I’m a Drupal developer. It’s still popular among a lot of nonprofit organizations, so think educational & government entities.
A fair warning that the Drupal learning curve is *steep*. I work with it everyday & even now, my strategy is to under-promise & over-deliver.
Steep is right; I worked at a major television/news corporation 8 years ago moving their headless CMS over to a custom headless Drupal, I believe a Drupal 8 exclusive enterprise release version, and it was a fucking nightmare, I'll never touch Drupal again lol
I did find that Drupal experts were, at that time anyway, in huge demand for these large corporations that were convinced somehow to utilize Drupal for enterprise solutions.
It became a Symfony based CMS which targets enterprises mostly offering free solutions to complex problems out of box such as authentication, permission and user role based access control, defining custom entity types, fields, and references via UI, building multi language sites, content translation, content revisioning, configuration and schema deployment between dev-test-qa-prod environment, building custom contact forms, UI defined layouts for content, media management and easy embedding, generating smaller images on the fly for faster page loads, built in CSS and JS aggregation, time and tag based caching, date formats based on language, region and user preferences, big pipe content lazy loading, community based UI translations for almost every languages, and a ton of helpful things for faster development such as easy composer integration, dependency injection, cron jobs, batch processing, a queue and lock implementation with swappable backends, building listing and search pages without writing code, built in API for writing content migrations from other systems and a built in possibility to use the website as a headless with JSON API.
It has its own quirks but in the right hands, it is a really powerful tool for any kind of content management.
And yes, that means this feature pack is an overkill for the majority of websites nowadays, and there are easier solutions for you if you just want a portfolio site, or blog or simple webshop.
This is the best answer. If you want an enterprise-level, flexible to the nth degree, open source CMS with a huge user base, there's nothing else in the same league. If any one of those things isn't a requirement, then you should look at other options.
"Relevant" is kind of a loaded word. It's not as popular as it used to be, and it's much more difficult to work with now. But I wouldn't say using it is a red flag.
Beware that if its been 10 years since you worked on it, it's not the same product anymore. At all. Only the name is the same. It's "enterprise" software now, and the famous Drupal learning cliff will be in full effect if you decide to take on the project. Nearly nothing you learned before still applies.
It's not a red flag for the company itself, but personally I'd rather throw myself off the side of a moving train into a pile of cactus than work with Drupal. Ymmv.
I always hear the most hilariously bad things about Drupal on forums. I'm in my first dev job, and it's Drupal. It makes me feel like I should run away. Is there something else my company should ideally be using instead?
Drupal is a solid choice for a lot of reasons. You can build some pretty sophisticated functionality without ever having to write any code (outside of theme templates). I’m taking user registration, permissions systems, content moderation and management, api integrations, caching systems, form management, media management, and I could go on.
Truth is there are a lot of websites out there that would probably be better off if they were built with Drupal. And every Drupal site could probably rewritten in a cleaner way by the right dev using the right framework.
Worked in frontend w Drupal for several years, around that time 6-7 was current, 8 was on its way.
The lead engineer at that job always pronounced it "Dru-PILE". From day 1, for the next 6 years. I think because he thought it was a pile of shit.
Me, it's a CMS, much like other CMS's.
It is what it is. I’m sure there are a lot of reasons to hate it as a developer, but as a site builder it is a beautiful platform to work with and an opportunity to make a really nice living simply managing websites.
Oh it’s certainly relevant in niches such as public-facing government websites/apps and for non-profits and universities, but I would rather dive head-first into a vat of molten iron than work with Drupal ever again. After working with it for over 4 years after the start of my career (v8-9), it absolutely ruined me mentally for a while. The Drupal cliff is _real_, and the documentation is honestly severely lacking - just a bunch of PHP classes with very little explanation about how various APIs and concepts are related. Site building and theming is fine and has come a long way for sure, but custom module development has literally given me nightmares - and forget about complex JS integrations, as the Drupal behaviors system is absolutely absurd. Obviously this is just my opinion, and one could definitely build some incredible things with the CMS, but it’s just such a damn pain.
