It’s Drupal’s birthday . The open source CMS has been around since 2001. Development is less rapid than other CMS, but the user base is solid. Congratulation.

In the world of content management systems, there is one factor that is distorting the market – namely WordPress . Matt Mullenweg’s system has huge market shares. 40 percent of the world’s top 10 million websites in Alexa use it. That corresponds to a market share within the CMS cosmos of 64.3 percent. No other system can match it.

Since WordPress leads by such a clear margin, all competitors look like dwarves and one would be tempted to marginalize them. On closer inspection this is not true.

Drupal is in the top 5 of the most popular CMS worldwide

Let’s take a look at Drupal. The system from Belgium is “only” used at 1.5 percent in the ten million most popular websites in the world. However, that is still 150,000 websites in the ranking under consideration. The distribution in the rest of the network is unclear. The market share in the CMS cosmos is 2.4 percent.

This means that both share values ​​correspond exactly to those of the website Builders Wix, which is considered a market-leading example of success alongside Squarespace. How can one be an example of success and the other a marginalized CMS dwarf? It is only the relation to WordPress that feeds this misinterpretation.

In fact, apart from WordPress, no other CMS has double digits Market shares. The most important CMS according to Mullenweg’s system is Shopify – which one might also ask to what extent it should even be counted as a general CMS – with a usage share of 3.3 and a CMS market share of 5.3 percent.

This is followed by Joomla with 2.1 (3.4), Squarespace with 1.6 (2.5) and then Drupal and Wix with the identical proportions. Then we see Bitrix and Blogger with a one before the decimal point, all other systems are in the range of less than one percent.

Drupal 9: Half-yearly release cycle, big ambitions

Drupal is – if you look at it correctly – among the absolute best in the world . The development team has confirmed this claim with version 9 released in June 2020.

Drupal 9 (D9) is a version that lays the foundation for the future of the popular content management system. It does not bring any new features that are important for everyday use, but rather focuses entirely on rejuvenating its technical substructure. The updates of the underlying PHP framework Symfony to version 4.4 and the template language Twig to version 2 testify to this.

With the D9 release, the team committed itself to a six-month release cycle. So far it has been able to be adhered to. The current release is version 9.1.4, which was released on February 3, 2021. With version 9.1, a new front-end theme called Olivero as well as improvements to the presentation and content workflow were introduced. The system also got PHP 8 support.

The semi-annual iterations are always consistent by one point counted up after the main version number, i.e. 9.0, 9.1 and so on. Each subsequent version in the main strand will be backwards compatible with all previous versions up to 9.0.

Drupal can therefore become its 20th . Birthday not only look back on a successful past, but look forward to an equally promising future, if the chosen path consistently continues.

That’s why Drupal is called Drupal

Little anecdote for those who still knew: Drupal is an Anglicitation of the Dutch word Druppel, which means drop in German.

The name was created by mistake. Originally, Drupal inventor Dries Buytaert wanted to name his system Dorp, in English village, but made the mistake of registering the domain and incorrectly registered drop, the English word for drop.

Buytaert made a virtue out of necessity and called his system not Dorp, but Drupal, which was certainly the right decision in the long term from a brand perspective. This also explains the system’s cute mascot, a friendly drop of water.

Most read