Ask HN: Why hasn't Drupal benefited from WordPress's current issues?
Having used Drupal a long while back I would have thought that it would be the obvious answer as an alternative to WordPress if that time came.
However with the upheaval and issues that are occurring in the WordPress community at the moment, I have rarely seen anyone online recommend Drupal as an alternative to WordPress.
Both are PHP-based open source content management systems. Both have similar features (though with perhaps a different emphasis).
Why hasn't Drupal benefited, or even been recommended often, when discussing WordPress issues?
Does Drupal just lack the mindshare required to become a feasible alternative?
These things take time to sort out. Anyone moving platforms now, due to the drama, isn't going to show up in surveys/polls until after they've migrated. And depending on the size of their site, a migration could take the better part of a year. I expect we'll see how the sands are shifting by next July.
Wordpress is fundamentally a blog posting app with a rich plugin and editor ecosystem for advanced usage. It starts out simple, can result in a functional website in a matter of minutes, but can be expanded a LOT to meet your needs. And it's largely backward compatible and major versions usually provide some escape hatch in the form of a plugin that can revert to some previous functionality or preferred UX (like undoing the newer block editor in favor of the simple rich text one of yore). Once you set it up and add some basic caching and security plugins, it's pretty much ready to go.
Drupal is a content management system management system that requires you to spend hours upon hours learning how to manage the software itself before you can start making useful schemas and content. It starts out overly complex and it becomes unusably cluttered with advanced usage. It's horrendously bloated, the kind of shitty enterprise monolithic app (so common in the 90s and 2000s) that did a thousand things poorly, in order to sell itself to management. End-users suffer. The editor experience is horribly slow and the UX sucks. The developer experience is decades behind modern systems, and even worse than Wordpress. The API docs are a confusing mess of clobbered together notes across incompatible versions. The plugins are mostly abandoned. The upgrade process is really not an upgrade; it is a total rewrite (and they've had to postpone the mandatory end of life several times over because so many people struggled with that process). It's a very fragmented ecosystem full of tech debt and endless frustration. And as a result, it's spawned a lot of third-party consultancies and agencies that specialize in Drupal – in a bad way, as in they just help hold hapless small businesses hostage in the Drupal hellscape. It's open-source, yes, but extremely subject to proprietary lock-in, not just within Drupal but within an individual version range of Drupal.
Drupal is bar none the single worst software I've EVER had to work with, and the only framework I absolutely refuse to ever work with again, no matter how much a client wants to pay for it. I would absolutely not recommend it to anyone for any use case, and would very strongly encourage the use of ANY alternative framework, even that rando repo on Github that only has 2 stars from 5 years ago.
It's not just me, either... 3/4 of people who worked with Drupal never want to do so again: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology/#2-web-frame...
To put that in context, compare it to the much-hated (here) React (double the % of people want to keep using it) or even Next.js (almost double). Drupal is TWICE as hated as the most bloated JS framework out there. jQuery soup is more liked. ASP is dramatically more loved. Drupal is right down there with Gatsby, the first AngularJS, and other dead frameworks.
And that new SO visualization is a bit confusing. The older style (2022 and prior) makes it clearer that Drupal is the 2nd-most "dreaded" framework out there: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-most-loved-dre....
Stay far, far, FAR away from Drupal if you value your time, happiness, or sanity.
If you're looking for a Wordpress alternative, look at any other self-hosted CMS, or a headless system, or something you clobber together out of Airtables, or a flat file CMS, or Access, or Filemaker, or just anything, really. Not Drupal.
Drupal still has a very high learning curve. I'll use Drupal over WP any day, but I can acknowledge it has some rather rough edges.
I haven't dug into it yet, but I think that "starshot" initiative that's been Drupal.org's front page since the last DrupalCon might be aimed at giving people an option without the rough edges.
Personally, if Wordpress handled security alerts with plugins the way Drupal does, and if they did a better job of keeping bad code out of plugins (why can a theme implement a form?? At least that was the case years ago. Has it changed?) I'd give WP a serious look again.
Drupal peaked in like 2009. It’s mostly built by “click monkeys”, as you can do a lot by clicking around the UI to build stuff. But it’s old and even the founder abandoned it long ago around 2012.
people use it because they didn’t learn anything else and It still has hype from those early days (2005-2009).
It was also a nightmare upgrading the versions of it. It faded out of popularity with most people for a reason.
There are better options today and even 10 years ago and not just Wordpress.
> But it’s old and even the founder abandoned it long ago around 2012.
Dries is still using Drupal. Here is his personal blog, where he discusses updating to Drupal 11: https://dri.es/drupal-11-released
Dries is the founder of Acquia, whose products are all based on or related to running Drupal websites.
Dries was the keynote speaker at DrupalCon Barcelona last month, where he discussed the new features currently under development in Drupal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wce6FkNN2Io
> It was also a nightmare upgrading the versions of it.
This was an issue prior to version 8. All major versions since then have been directly upgradable. It usually takes me 2-3 hours to do a major version upgrade. Maybe a few more if there's a lot of custom code.
> It’s mostly built by “click monkeys”, as you can do a lot by clicking around the UI to build stuff.
Isn't this an almost perfect description of WordPress? It hasn't seemed to have done any harm if that's the case.
> But it’s old and even the founder abandoned it long ago around 2012.
Are you sure? On drupal.org right now one of the main links is one of the founders in a keynote video presenting the newest version.
The delta going from Wordpress to Drupal is quite big, it's been few years, but I remeber quotes for Drupal 8 projects being a few times larger than quotes for Wordpress based projects.
Most WordPress customers aren't so much locked into "WordPress", the application, but rather a provider of WordPress with a custom CMS. Unless their provider switches, they aren't really enabled to consciously protest WordPress.
This goes for both WP Engine and Automattic. Could be the reason why both are comfortable going nuclear on each other - they know their users don't have an easy alternative.
>> "Could be the reason why both are comfortable going nuclear on each other - they know their users don't have an easy alternative."
I've followed this from the start and as best as I can tell Automattic is the only side that went nuclear. WP Engine sent a C&D, then filed a lawsuit when the attacks persisted, and seems to have gone quiet since then aside from responding to the takeover of ACF.
WP Engine's response is how I expect a professionally-run organization to handle things: address technical issues as they pop up while continuing to provide the service people pay for, but otherwise quietly wait for the trial. Meanwhile there's a new bomb lobbed from Matt Mullenweg 1-2 times a day at WP Engine, the WordPress community, individual contributors, or some combination while Automattic employees are out doing the work of a PR department.