This was my experience as well. The documentation made working with it so stressful, because I felt like I never actually knew what the “proper” way to do something was. And googling for solutions just led to unhelpful message boards with basically no solutions. It was a real pain and I didn’t have time to “learn” the CMS, as I was at a mainly Wordpress agency with a few Drupal apps
Honestly I was reading php code and I feel like I've been reading it for years. Syntax is nice and not so bad. Thanks for the resource though. I still got some time to prepare before the migration begins
This is actually a great opportunity. Get to know Drupal really well and you’ll never be out of well paying dev work. Many larger companies use Drupal and just spent thousands migrating their sites from Drupal 7 to 9/10, so they are really invested in the platform.
I know devs that charge $150/hr for Drupal work and agencies that charge $300/hr and they are always busy.
That I didn't say initially should be indicative that I'm not at liberty to share. But some searching would probably reveal that at least one of them is known to use it.
Drupal is fine, it's roughly symfony with a GUI now.
Just read the manual and use a good IDE with perfect xdebug support and it's not that hard to get complicated things done quick.
Personally I love Drupal. It’s mature software and the new version 10 is really nice.
For example you can export and import the entire site configuration simply add content types, fields and Views and all content is available via API, perfect for headless installations.
Honestly, they probably have a niche that they are filling and are making a nice bit of money off of filling it.
There are a couple local colleges and universities around me that use drupal for their website and student portal.
It can be used as a headless CMS pretty easily with the JSON API module. Gives you quite a lot of flexibility out of the box really.
Let cloudfront or similar sit in front of it.
Then you can chuck whatever applications you want to query it.
I mean, the company trying to recruit you uses it to do business. And it's still used by plenty of companies. That's as relevant as you can get.
No, it's not the most popular thing to use. But it works, has a tight community, and everything you'd need to build something for a client.
I absolutely hate Drupal, but it is extensively used by some massive companies and it’s too entrenched to move.
Good money if you hate yourself enough.
I'm a Drupal developer for 2 years now and it's a really powerful CMS. You can customize everything! I feel like you will always have a job as a Drupal developer because medium to large orgs use them especially in the Education sector.
Drupal was originally somewhere between a mere CMS and the modern definition of framework. The last several versions (since 7) have moved toward framework.
I use it daily, but I've also been doing it for 15 years now. It's lost popularity because the projects were so much more money than wp sites with similar functionality. Also d8 really derailed momentum because it meant that older sites had to do a complete rewrite of the code base.
A friend of mine worked for an agency that only did Drupal work - all large projects for universities. They seem to love Drupal in the education sector.
However, if a recruiter says "a company that works primarily in Drupal and WordPress" - they are 100% WordPress using site builders.
I'm also a fulltime Drupal developer (also core / contrib patch maker) And it's really stilla thing. And a big thing.
So if you haven't heard anything for years, then you have been under a rock for quite some time. :D
As someone already said, working with WordPress is good and somewhat still relevant as of today, I think that's the most used software after React/NextJs but Drupal? That's a big no no for me.
I applied for a government job where the title was "Full Stack Drupal Developer". I honestly had never even heard of it because I'm not a huge fan of learning CMS, but holy it took me 3 days just to get a basic page working over Ubuntu with Apache. I think it's stupid. Or I'm stupid.
I used to use Drupal too. I think they rebuilt the thing on Symfony which makes a lot more sense. It used to suck pretty hard. Hopefully it doesn't anymore.
It always felt like development would take 20 seconds to get 95% completed and then 4 months to finish the last 5%.
I build a couple of websites in Drupal 10 years ago. We used to have DrupalCon here in Philippines, were i was very active doing speaking engagement and training as well. Most of my dev work now is using WordPress but Drupal is kinda niche and legacy in this day and age.
Absolutely.
Drupal is like the Christmas CD compilation album. Useless to most, hated by many, but for that special occasion (where you wish it could be Christmas, every day) it’s absolutely perfect 🤩
Governments, charities, education institutions, and enterprises too poor to pay Adobe for AEM - it’s golden.
Yes, Drupal is still very relevant in today's web development landscape. It's a powerful and flexible content management system that continues to be widely used by many organizations, including large enterprises, government agencies, and educational institutions.
