develop Service Market"? I think they pivoted to targeting corporations and not small publishers anymore, or that's what their $3,800 single user licence or $7,000 corporate user license sugests. [digitaljournal.com...]

[Oimachi2]

I love this post, found it through Google alerts also!

I'm "still" a Drupal guy, but not for long...can do Drupal8/9's ridiculous song and dance with composer and git, what a nightmare...but I can do it!

I can also do WP with ACF and Pods and nearly get the same functionality as Drupal, can do Backdrop also.

I see that thousands of Drupal sites are still on D7, but when I contact them to offer a migration they just ignore me...

When you say Drupal guys are rare, what do you mean? Out of all my clients, I've only once had a Drupal site (mind you it was 10k so worth it) but apart from that, I find it absolutely impossible to find Drupal work unless you have computer science degree and apply for United Nations...!

I'd love to do some Drupal work and migrations, but how and where to book anything?

[explorador]

Didn't they rebrand to "Drupal Develop Service Market"? I think they pivoted to targeting corporations and not small publishers anymore, or that's what their $3,800 single user licence or $7,000 corporate user license sugests. [digitaljournal.com...]

I have no idea about that. My question goes about:

• Curiosity regarding webmasters who openly talked about their projects across platforms, then built something on Drupal or migrated to Drupal, and that's the end of their story, never to hear about adjusting or migrating their websites, and dying.
  
• Same with the company I mentioned, Drupal was the end of the road, and started from scratch in Wordpress. This one at least is understandable to me, as locally, people knowing how to handle Drupal are hard to find.
  
• I didn't see threads on forums asking what to do, how to migrate, or whatever after this Drupal division
  
• And personally curious if there is (or was) a market for this, Drupal migrations

In the past, out of curiosity, checked online work (freelance) websites, I did find people wanting to build stuff on Drupal, not no migrations. Anyway, I was also curious about people who here on WebmasterWorld built stuff on Drupal, what did they do? never got to see the end of their story.

I see that thousands of Drupal sites are still on D7, but when I contact them to offer a migration they just ignore me...

Interesting, I'm curious about that, but at least I never reached out to offer a migration, that's a good idea. I guess, given the times, people are skeptical on such offers, perhaps some direct contact is needed, you know, many people receive offers on a monthly bases offering redesigns.

When you say Drupal guys are rare, what do you mean? Out of all my clients, I've only once had a Drupal site (mind you it was 10k so worth it) but apart from that, I find it absolutely impossible to find Drupal work unless you have computer science degree and apply for United Nations...!

I mean locally. In my country Drupal-able people are amazingly rare, after some years found a local facebook group organizing meetups, it was like 15 guys and then after Drupal 8 they stopped posting. Yes, finding Drupal work is difficult, yes there are places but require some special certifications, anyway locally: no offers to be seen.

I'd love to do some Drupal work and migrations, but how and where to book anything?

A few times I thought about this out of nostalgia, never found anything. Today I'm curious if anyone had any stories to share.

My case? I loved Drupal and built let me see... 6 big websites on Drupal with decent traffic doing great for years, but I left the company, or the work with the client ended after product delivery. Yes I could have migrated those (if asked or hired) to a different platform, even to Wordpress, but that's me, that's how the story would have unfolded. Regarding my websites, no, I didn't build mine on Drupal, instead used my custom made CMS, why? it's specific, fast, and was my goal to code my own solution, that's why I have no personal Drupal migration story regarding my websites.

[Kendo]

We provide plugins for the most popular CMS like Drupal, Joomla, Moodle and WordPress. But we don't get many calls for support on Drupal or Joomla lately. We did provide the same plugins for Nuke but again, not popular and being ASP.Net, maintaining those was a RPIA.

Of them all Drupal was and still is my favourite CMS for building a corporate/product website. But I prefer to roll my own bootstrap templates and avoid the truckload of includes that come along with CMS like WordPress.

A couple of weeks ago I came across and article or discussion, it may even have been someone contacting us by email, banging on about how he uses Joomla because it is the fastest CMS of them all. Well I had to disagree and explained to him that we had properly tested this by creating identical sites and content in each one. It was Drupal that was by far the fastest loading. When told this, the guy called me a liar, stating "who would ever bother to do that?".

Well, when one has 4-5 plugins for each of those CMS and creates a website for each CMS to showcase those plugins, that is what we did!

Each site was identical in page content and embedded media.

[martinibuster]

Instead of a Drupal migration market how about a Drupal 101 market? Teach people how to use it.

Drupal is a good product and it isn't that much different from WordPress. It makes sense to teach people how to use it than migrate sites over to WordPress.

