--- title: 'Drupal is alive and kicking!' url: 'https://graker.ru/en/news/2025/12/12/drupal-lives' language: en type: post author: 'Roman Grachev' published: '2025-12-12T14:10:00+03:00' updated: '2026-11-07T19:16:20+03:00' categories: - Drupals - 'Software Development' translations: ru: 'https://graker.ru/news/2025/12/12/drupal-lives.md' --- # Drupal is alive and kicking! ![Drupal is alive and kicking!](https://graker.ru/sites/default/files/styles/max_1300x1300/public/uploads/2025-12/generated-image_22_.png.webp?itok=UzkYPwf1) While networking, I talk to all sorts of people who are also into web development. And of course I often mention Drupal, since that's what I've been working with most of the time for the last 20 years. And quite often I hear something like this in response: "Drupal? Is it even still alive?" That's understandable. If a person dealt with it a long time ago, in the early 2010s for example, and even back then it seemed not very relevant, then today all the more so. Back then Drupal was criticized for all kinds of things — the "lack of OOP", excessive functionality, the not invented here principle, and how hard it was to move from one major version to another. Although personally I liked both D6 and D7 just fine. > It's like meeting an old buddy you haven't seen in 20 years. Your mind doesn't really interpolate his "possible life path" and stretch it over those 20 years. So it may seem that he's still the same as "back then". But he's not the same anymore. Drupal isn't the same anymore either. Granted, over these years it hasn't acquired gray hair, hemorrhoids and alimony. Quite the opposite — it has become much prettier! At the end of 2015 the best thing that could have happened to it happened: version 8 came out, which brought: — **YAML configs**. That is, everything you clicked together in the admin UI could, with a flick of the wrist, be exported to files and automatically deployed to production. This made not only development many times easier, but also maintenance: now you can easily see what the client clicked in the settings that broke everything. See it and revert it. — **Installing and updating everything through Composer**. Major version upgrades were made easier too. To go from 8 to 9, 10 and 11 you no longer have to rewrite the whole site. — Twig theming, a WordPress-style media library, REST support for outputting content as JSON/XML and getting a headless CMS, and much more. — **They abandoned the much-criticized not invented here principle**, under which bringing third-party solutions into core was frowned upon. Abandoned it and right away dragged Symfony under the hood. > That's a cool PHP framework in which you can write three times more code than in Laravel, but it will be clean and proper. That instantly settled most of the complaints about outdated code and the lack of OOP. Classes, objects and patterns now galore. There are controllers, and routing, and dependency injection, and decorators, and event subscribers. Simply gorgeous, in short. The "pig in lipstick" ([for those who don't remember](https://graker.ru/news/2012/08/16/svinya_v_pomade_vozvrashchaetsya_ili_zapylivshiisya_krizis), in Russian) has turned into a beautiful butterfly serious modern product. With a still high [learning curve](https://habrastorage.org/r/w1560/storage2/699/b74/27d/699b7427da76e3f11618ba2dc565282c.jpg), and with a sense of deep satisfaction from your work once you get over it. — So yes, Drupal is alive! — I proclaim to you in response, dear friends. And certainly more alive than many. True, in our country the situation with it isn't great: 1C-Bitrix has swallowed everything around. Though that's not what's frustrating, it happens. What frustrates me as a developer is that there are no *technical* reasons for it. I wrote about this in the article [CMS vs Framework](https://graker.ru/news/2025/11/14/some-myths-on-choosing-between-cms-and-frameworks) (in Russian). Meanwhile, in the rest of the world Drupal is doing just fine. Serious content sites, big ones with linked subdomains, universities, e-commerce, government portals — it finds a use everywhere. I've worked on a couple dozen projects in Europe and the US, and over the last 7 years 1 catalog moved to Bitrix WordPress and 1 store to Shopify — due to a change of marketing teams, who of course have to redo everything on arrival. Everyone else is doing great, running for years. I'd certainly like to work with it more often in our market too. But this year, by the way, I've started noticing little signs here and there, when folks who never even looked at Drupal before suddenly became interested and even started wanting something. Life is getting better! And recently [Canvas 1.0 came out](https://dri.es/drupal-canvas-1-0-released), a visual landing page builder for Drupal. One of these days we'll play with it and see what it can and can't do. The results will be here, stay tuned.