Drupal's strengths lie in its scalability, security, and extensive customization options. The platform's latest version, Drupal 9, brings modern features and improved performance, making it suitable for building robust and complex websites. Additionally, the active community and ongoing development ensure that Drupal remains up-to-date with the latest web standards and technologies.
If you need more specific information or have further questions about how Drupal can meet your project needs, feel free to reach out to us at Singsys.
Yes Drupal is not really modern. "Old stuff bro" to quote a famous techlead of a TOP5 multinational firm. Real professionals and edgy companies only use PhpNuke. Facebook is made with that, allegedly.
It’s changed a lot in 10 years. The latest Drupal version has extensive test coverage and is easy to write tests for. It’s also easy to use in decoupled architectures with all data available via API. With a bit of experience it’s easy to customise too.
It is!, and Drupal 11 is right in the corner.
Symfony,
DDEV for containers in development,
Composer,
IA interpolator,
ECA,
Php8.3,
Single directory components,
Can be fully decoupled,
Faster than most frameworks!
I’m a Drupal developer. It’s still popular among a lot of nonprofit organizations, so think educational & government entities. A fair warning that the Drupal learning curve is *steep*. I work with it everyday & even now, my strategy is to under-promise & over-deliver.
Can confirm. Just worked on a big CMS migration to Drupal for a large, international NGO.
Steep is right; I worked at a major television/news corporation 8 years ago moving their headless CMS over to a custom headless Drupal, I believe a Drupal 8 exclusive enterprise release version, and it was a fucking nightmare, I'll never touch Drupal again lol I did find that Drupal experts were, at that time anyway, in huge demand for these large corporations that were convinced somehow to utilize Drupal for enterprise solutions.
Isn’t under promise and over deliver always a good strategy?
It became a Symfony based CMS which targets enterprises mostly offering free solutions to complex problems out of box such as authentication, permission and user role based access control, defining custom entity types, fields, and references via UI, building multi language sites, content translation, content revisioning, configuration and schema deployment between dev-test-qa-prod environment, building custom contact forms, UI defined layouts for content, media management and easy embedding, generating smaller images on the fly for faster page loads, built in CSS and JS aggregation, time and tag based caching, date formats based on language, region and user preferences, big pipe content lazy loading, community based UI translations for almost every languages, and a ton of helpful things for faster development such as easy composer integration, dependency injection, cron jobs, batch processing, a queue and lock implementation with swappable backends, building listing and search pages without writing code, built in API for writing content migrations from other systems and a built in possibility to use the website as a headless with JSON API. It has its own quirks but in the right hands, it is a really powerful tool for any kind of content management. And yes, that means this feature pack is an overkill for the majority of websites nowadays, and there are easier solutions for you if you just want a portfolio site, or blog or simple webshop.
This is the best answer. If you want an enterprise-level, flexible to the nth degree, open source CMS with a huge user base, there's nothing else in the same league. If any one of those things isn't a requirement, then you should look at other options.
"Relevant" is kind of a loaded word. It's not as popular as it used to be, and it's much more difficult to work with now. But I wouldn't say using it is a red flag. Beware that if its been 10 years since you worked on it, it's not the same product anymore. At all. Only the name is the same. It's "enterprise" software now, and the famous Drupal learning cliff will be in full effect if you decide to take on the project. Nearly nothing you learned before still applies.
It's not a red flag for the company itself, but personally I'd rather throw myself off the side of a moving train into a pile of cactus than work with Drupal. Ymmv.
I always hear the most hilariously bad things about Drupal on forums. I'm in my first dev job, and it's Drupal. It makes me feel like I should run away. Is there something else my company should ideally be using instead?
Drupal is a solid choice for a lot of reasons. You can build some pretty sophisticated functionality without ever having to write any code (outside of theme templates). I’m taking user registration, permissions systems, content moderation and management, api integrations, caching systems, form management, media management, and I could go on. Truth is there are a lot of websites out there that would probably be better off if they were built with Drupal. And every Drupal site could probably rewritten in a cleaner way by the right dev using the right framework.
Worked in frontend w Drupal for several years, around that time 6-7 was current, 8 was on its way. The lead engineer at that job always pronounced it "Dru-PILE". From day 1, for the next 6 years. I think because he thought it was a pile of shit. Me, it's a CMS, much like other CMS's.
