back to article Shall we Drupal 8? Hint: it's not a verb, but the 8th version of Drupal

The 8th version of open source content management system (CMS) Drupal is upon us. This time around, Drupal folk are talking up tooling for “the post-browser era”, which apparently means lots of people now read stuff on devices Dries Buytaert, creator and project lead of Drupal and also CTO at Drupal-wrangling firm Acquia …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Can you update it without taking the whole thing to bits?

    1. Ian Tresman

      No update

      You can not "update" Drupal 6 or 7 to Drupal 8, but have to do a clean install, and then attempt to migrate the data. Forcing people to update from Drupal 6 to 7 first is an unnecessary hurdle.

      1. roytrubshaw

        Re: No update

        Forcing people to update from Drupal 6 to 7 first is an unnecessary hurdle.

        True.

        Also Drupal 8 is (apologies for the buzzwords) a major paradigm shift, being based as it is on Symfony 2.

        I am not looking forward to migrating. I'm seriously looking at Backdrop (https://backdropcms.org/) which may turn out to be the answer for small to medium sites.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: No update

          Thanks; but I was asking about day-to-day operation; not major versions. 6 and 7 were a major PITA to update compared to Wordpress' "do it" button. You had to stop the whole thing; manually FTP the files into the right place etc.

          S'pose I shouldn't be lazy and install a test one to see for myself.

          1. Sylvaticus

            Re: No update

            For minor versions updates there is a gui option (ftp access required) or a wanderful "drush up" coomand (terminal access requirrd) that check, backup, download and install the updstes for you..

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: No update

              Thanks for the info.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Major Buzzword Bingo. Have to see it in action to see the reinagining really has made it useful.

  3. batfastad

    Polish

    Worked with Drupal a year or two ago. Does it still take a minimum of 100 DB queries to render a page? And does it still cache PHP code in the database and execute with eval()?

    In our case it was more like 2000 DB queries per page due to the number of modules shovelled all over it. A module to make a headline in upper case, a module to trim the headline to X chars, etc.

    Either way, out of the box performance of a stock Drupal 7 was really poor compared to the in-house ground-up system that was replacing it.

  4. This post has been deleted by its author

  5. Nick Ryan Silver badge

    Upgrading from any prior version of Drupal to Drupal 8 will cause serious sense of humour failures amongst everyone involved. Guaranteed. While the core Drupal development team are somewhat better than they were there's still an unpleasant ivory-tower syndrome there and if you can't mind read and predict the future then whatever you build, or have built, will not be easy to update. The more plain, vanilla your installation the easier it will be upgrade but for many situations I'd honestly consider just recreating the site than attempting an upgrade.

    It's not that Drupal 8 isn't heading in the right direction, it's been steadily lagging more and more behind other CMSs such as wordpress when it comes to backend usability and ease of use but IMHO there's still a very long way to go. The underlying changes in Drupal 8 will make this transition rather easier and hopefully swifter.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Drupals Main Flaw is the Updating

    Drupals main and crippling flaw is the core devs hubris and stubborness to resist making updating seamless.

    Instead every update involves clean installs, and hoping your data can be imported, and forget about your GUI site design, you will have to redo that from scratch with a totally new tools you know nothing about.

    And that is why Wordpress sites vastly outnumber Drupal sites.

    1. Spudley

      Re: Drupals Main Flaw is the Updating

      Drupal's other major flaw is the five-year turnaround time for new versions -- they seriously need to get themselves a more sane release strategy with incremental updates rather than spending years virtually rewriting the whole platform every time.

      This is, of course, a direct corollary to the point made by the previous commenter.

      Having said that, the rewriting process does have it's benefits. Wordpress's codebase is utterly utterly awful; you only need to see some of the garbage they've left in there in the name of backward compatibility and not rocking the boat to understand why it's got such a poor record on security. A bit of rewriting would do Wordpress a lot of good... but would break all those gazillions of plugins. Catch 22.

      But the plugins angle is another reason why major version Drupal updates a pain. You may want to upgrade your Drupal 7 site today... but are all your plugins ready for D8? You're going to have a fun time researching the answer to that. But a hint: The answer is probably not; you're going to have to wait a while longer before you can upgrade.

      All that makes me wonder why Joomla isn't more popular. It's got a decently written codebase, is much easier to use than Drupal, and excellent backward-compatibility for plugins. But somehow it always seems to get overlooked.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Drupals Main Flaw is the Updating

        I gave Joomla several chances, for some reason it would not successfully install on my servers. The installer would always crash about half way into the install.

        1. batfastad

          Re: Drupals Main Flaw is the Updating

          Drupal's main a crippling flaw is its terrible performance, caused by an insane reliance on database for configuration, content, sessions and caching. I don't have a problem with a CMS hitting a database but just make sure you're not hitting it 2k+ times per page. Guess where Drupal's cache is stored? Yeah, database.

          With the admittedly insane flexibility that Drupal offers, you pay for that massively in performance. Saw a Drupal codebase recently that wasn't able to get more than 2 req/s out of the box even with Drupal's database caching enabled. Switching to memcached for caching made a minor improvement up to 10 req/s but it just moved a couple of hundred round trips from a DB instance to a memcached instance. Drop Varnish/nginx in front... happy days. 500 req/s no problem. Until a user decides to login, then back to square one.

          Fans will quote that blah-whatever.org high-traffic website is powered by Drupal. Sure, powered by Drupal, behind 3 layers of static file caching/CDN.

  7. TeeCee Gold badge
    Facepalm

    ....and there goes the farm.

    If you really, really, really want to lose the corporate market completely, there's one surefire way to do it with any product.

    Fuck up back-compatibility with and/or migration from earlier versions.

  8. hasan.raza

    Yeah Drupal 8 is best, if you looking for security

    Go for Drupal 8 if you are looking for secured platform it even has built-in security modules.

  9. hasan.raza

    Drupal 8 is the best and most secured CMS out there.

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