Drupal 8 is yet to achieve the popularity of Drupal 7, but the most recent edition of the open source web platform is already helping deliver the digital presence of some of the world’s largest enterprises, according to John Kennedy.
Kennedy is a product manager for Acquia — the company founded by Drupal creator Dries Buytaert — and has spearheaded one of the company’s key initiatives to smooth the path to Drupal 8 enterprise adoption: The development of a Drupal distribution dubbed Lightning.
Drupal 8.0.0 was released in November 2015 and involved a major overhaul of the content management system.
In a sense Drupal 8 adoption has been “faster and slower” when compared to Drupal 7, Kennedy argued. After its January 2011 release, Drupal 7 experienced exponential adoption, helping boost the CMS to more than a million installs by early 2014.
As of 1 January this year, Drupal.org figures generated by the platform’s Update Status module (which are limited to Drupal installs with that module enabled) show just shy of 110,000 sites running 8.x, compared to more than 950,000 running 7.x.
“If you just looked at Drupal.org you would say, ‘Ah Drupal 8 is hovering around 100,000 installs online and that is not keeping pace with what’s happened with Drupal 7’,” Kennedy said.
“After six months, Drupal 7 went through this exponential rise in number of sites and kept going until it hit about a million sites. Drupal 8 isn’t doing that — but if you look at the companies that are adopting Drupal and the size of Drupal sites, it’s completely changed.”
“We now, more than ever, have more of the top Forbes 2000 companies and Drupal 8 is taking over the Alexa 10,000 and the top ranking sites for big companies,” Kennedy said.
“It’s really changed the market [Drupal] works in and it’s changed who we’re competing against. We’re really competing against Adobe and Sitecore and the other people in the top right [of the] Gartner WCM Magic Quadrant.”
At the same time, Kennedy said what he describes as “legacy CMS providers” are dropping off. “IBM has their own WCM that they’re not using for Ibm.