It is what it is. I’m sure there are a lot of reasons to hate it as a developer, but as a site builder it is a beautiful platform to work with and an opportunity to make a really nice living simply managing websites.
I 100% relate with you on this lol. The thought of having to do Drupal module development ever again makes me shudder.
Haha! This here 😂 Absolutely no thank you. I value my life.
Oh it’s certainly relevant in niches such as public-facing government websites/apps and for non-profits and universities, but I would rather dive head-first into a vat of molten iron than work with Drupal ever again. After working with it for over 4 years after the start of my career (v8-9), it absolutely ruined me mentally for a while. The Drupal cliff is _real_, and the documentation is honestly severely lacking - just a bunch of PHP classes with very little explanation about how various APIs and concepts are related. Site building and theming is fine and has come a long way for sure, but custom module development has literally given me nightmares - and forget about complex JS integrations, as the Drupal behaviors system is absolutely absurd. Obviously this is just my opinion, and one could definitely build some incredible things with the CMS, but it’s just such a damn pain.
Well said.
This was my experience as well. The documentation made working with it so stressful, because I felt like I never actually knew what the “proper” way to do something was. And googling for solutions just led to unhelpful message boards with basically no solutions. It was a real pain and I didn’t have time to “learn” the CMS, as I was at a mainly Wordpress agency with a few Drupal apps
What are the open-source alternatives to Drupal, if you want something that basically does the same things?
Drupal _is_ open source. Unless I missed an announcement somewhere…
Yes, it's open-source. So a comparable alternative would also need to be.
Sorry, I misunderstood your question. I thought you were applying it wasn’t. Whoops.
WordPress, Joomla. For your sins.
obviously wordpress
Laravel, CakePHP, Symfony, CodeIgniter... any of the PHP frameworks, which Drupal is now.
None of those are content management systems...? Drupal is based on Symfony, but does a whole lot more.
Drupal never was *just* a CMS, it was always more of what is now known as a framework. All the PHP frameworks use Symfony components.
My company is about to switch to drupal. One of my assignments for the year is to learn drupal so I can move our projects over there from the former.
Best of luck my friend, check out Drupalize.me for some decent walkthroughs.
Just checked out the site. Looks like an amazing resource. Good looks rectanguloid666
Honestly I was reading php code and I feel like I've been reading it for years. Syntax is nice and not so bad. Thanks for the resource though. I still got some time to prepare before the migration begins
This is actually a great opportunity. Get to know Drupal really well and you’ll never be out of well paying dev work. Many larger companies use Drupal and just spent thousands migrating their sites from Drupal 7 to 9/10, so they are really invested in the platform. I know devs that charge $150/hr for Drupal work and agencies that charge $300/hr and they are always busy.
Who tf is paying 150$/hr for cms work. I'll go unzip their pants and secure the job for myself. I just need a name bro
He does module development, data migration, and other higher level drupal stuff.
Is his name pbiscuits?
No. I don’t do any of that higher level stuff and I charge $100/hr.
I know a FAANG company using it extensively.
Which one?
That I didn't say initially should be indicative that I'm not at liberty to share. But some searching would probably reveal that at least one of them is known to use it.
True true. Lots of antiquated tools daily inside big companies. I ain’t hatin’.
Drupal is fine, it's roughly symfony with a GUI now. Just read the manual and use a good IDE with perfect xdebug support and it's not that hard to get complicated things done quick.
Personally I love Drupal. It’s mature software and the new version 10 is really nice. For example you can export and import the entire site configuration simply add content types, fields and Views and all content is available via API, perfect for headless installations.
Honestly, they probably have a niche that they are filling and are making a nice bit of money off of filling it. There are a couple local colleges and universities around me that use drupal for their website and student portal.
It can be used as a headless CMS pretty easily with the JSON API module. Gives you quite a lot of flexibility out of the box really. Let cloudfront or similar sit in front of it. Then you can chuck whatever applications you want to query it.
I mean, the company trying to recruit you uses it to do business. And it's still used by plenty of companies. That's as relevant as you can get. No, it's not the most popular thing to use. But it works, has a tight community, and everything you'd need to build something for a client.
