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Jeff Geerling’s Blog: Did breaking backwards compatibility kill Drupal?

Did breaking backwards compatibility kill Drupal?

First of all, Drupal is not dead. But I would argue it’s not in healthy place relative to competing projects as it was in its heyday, in the early 2010s.

In this blog post, I will explore the problem the Drupal community finds itself in five years after a major release that broke backwards compatibility in almost every subsystem, forcing a laborious upgrade process and process shift that left many users in the dust.

I’ve written about this in the past, most famously in my post Drupal 8 successes and failures. I’m not going to rehash the details from that post, but I did want to focus on what I think is the primary reason for this graph’s downward trajectory since 2016:

Usage Statistics for Drupal Core from 2013 to 2020

Jeff Geerling
August 19, 2020