We already dropped Drupal - maybe it’s time for you to do the same.

Whoa! Hang on a minute Torchbox! You’ve got skin in the game.

Yes we have. Feathery skin in fact, in the shape of Wagtail, so we’re not going to claim to be unopinionated. And let’s face it - to quote Culture Club - “popularity breeds contempt”. StackOverflow’s survey in 2019 showed Drupal occupying the rather unholy trinity of being simultaneously the least loved, the most dreaded, and the least wanted framework. But we all know things are a bit more complex than that.

Drupal is still very much out there, and it’s huge. It’s established, trusted, and its fundamental development principles remain unchanged. The agency scene is alive. Major sites continue to be developed. Drupal was good to us for years and we’re not here just to kick it. 

Instead, what we do want to do is to revisit some of the points we made in our original article, and review the current state of play for organisations facing Drupal 7 end of life. Because if you find yourself in that situation, sticking with Drupal isn’t a no-brainer.  Why? Because moving from Drupal 7 to 8/9 can’t be thought of as an ‘upgrade’ - if you’re going to do it right, then you’re looking at what amounts to a ground-up site rebuild. So, you should approach your decision making process on that basis, and that means it’s a good time as any to consider your CMS options. And there are some compelling reasons why Drupal may not be the right long term bet.

1. Be prepared to cough up for the really good stuff

Some of the most compelling features of Drupal 8 and 9 aren’t open source. Lift - Acquia’s customer experience solution - is positioned as a pay-for service augmenting an open source CMS. “So what, the WordPress ecosystem may be the most successful freemium ecosystem in the history of the internet.” Yes but it’s important to be clear, that very much unlike (say) WooCommerce, Acquia Lift costs tens of thousands of dollars annually. “Well fair enough, it’s clearly enterprise functionality!” Fair point…though, Wagtail has been enhanced with an open source library for core personalisation functionality that’s freely available to develop with. More concerning though is the situation with Site Studio (formerly Cohesion). It’s powerful; it’s cool; it’s what the Drupal community hoped Layout Builder would be - but it too sits behind a paywall. Given Acquia’s influence of the Drupal roadmap, its acquisition in 2019 makes it likely that an enterprise model will continue to play a major role in the future direction of Drupal.

2. Technical inertia

Site Studio also gestures at a future for Drupal that’s even less about code and much more about UI-based configuration. With that design decision comes all the continued baggage of a complex admin interface, and even though that can (and doubtless will) be improved over time, it means more belly fat around the Drupal codebase, which will slow things down by making it harder to keep up with the pace at which web technology is changing.

As a case in point: we all know that Drupal is all about PHP and Symfony, just as Wagtail’s basis is Python and Django. Drupal’s move to Symfony was undoubtedly a good one - but Drupal isn’t keeping pace with the framework. Symfony 4 has been out since 2017 but it's only just now coming to Drupal in version 9, which means there will be technical debt built in from release. (Symfony 5 - the current recommended version - has been out since Nov 19.)

3. Backing the wrong backend

Maybe a more compelling point though, for anyone considering the long term future of their CMS investment, is that Python and Django are continuing to grow in popularity with developers - and that’s bearing in mind they’re already one of the most popular languages and (non-JS) frameworks at the moment. There’s no sign this is going to change any time soon. Ultimately, you’re not going to get far with data science or machine learning if you’re working with PHP. Mastering Python looks like a great career choice for any would-be developer right now and this is probably one of the reasons why it’s increasingly the language startups (and therefore graduates) target, along with JavaScript.

4. A11y not quite aboard

Last but definitely not least, although Drupal has made good progress on providing a more accessible admin environment (via the Claro theme), contributed modules and/or custom development are still needed to make it fully accessible. This doesn’t feel right for a modern CMS. Creating a fully accessible admin experience has been a major focus for the Wagtail core team for some time now and we’re nearly done baking in WCAG 2.1 AA compliance out of the box.

Decisions, decisions

So you’re running a Drupal 7 site, you know you need to take action reasonably soon, and you’ve made it this far into the article - hopefully then you’re a little more open to the idea that evaluating other CMS solutions really ought to be an essential part of your decision making and procurement process. What next? Here are a few pieces of advice in terms of what you should consider as part of your evaluation.

• Think seriously about the user experience for editors and content creators. Engage with all the people in the organisation who have to spend any meaningful amount of time working with your Drupal 7 CMS and talk to them about aspects of the user interface, workflow, and process that they either find counter intuitive or time consuming at the moment - and make sure you canvas their opinion on things that would make their lives easier. How much time does it take to setup and publish content in the existing CMS at the moment? How are users authoring their content and could the process of publishing to the web be streamlined? Using a CMS transition to streamline things for your content team will make them happy and could yield huge efficiency savings for you.
• If your objective is to integrate your CMS more tightly with other important platforms within your organisation - such as your CRM - don’t assume that just because ‘there’s already a module/plugin for that’ things will somehow all work as if by magic. Integrations with third party systems are often much more complex than you think. If a supplier is able to demonstrate a small proof of concept or tech demo integration with one or two of the platforms you use, it’s a good sign that their CMS has good support for interoperability and can be developed / extended without needing too much developer time. You’re more likely to get the sort of integration you’re after.
• Make sure you get the opportunity to try out or see a demonstration of alternative CMS systems so that you can get a sense of how things might work for you. And don’t be shy about asking a supplier to tailor a demo so you can see how mission-critical features that sound great on paper will actually work in practice. 

† We updated this article on 23rd October 2020 to reflect the extension of Drupal 7's EOL by a year from November 2021 to November 2022.