Prologue

Almost 4 years ago I wrote a controversial post entitled “17 Reasons WordPress is a Better CMS than Drupal” that caused me to be persona non grata among some of my prior Drupal friends.

But while some of the issues I mentioned have been addressed by the Drupal community most of the issues remain in Drupal 7, and WordPress has continued to gain strength as a CMS.

Unlike almost 4 years ago, I’m now seeing many people replacing Drupal solutions with WordPress and the end users becoming happier. My team is even bidding on replacing a website so we can build a member’s-only private site to go with it after the Drupal developers have not been able to deliver on the private site for over 2 years.

The Impetus

What triggered me to write this post was I was composing a long reply to a comment on the other post and it became clear it would be better as a new post.

In the comment the commenter asserted:

With Drupal 8 coming up, I am sure the difference in number of users between Drupal and WordPress will come down.

However, I think that the commenter will find that the exact opposite happens. Why do I think this? I started college shortly before the IBM PC was released so I’ve seen enough computer industry history firsthand to know a bit about the patterns that repeat related to software platforms.

Will Drupal 8 grow Drupal’s User Base?

I highly doubt it, and I think there is strong evidence in the history of software platforms that would support my view. Those patterns I mentioned above indicate to me that the strategy of changing Drupal’s architecture in Drupal 8 will be a failing strategy.

Let me explain.

Fans Like Things As They Are

As with all software products and platforms that gain a notable level of success, Drupal 7 and earlier appealed to people who valued what Drupal had to offer. Some of those things include ease of end-user configuration and other things include hierarchical software architecture and the hook-based extensions mechanisms. Or at least those are what originally appealed to me in Drupal before I discovered all the downsides I explained in the prior post.

Now Drupal 8 promises to be a lot more “modern frameworks and platforms,” adopting “modern PHP concepts and standards, object-oriented programming, and the Symfony framework.” Now that sounds awesome, and on the surface should cause almost any Drupal fan to cheer.

But those stated aspects require a lot more programmer skill to work with yet one of the things that appealed to a lot of Drupal users-cum-developers is that they did not have to understand object-oriented programming, nor modern frameworks and techniques. To quote Jennifer Lea Lampton:

Back in the day, Drupal used to be hackable. And by “hackable” I mean that any semi-technical yahoo (that’s me, btw) who needed a website could get it up and running, and then poke around in the code to see how it all worked. he code was fairly uncomplicated, though often somewhat messy, and that was fine. At the end of the day, it did what you needed.

Given the fact far fewer people have a high-level of programming skill many of those who do NOT see themselves as professional programmers do not want to improve their coding ability, they would rather just focus on their chosen career where Drupal is only a tool to help them.

So Drupal 8 will be will be alienating all those users and they will feel abandoned. Or as Ms. Lampton says:

Today, the majority of the people in our Drupal Community aren’t CS engineers. They are self-taught Drupal experts, people less technical than myself, and people who can get by using this awesome software we’ve developed to help make their lives easier. What is the transition to Drupal 8 going to be like to them? Well, I asked some non-core developers, and I didn’t like what I heard. A lot of professional Drupal developers already have exit strategies. …

And my guess is that most of those alienated users and new users who would have otherwise chosen old Drupal will move to WordPress.

But Pros Want to be Pros

And on the other end of the spectrum are those who DO see themselves as professional programmers and those people (almost) always want to increase their coding skills. They will start asking themselves why they are working on a platform (Drupal) that still has lots of “impurities” when the could just more over to a “real” framework such as Symfony or even Rails or Node.js, and not have to deal with all the legacy issues of Drupal?

Or as Ms. Lampton continues (emphasis on WordPress mine):

They may even have a day job building or maintaining Drupal 6 and/or Drupal 7 sites, but they go home at night and study Ruby, Node.js, Angular.js, even some are looking into WordPress. They want to be “out” before they have to learn Drupal 8. These are smart, capable people, who I’m sure – if they wanted to – would be able to pick up Drupal 8. So, why are they leaving? Because Drupal 8 has become different enough that learning it feels like learning something new. If they are going to invest in learning something new, why not Ruby, or Node.js, or something else?

What Visual Basic’s History Can Teach Us

What makes me think the above scenario is likely? Because I saw it happen with Visual Basic and C#. Visual Basic pre .NET was easy to use and became arguably the world’s most widely used programming language for a time. But it was a ugly language with many inconsistencies and was very limited in what it could do compared to C++ so it was always looked down on by “real” programmers ignoring how Visual Basic empowered so many people who never would or could develop using C++.

So Microsoft envisioned a “better” way; a .NET platform on which both Visual Basic and a new language called C# would live making Visual Basic a “proper” programming language, almost on par with C+.

Fast forward to today and what happened was that those who valued Visual Basic’s simplicity continued to use the old Visual Basic (for a while), abandoned it for other tools that were easier, or just quit developing and focused on other parts of their career.

Those who wanted to become better professional programmers asked themselves “why stay with VB?” so most everyone just moved up and over to C#. This migration effectively killed off what 10 years ago was once the most popular programming language in was the world.

And I believe a pattern similar to the Visual Basic decline will occur with Drupal starting at version 8.

When Upgrades are Challenging People Evaluate Options

And then there are those who will stick with their current version of Drupal until they can no longer maintain the solution and still get the evolving solutions they need for web and mobile.