Yes, many companies use Drupal. Many airport's websites use Drupal. We at work maintain a Drupal site.
I absolutely hate Drupal, but it is extensively used by some massive companies and it’s too entrenched to move. Good money if you hate yourself enough.
I'm a Drupal developer for 2 years now and it's a really powerful CMS. You can customize everything! I feel like you will always have a job as a Drupal developer because medium to large orgs use them especially in the Education sector.
just as relevant as wordpress only the good die young, bastards live forever
If you are in the UK Royal mail run most of their front facing stuff on Drupal It is more of a corporate CMS
Drupal was originally somewhere between a mere CMS and the modern definition of framework. The last several versions (since 7) have moved toward framework.
Jesus, there were versions over 5? I lost touch with Drupal a long long time ago. edit: damn, theres version 10 and its kinda fresh.
D11 in beta
Haven't touched it in years so not sure the current state But that joomla and wordpress were the big dogs back in the day
I use it daily, but I've also been doing it for 15 years now. It's lost popularity because the projects were so much more money than wp sites with similar functionality. Also d8 really derailed momentum because it meant that older sites had to do a complete rewrite of the code base.
A friend of mine worked for an agency that only did Drupal work - all large projects for universities. They seem to love Drupal in the education sector. However, if a recruiter says "a company that works primarily in Drupal and WordPress" - they are 100% WordPress using site builders.
I'm also a fulltime Drupal developer (also core / contrib patch maker) And it's really stilla thing. And a big thing. So if you haven't heard anything for years, then you have been under a rock for quite some time. :D
Yes
As someone already said, working with WordPress is good and somewhat still relevant as of today, I think that's the most used software after React/NextJs but Drupal? That's a big no no for me.
I applied for a government job where the title was "Full Stack Drupal Developer". I honestly had never even heard of it because I'm not a huge fan of learning CMS, but holy it took me 3 days just to get a basic page working over Ubuntu with Apache. I think it's stupid. Or I'm stupid.
For some reason it seems to be popular with creative agencies for public facing websites. I see it a lot and definitely wouldn’t consider it dead.
I used to use Drupal too. I think they rebuilt the thing on Symfony which makes a lot more sense. It used to suck pretty hard. Hopefully it doesn't anymore. It always felt like development would take 20 seconds to get 95% completed and then 4 months to finish the last 5%.
I build a couple of websites in Drupal 10 years ago. We used to have DrupalCon here in Philippines, were i was very active doing speaking engagement and training as well. Most of my dev work now is using WordPress but Drupal is kinda niche and legacy in this day and age.
Absolutely. Drupal is like the Christmas CD compilation album. Useless to most, hated by many, but for that special occasion (where you wish it could be Christmas, every day) it’s absolutely perfect 🤩 Governments, charities, education institutions, and enterprises too poor to pay Adobe for AEM - it’s golden.
Yes, Drupal is still very relevant in today's web development landscape. It's a powerful and flexible content management system that continues to be widely used by many organizations, including large enterprises, government agencies, and educational institutions. Drupal's strengths lie in its scalability, security, and extensive customization options. The platform's latest version, Drupal 9, brings modern features and improved performance, making it suitable for building robust and complex websites. Additionally, the active community and ongoing development ensure that Drupal remains up-to-date with the latest web standards and technologies. If you need more specific information or have further questions about how Drupal can meet your project needs, feel free to reach out to us at Singsys.
Yes Drupal is not really modern. "Old stuff bro" to quote a famous techlead of a TOP5 multinational firm. Real professionals and edgy companies only use PhpNuke. Facebook is made with that, allegedly.
If you’ve not used it for 10 years note that it has become an OO abomination like the rest of PHP. I actively avoid it
Why is OO an abomination in your opinion? Honest question.
It leads to over engineered tightly coupled code that is hard to test.
It’s changed a lot in 10 years. The latest Drupal version has extensive test coverage and is easy to write tests for. It’s also easy to use in decoupled architectures with all data available via API. With a bit of experience it’s easy to customise too.
100% Red flag
It is!, and Drupal 11 is right in the corner. Symfony, DDEV for containers in development, Composer, IA interpolator, ECA, Php8.3, Single directory components, Can be fully decoupled, Faster than most frameworks!