According to the latest market share trends posted on W3Techs.com, Drupal is currently one of the most popular content management systems (CMS) in the market. Used by 2.3% of all websites and having a worldwide market share of 4.6%, Drupal might seem to be far behind from other CMSs; it is moving at a faster pace to compete.
Some of the most popular websites built on Drupal include – Weather.com, AutoTrader.com, NBC.com, NBCUniversal.com, and Patch.com. Also, large-scale websites like Arizona, Mint, The Economist, and the NY Government are running with the help of Drupal CMS successfully.
Written in opensource script code-PHP, the framework is more popular than Magento, Blogger, Shopify, and similar. Let’s look at the status of Drupal in the past years and where it is headed in the future.
Status of Drupal in 2019
Drupal has been awarded many titles. It has come to the limelight as the best CMS for nonprofits, publications, government agencies, and large-scale organizations. It fits perfectly for heavy traffic sites or websites having complex, vast resource libraries and databases.
Drupal 8 came out in 2015 and a major release was long due. So, 2019 was the year of the official announcement of Drupal 9 that came out via Dries at DrupalCon Europe. This information whisked a lot of anticipation in the community and gathered a lot of Contribution, too. This also meant that Drupal 7 would reach end-of-life in November 2021.
According to Dries, the state of Drupal in 2019 saw a huge jump of improvements. Drupal has continued to show momentum with 51% growth.
Drupal Performance 2020
The year 2020 was a great year for the CMS. As promised by the founder in 2019, Drupal 9 was released on 3rd June 2020 amid the global COVID-19 pandemic. This launch stirred discussions and many pondered over the newest improvements and waited for the results. While a verdict is yet to be out, it is safe to say that it wasn’t a bad deal for Drupal’s overall growth as an open-source CMS. It surely marked a new tangent for the CMS with PHP 8, Symphony 5 & 6, and much more that stands on offer.
Drupal 9 brought a lot of conversations around and the future with Drupal 10 is not so far behind in 2022. Meanwhile, the latest release of Drupal 9.1 has also made a hit with the Olivero and Claro themes being introduced officially in the update. It is only about time that businesses will head in the Drupal direction soon.
Why should we use Drupal moving forward?
Looking at Drupal’s future scope, organizations are preferring Drupal as their CMS for business at large. It was with Drupal 8 onwards that the CMS moved more into the direction of enterprise-ready features. Here is an attractive list of accolades that are making Drupal win:
- Drupal’s admin interface is working towards running on React soon as we can see an effort underway by core maintainers.
- Drupal 8 is here to support JSON API and GraphQL.
- The “Decoupled” movement in the Drupal community is already a hit.
- Drupal is adapting towards a future that is “API First”.
- According to builtwith.com, Drupal is giving a tough call to other CMSs in Alexa’s top million sites list.
That was our take on Drupal as one of the top preferred CMS in the marketplace. I hope this gave you a good view of the CMS and its probable future. It’s time for you to take a call and make your choice for your business.
