Comment by JohnTHaller
1 day ago
Drupal is now a very different animal than it was in the Drupal 7 heyday. It's confusing for folks used to WordPress and similar as you're not gonna be uploading it to a regular old shared hosting provider. There's no way you're using modern Drupal without SSH access and using command line to install and update. And thoroughly learning how the Drupal bits all work together.
Drupal CMS is what a lot of people suggest for new folks, but it isn't explained what it is on the Drupal website. It's apparently a set of pre-configured extensions, templates, AI, and settings. Drupal has a version on their site to download but it says it's a "trial" and requires registration to get it, further increasing friction: https://new.drupal.org/drupal-cms/trial#:~:text=start%20your...
Once you do get it, it may or may not work. When I last tried the Windows version, it didn't work and just gave the old Drupal white screen of death in the browser.
When I've seen discussions in the Drupal sub-reddit, most of the recommendations on how to do something seem to be some version of 'have Claude do it for you'. And the Drupal homepage is very AI forward and mentions AI 9 times.
Drupal's largest install base was back in the Drupal 7 days, which was the last major version that supported upgrading in place from the previous versions. Major compatibility changes started with 8 and continued. About 1/2 the sites that used to run Drupal 7 migrated to WordPress rather than upgrade. Today, there are about the same number of sites running Drupal 7 as the current Drupal 11, which speaks volumes.
As someone that still uses a paid, extended-support version of Drupal 7 and is likely switching my big legacy site to Backdrop CMS (actively maintained Drupal 7 fork) and my other two sites to another CMS, it doesn't seem like there's a place for folks like me in the current world of Drupal.
> which was the last major version that supported upgrading in place from the previous versions
This isn't correct. Yes it was true from Drupal 7 to 8, but one of the primary goals of that change was so that every major version after could have seamless in-place upgrades - which they have. Yes there's deprecated code etc. that you might run into in contrib. or custom modules, but the site upgrades themselves are easier than ever.
I'm aware that the modern Drupal supports in-place upgrades for the most part, though white screen of death reports are still pretty common. My point was that there was a split from classic Drupal to modern 'you have to use the command line and should know how to code' Drupal in terms of upgrades from the 7 to 8 split-off.
From all my reading in the Drupal subreddit, modern Drupal isn't especially useful for real world scenarios without a bunch of contributed modules and stuff... hence Drupal CMS. Additionally, folks were recommending not using Drupal 11 until it had been out for well more than a year due to the sad state of contributed module upgrades. I'd wager this is due to the much smaller Drupal community than the version 7 highs.
> modern 'you have to use the command line and should know how to code' Drupal
I get needing to have command line skills for a web framework upgrade (doesn't seem like an unreasonable expectation to me), but why on earth would an upgrade require writing your own code?