Evolution of Drupal 10: All you need to know .

Background about Drupal

Drupal has been a popular content management system and always stood out as a scalable robust solution.

Its focus on security and content management made it a great choice for big enterprises, governments, non-profits and University websites.

Let's look at some data about usage of Drupal since 2014 to understand how Drupal has evolved overtime.

As visible, From 2015 to 2018, it powered over 1.2 Million websites, with 1 Million plus websites in Drupal 7, which is the most stable version of Drupal to date.

But since 2019, Drupal kept losing customers with only about 0.8 Million websites still on Drupal as of Today.

The question is despite offering all the great features, why was Drupal loosing customers?

Why was Drupal not growing if Drupal 7 was such a success?

Drupal lacked Evolution.

Drupal 7 was a huge success for Drupal because of its security and scalability and they saw its fruits coming to life and enjoyed it for over 3 years.

With further releases of Drupal 8 & and 9, the CMS did make serious progress and users who stayed on Drupal were very happy with the progress Drupal was making.

However, The world outside was evolving a bit faster, they saw a big opportunity in what Drupal lacked, guess what it may be?

User-Centric Experience: Most CMS were adapting and focusing on creating a user-centric experience. They focused on websites which were easy to build and easy to use, and maybe not that secure, but seemed like users didn’t care that much.

People were swayed from what looked good from the outside while deep down saw Drupal as a CMS about scalability and security.

Drupal realized that there was a gap, it had to work harder and smarter to become a better choice among its peers.

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Launch of Drupal 10.

While Drupal was not able to directly compete with its peers with Drupal 8 & and 9 (While they were still great according to me.), it didn't give up. It knew it could do better.

The Drupal team kept its head down and worked hard to learn what they could adopt and innovate.

I still remember the speech by Driesnote at DrupalCon Prague about the ongoing evolution of Drupal, focusing on addressing user experience challenges and introducing new improvements in accessibility, performance enhancements, and the integration of modern web technologies in Drupal 10.

Finally, They launched Drupal 10 on December 14, 2022. So does anything change in the Drupal world?

Let's understand Drupal 10 a little better before jumping to any conclusions.

What's better in Drupal 10?

Drupal 10 is the latest version in the Drupal world, so it's new but is it any better than before?

If you ask me yes, I do think Drupal is better and more powerful than ever before. I think Drupal 10 has truly evolved to become a better CMS.

So what's changed about Drupal that makes it better you ask? Let's understand what Drupal has done to make Drupal 10 the best enterprise CMS today.

Drupal got rid of its weakness:

If you read this blog closely till now, you would have understood the true weakness of Drupal was a big shift with User Experience as it’s main focus and getting the word out.

Drupal changed this, by introducing three most important features that would change how users perceive the CMS:

1. Editing Experience: Drupal had a steep learning curve unlike its competitors, which often was a reason behind many decision-makers choosing other Enterprise CMS with better editing experience. Drupal realized this and worked harder to create an easier editing experience for its users. The release of CK Editor 5 in Drupal 10 offers a cleaner interface and more efficient tools for editing media, tables, styles, and lists, making content creation more intuitive and user-friendly.

2. User Accessibility: User Accessibility is simple terms means websites for all or in other words, accessible to disabled individuals. WACG compliance has been a mandatory legal requirement for websites. for a long time. The importance of accessibility though has been on the rise with lawsuits for non-accessible websites. Drupal value Accessibility, Drupal 10 supports WCAG AA compliant websites with its new Olivero default theme which not only meets the stringent WCAG AA standards but also enhances the visual appeal with its high-contrast color palette and clean interface, making websites more accessible and aesthetically pleasing

3. Automatic Updates: For a long time, Drupal has been a time-consuming CMS from a maintenance and updates standpoint. Automatic Updates is a feature that resolves this pain point and eases the work of Developers. Automatic Updates does all the hard work in a copy of your website, and lets you/the developer know once updates are ready to be deployed. It can also report and detect problems if faced during the update process thus simplifying a major pain point.

Drupal improved on its strengths:

What do you think Drupal was best at? It's obvious, isn't it? If you guessed security, speed & and scalability you are right.

Drupal is ont letting other CMS’s win on this anytime soon, wanna learn why? Let’s begin.

1. Security: Security is something Drupal beats all its competitors single-handadly, it has always been the most secure CMS of all time, which is why governments, Enterprises and universities love working with Drupal for their websites. The adoption of Symfony 6.2 and PHP 8.1 plays a crucial role in bolstering Drupal's security infrastructure.

2. Speed & Performance: In speed, Drupal sites have outperformed its competitors for most of the time but Drupal 10 is the fastest Drupal has ever been. This is because of Drupal’s efforts on key features such as Lazy Loading, Big Pipe & and JS Minification. To help you understand how good is Drupal 10, if we look at Core Web Vitals as a measuring metric, In 2023, Drupal achieved an impressive CWV score of 51.4%, beating other open-source CMS competitors like Joomla (41.7%) and WordPress (32.5%).

3. Scalability: Scalability is another key feature that has helped Drupal in being the Robus CMS it is. Managing huge content types and databases is something Drupal has been most reliable for. Drupal 10 further improves scalability through efficient content delivery mechanisms and Improved database performance.

Does anything change?

If you ask me, everything changes because Drupal now is faster, better, easier, scalable and more secure making it the best Enterprise CMS out there today.

For those who are still using Drupal 7, it's time you start thinking about migrating to Drupal 10 as Drupal 7's end-of-life is going to happen on January 5, 2025.

And, those who are on Drupal 8/9, should consider upgrading immediately, as both Drupal 8 & 9 have already reached their EOL.

And if you are looking for help with an agency for Drupal 10 Development or Drupal Migration Services? You know what to do right? Contact us today !!

We have a team of 10+ Drupal Experts, who have hands-on experts in Drupal 10 development & and migrations.

I hope my blog about the Evolution of Drupal 10 was helpful and if you think so too, do share it with folks who may need to learn about Drupal 10.

Ps: I don't mean to offend anyone's feelings and thoughts because of my blog in the Drupal community or the world outside, just trying to put my thoughts into a story and market Drupal 10, as I believe it will truly make a difference.