Comment by smoghat
2 days ago
A lot of developers got burned by Drupal in the 2010s. "The drop is always moving" may be gone, but having to do a massive rewrite of a site's template every couple of years and rebuild its plugin ecosystem—even if all one wanted was a secure site—was a lot to manage. Add to it a community that was oriented toward only listening to folks who contributed to the project or made plugins and the bad reputation was earned. I'm not a professional web developer, but I know a few who gave up on Drupal during this time, just as I did. My nonprofit now runs on Wordpress, which isn't perfect, but can handle 1,600 paid members (via a paid plugin) and just works from day to day. My personal site is vastly more sophisticated than it ever was under Drupal since the maintenance is so much less. It's going to take a lot to rebuild this reputation. A lot of love was lost.
I maintained websites built in Drupal, WordPress, etc for medium sized businesses back in 2010s.
Drupal has been absolute mess for maintenance, backwards compatibility, responsive ness (code/dev wise).
People started flocking more to WP and Drupal docs weren't just up to date as people were moving away.
Nothing will change my mine over Drupal at this point still especiallyin this day and age. Better create one yourself or mod WP.
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Whatever the post says about it's "light-years ahead" sounds like a tiktok influencer talk.
It's genuinely so much better than it's ever been.
I completely understand how people got burnt. The move forward was less about bringing users, site builders, and developers along for the journey and more about providing what enterprise needs.
And one of the enterprises that was front and center was Acquia, Dries' organisation that he set up to offer consultancy services based on Drupal.
Having said all that, it is genuinely a very good product now, and one that LLMs are incredibly good at building with.
The high level of documentation, convention over configuration, and the API-driven nature of Drupal lend themselves very well to LLM assistance.
Considering just how awful WordPress is in terms of security, community, cohesion, code quality and maintainability. I think it's a crying shame that Drupal has lost so much goodwill.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but I'd recommend anyone reading gives it a try with Codex or Claude code, and you'll hopefully see what I mean.
Now at this point, it's not the usability or how good it is over other products or how you can do more with AIs.
Drupal needs to market how well it can people make $ or at least save. ROI is a good KPI to bring up, if the team has data to back it up, etc.
Rural lost almost all of the good will, and foe good reason. It was a dumpster fire with a half arsed ecosystem of extensions. During that period WordPress was flourishing, listening to users, and making sure administration was a lot easier.
Saying that Drupal is better than it has ever been is not much of a statement. It still isnt as easily extensible due to having a smaller community of contributors as an after effect of mismanagement.
I hope they have improved, but their reputation has been earned repeatedly.
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Well, dri.es is the drupal creator :D
yeah, that's the double-edged sword. Drupal can do what it does today because it continually rebuilt it's foundation - but at the same time that sort of movement did cause a lot of pain along the way. At the same time, in the world of "I'll just have my agent rebuild it" makes that sort of change a whole lot easier to deal with - if not the standard everyone may need to adopt.
Well I tend to think that "Configuration isn't the most important thing, it's the only thing" and I came to have a lot of respect for how configuration works in modern Drupal after having to work on our Drupal early this year.
> in the world of "I'll just have my agent rebuild it" makes that sort of change a whole lot easier to deal with
Easier in terms of effort and time, but it still costs, and it still adds drag.
The fact that I can do housekeeping much more easily with agents doesn’t make me want to do more of it. The whole point is to free up my time, energy, and thinking for things that are more worthwhile, interesting, and value-adding. That’s my mentality both at home and at work.
If you’re building a framework or a library, whether open source or commercial, and you think agentic and AI native development gives you more license for breaking changes and churn because your users can just fix it up with their agents, then I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you because that blade cuts on both sides.
If you can keep churning and breaking stuff, then I can get fed up, drop your shit like a hot rock, and build it myself. And I will.
I’ve just rebuilt my personal site from scratch after getting cheesed off with the framework I used and it didn’t take very long. What’s actually taken longer is making all the improvements I would have liked to make but were too much hassle before, so one needs to relearn shipping discipline, but that’s OK.
Same goes at work. Even major stack changes, like migrating database engine, are so much easier. Yes, you still need to be methodical and disciplined - in fact I’d argue agents make that more important than ever in many enterprise contexts - but it is still so much easier. I’m seeing projects left and right that in the old world would have taken weeks or months executed in days or weeks. It’s wild times.
Why use Drupal at all if the agent can just build things?
Because agents can build things, but fortunately for us humans, there's still room for making sure the "right" thing gets built.
i.e. why read a book written by a human when an agent can write one? Why buy a painting that could have been printed.
One of the benefits of open-source and frameworks is they're made up of battle-tested decisions by a lot of people with real skin in the game for a long time. Yes an agent will often solve your problem, and will solve it correctly - as asked, but often a better answer is found by stepping back, evaluating the fundamentals, checking other perspectives, challenging assumptions, and having an opinion.
Having a framework as guardrails (Hah!) for agents is still very powerful, in my experience working with Rails + Claude it works together really well and there's not really a downside compared to doing it completely from scratch.
I'd rather point the agent at and authentication gem and tell it to use that, vs telling it "build authentication, make no mistakes".
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