At which point these people will be forced with a choice; migrate to the newer Drupal, or migrate to a different platform? And given how little interest the Drupal core team places in 1.) “Being backward compatible” and 2.) “Creating an interface that is usable for end-users” the choice will often not be “Move to newer Drupal.”

True Believers will be True Believers

Of course there will still be people who love Drupal 8. And unlike proprietary software like from Microsoft, Drupal 8+ will continue to exist as long as a group exists who are passionate enough to maintain it. But I am almost certain Drupal’s market share will drop significantly and lose most of it to WordPress (which BTW won’t make that much different to WordPress’ marketshare, by comparison.)

Don’t Mess With My Status Quo!

And this being the open-source world, Drupal has already been forked and the fork is called Backdrop from the same Ms. Lampton quoted above as well as Nate Haug. Assuming Ms. Lampton and Mr. Haug and team executes at least reasonably well then some of the more fervent believers in “Drupal Classic” will move over to Backdrop, and Drupal 8 will loose more marketshare from yet another source.

But Backdrop will almost assuredly never be more than a footnote because it won’t have the marketing muscle in IT shops that Acquia has, and IT shops have been the primary drivers of Drupal adoption from best I can tell looking in from the other side. And Backdrop being a fork won’t have the 10+ years of supporting organization that Drupal now has. Plus, Backdrop has an unknown brand at this time and building up that brand will take time.

Old Doesn’t Inspire, It Just Fades Away

Given that Backdrop is basically a stake in the ground to avoid evolving Backdrop is highly unlikely to become “the hot new thing” but will instead be like FoxPro that for years after Microsoft acquired it was “a user base Microsoft could not grow and Microsoft could not kill”; that’s a direct quote from a former marketing manager at Microsoft.

The Shrinking Girth: Traveling Up the Pyramid

So Drupal 8 will be pushed by Acquia into IT shops, but it will be used by an increasingly narrow user base until the user base becomes so small that Acquia can no longer survive.

This long tail may take a really long time, but I am certain it is inevitable, unless of course Drupal/Acquia/Dries change strategy.

What SHOULD Acquia/Drupal Do Instead?

So here’s where I’ll divert from my criticism of Drupal and advocacy of WordPress; I’ll actually recommend what I think Drupal/Acquia/Dries should do and how they could potentially grow their business even if they do not catch WordPress in marketshare.

Announce the Drupal 8 Will Be “Drupal 7 Enhanced”

Dries Buytaert should do an about-face and announce that Drupal 8 will NOT be based on a new architecture but will instead simply be an enhanced Drupal 7, much like the about-face Tim Berners-Lee famously did when he announced XHTML was no longer the future of the web.

Adopt the Backdrop Team for Drupal 8 and Beyond

Dries should then work the Backdrop team and any of the Drupal 8 team who want to continue the status quo albeit with evolutionary improvements, much like how Merb broke off from and was later merged back into Ruby on Rails.

Further, adopt a no-breakage policy for future Drupal releases and work to ensure backward compatibility so that people are not forced into painful upgrades if they do not want to invest a significant amount into redevelopment. Learn from WordPress how to evolve without introducing breaking changes.

Announce a New CMS Called “Acquia”

Then, take all the ideas and lessons learned with Drupal that were destined for Drupal 8 and create a clean from-the-ground-up implementation of a next generation CMS targeting those who work rather program at the level of a framework but prefer to have more of the features needs for content management ready-built and available so as not to require people to reinvent the wheel.

Launching an Acquia CMS would have the benefit of being new in a way that could appeal to more than just the existing Drupal user base that does want to level up but not abandon Drupal. And Acquia is already a very strong company that has a stellar enterprise sales and support team so they would be in a great position to market a new CMS, and launching it would give them a stronger offer to sell to and support for their customers.

Acquia CMS could become the better alternative to Symfony that offers more functionality without all the legacy cruft of Drupal instead of Symfony being viewed as the better alternative to the Drupal CMS that carries so much baggage which is where I think things are headed.

Give Developers Something NEW To Adopt

And this branding is not just for technical improvements, it’s more important for positioning reasons.

Acquia CMS could have none of the negative associations developed by prior users of Drupal. Acquia CMS would be free to address all the problems I outlined in my prior blog post. And Acquia could once again become the CMS mindshare leader, a position that Drupal previously held IMO.

But Wait, Don’t Listen to Me!

If Drupal/Acquia/Dries does follow my advice, it would probably mean that I’d loose opportunities to work on certain future projects. The type of work I do with WordPress is most often competitive with Drupal in the minds the stakeholders deciding the platform the project will use. So I really hope they do not listen. :)

But hell, if they do follow this advice I would evaluate Acquia CMS and might even consider using it instead of WordPress in the future.

But really Dries if you are listening, please don’t! I’m currently really happy with the progression of WordPress and doing this would just throw a monkey wrench into my future works.

So nothing to see here; just carry on as planned. Nothing to see. :)

UPDATE

In the first version of this post I incorrectly referred to the fork as “Backstory”, not “Backdrop” and I did not include a link to the Backdrop website nor mentioned Nate Haug. I have corrected the post.

Thanks to commenters Doug Vann, Brian and Jen Lampton for pointing out my error.