What WOULD be good is a bridge to migrate the sites. Bridges exist for forum software to transfer from one system to another.

[Oimachi2]

Because it's insanely complicated and there is no way to teach it. Only experienced developer and deal with all the bugs and issues. Everytime there is a problem it's days on stack overflow , or it never gets resolved unless you pay $$$$ a developer.

You can't teach any mechanic how to maintain an F1 car, he needs experience.

[explorador]

[...]Kendo: It was Drupal that was by far the fastest loading. When told this, the guy called me a liar, stating "who would ever bother to do that?".

Well, when one has 4-5 plugins for each of those CMS and creates a website for each CMS to showcase those plugins, that is what we did!

That's unfortunate. Just like you explained, I also avoided Wordpress and limited myself to building just a few websites with WP, why? because if you do it well: clients will want more, and it's not what I wanted, and proving Drupal was better did not have any effect, probably because at least locally, almost nobody knows about Drupal, or just find it difficult. There were far too many Drupal vs Wordpress discussions, but rarely one strictly about Drupal and this seemed odd to me, still is, specially wondering about what happened to those websites and lack of evident offers to migrate.

@martinibuster: you are absolutely right. If it's so good, why migrating away? yes, bridges!. In my personal case at least, I offered Drupal for years instead of WP explaining the solid benefits, but the local clients insisted on WP, even solid companies wanted Joomla despite a long history of hacked sites, why? same as many other clients insisting on specific frameworks because they believed it was the secret to positioning a website (wrong concept, yes). Sadly, (just my impression) I came to consider there was (is?) a market regarding migrations away from Drupal, because I noticed more people struggling than adopting it due to lack of local support, or developers actually using Drupal. Recently felt nostalgic and thought, I would enjoy migrating some, and if it means business then great!

Why is it, that my current websites after so many years are not built on top of Drupal? if it's so good that's contradictory, right? Funny enough a post on this forum easily convinced me years ago. It's risky to build something that should last over the years relying on something that might break compatibility after a version change, or if upgrading means unneeded unpaid work. I had those experiences and hated each and every single one, pushing me to focus on creating my own CMS. X1 app changed a lot and became too slow to be useful, X2 app was discontinued because the group of coders just moved on to something else, X3 app had a solid change of philosophy because the coders did so, Drupal changed too, and WP breaks compatibility too in many ways and it's not my favorite (why still so many adopt it is a different discussion), still as a developer creating my own websites, that's extra work I did not want (still not interested). But that's jut me. Your words resonate A LOT, but if Drupal does it again, clients will need support from me in order to deal with the upgrades taking a direction I do not like, and I would feel married to an app. I love Drupal but I did not like what they did, and I don't want to get married with that.

@Oimachi2: True. That's why I still wonder why we don't see offers regarding migrations away from Drupal.

[martinibuster]

Because it's insanely complicated and there is no way to teach it.

My wife, who was inexperienced with any CMS, is proof that that Drupal is not necessarily so difficult. She received about a week of training and now she's hacking templates and modifying CSS like a pro.

My wife works with Drupal at a major organization. She had a superficial understanding of WordPress and a good working knowledge of how HTML works and now she's talking to me over dinner about how a page went missing and she had to set up a URL alias. I had to stop her mid-sentence to remark on how far she's come with handling a Drupal site.

In terms of SEO, switching over the CMS to a new system is a MAJOR change that CAN end badly if the site is not a 1 to 1 change.

It makes far more sense to train someone to use a CMS than to go through the hassle of converting a site from one system to another.

[edited by: phranque at 7:47 am (utc) on Apr 24, 2022]
[edit reason] typo [/edit]

[Kendo]

My wife, who was inexperienced with any CMS, is proof that that Drupal is not necessarily so difficult.

That is how I found it also. With no experience in using either CMS, once installed, I found Drupal to be the easiest to work with and it presented the prettiest website.

[edited by: phranque at 7:48 am (utc) on Apr 24, 2022]
[edit reason] typo [/edit]

[Oimachi2]

Once you have Drupal running, and you want to do basic stuff, sure, it's relatively easy, adding blog posts to Drupal is pretty much the same as Wordpress. Now building elaborate views and really pushing Drupal to it's potential is hard, but very powerful. And in that regards, it's pretty much the same as Drupal 7.

The problem with the new Drupal (8/9) is not ease of use, it's difficulty of setup, configuration, maintenance and updates.

[TorontoBoy]

I really like Drupal, and run a Drupal 8 site now. I started on D4 and have used Drupal continuously. I've also been doing WP sites since 2009. I really love working on both but the two platforms are markedly different in design and philosophy.

Drupal has rarely been successful in migrating. The philosophy of Drupal was to not be constrained by the past platform, but to innovate with no legacy strings attached. This has made Drupal a real bear to upgrade. When you do a major site redesign every couple of years, you kill the whole site, content, graphics, information architecture and all as well as upgrade to a major Drupal version. Or that was the thinking (revolutionary upgrade). Drupal is much more powerful, stable and secure than WP. While there are only 20 or so vulnerabilities for Drupal (I might be inaccurate now), now patched, there are hundreds for WP. I have heard of very few Drupal sites being hacked, whereas hacked WP sites are personal and plentiful.

Drupal has capabilities built-in that are much more difficult to do in WP in a secure way. Drupal has always had these capabilities from a decade back.

That said Drupal is a hard sell for customers. It is expensive to set up, takes a long time, maintenance used to be solid but in recent years has been somewhat hit and miss. The writer's UI is far inferior to WP. End users, including myself, much prefer WP. With increased capabilities, Drupal is much more difficult for customers to understand, for example, the site layout and information architecture. WP is much easier to explain, learn, use and upgrade. WP has withstood the test of time.

I won't be upgrading my D8 site to D9 because my theme has not been upgraded. If the theme writer puts out a theme upgrade then I'll move (New themes now use Symfony, much more difficult to learn, hack and use). I'm not optimistic that the migration will be successful, and I run a small D8 site. In recent years Drupal major upgrades have all been backend such as Symfony (much more complex) and site security. I deal mainly with front-end design. Unless D8 gets severely hacked, which I doubt, there is no need to upgrade to D9.

I will stick with Drupal because its capabilities are numerous and worthwhile for me. If you want a secure site, Drupal is it. That said I don't think I can find work using it, and the future seems dim. Drupal is now corporate, is expensive and requires extremely unique skills. There's no way a not-for-profit could consider a Drupal platform unless they have Drupal developer volunteers. I don't know how well Drupal will connect to its open source community. It all seems more about the big bucks now.

[martinibuster]

WP is much easier to explain, learn, use and upgrade.

That may very well be true. It's literally a WordPress design philosophy to present as few decisions as possible to the end user by making setup decisions ahead of time for the user so that WordPress works right out of the box, as painlessly as possible.

[Kendo]

WP is much easier to explain, learn, use and upgrade.

I have never found that. In fact it gets messier and more confusing along the way. They took away the Classic Editor as default and replaced it with something that I find useless for anything more than add "Hello World!" to a web page.

[explorador]

Oimachi2: Once you have Drupal running, and you want to do basic stuff, sure, it's relatively easy, adding blog posts to Drupal is pretty much the same as Wordpress. Now building elaborate views and really pushing Drupal to it's potential is hard, but very powerful. And in that regards, it's pretty much the same as Drupal 7.

The problem with the new Drupal (8/9) is not ease of use, it's difficulty of setup, configuration, maintenance and updates.

That's also the way I see it. Like others, I also proved Drupal handled high traffic way better than WP, using less resources, and easy to upgrade in terms of minimal stuff (no major upgrades, as D has been pretty stable, it's not like 1, 2, 3 versions over 2 years), but while people/clients/company were happy with D, they did not want to stick with it.

Teaching / easy to learn?

I don't see the point. The angle and context of the thread is not about that, I'm happy to teach just as every other Drupal enthusiast, but I'm not looking for people to teach, I wouldn't do it for free, and would only happen IF a company or client is interested on hiring me for those purposes. In general, Lots of clients dropped Drupal for specific reasons (some of those we know about), and they moved away, most of them loosing data and starting all over from scratch or with some copy paste text approaches, I'm curious about that. As much as we could talk about teaching or being easy to learn/use, the market is not asking about Drupal, I don't see them doing so.

It would be easy to think those are not critical projects, and thus, people are not interested on spending money... but some clients had no budget issues, so there must be something else:
- not knowing about alternatives regarding upgrades?
- not knowing about alternatives regarding migration?
- the usual opportunistic developer telling them "it's impossible?"

As for clients, the whole thing seems quite obvious to me in terms of market/client behavior, but I was still curious on what other people had to say, specially developers. Some here built sites with Drupal, I'm curious on what they did over these years.

I'm pretty much on the same page as @TorontoBoy explained. Regarding theme upgrades, I developed the themes from zero, custom made, so things looked differently to me regarding upgrading: nobody would upgrade the theme, and I'm not keen on doing the same theme building each time an upgrade happens.