With an adoption increase of 12% in the first quarter of the year 2018 and 28% in comparison to last year, it’s safe to say that three years after its initial release Drupal 8 is the go-to digital solution for mid-size and large international organizations.
Megan Sanicki, executive director of the Drupal Association, shared, “Drupal is the #1 open source platform for web content management among global enterprises, governments, higher education institutions, and NGOs. It’s currently used by over 1 million websites worldwide, and the growth of Drupal 8 in the market, really shows a shift towards the need and desire for digital platforms to offer more than just a templated, front page image gallery.” The need for custom, dynamic content management is growing as enterprise-sized companies realize templated blog sites just don’t cut it when a company needs an ambitious level of content depth while still delivering the digital experiences that consumers expect in 2018.
The success of Drupal
Drupal is an open source project, making it available to anyone, which provides “flexibility, scalability, speed and creative freedom,” says Drupal founder and Project Lead Dries Buytaert. Drupal 8 launched in spring 2015 and has steadily gained hold of the CMS market.
As recent as early 2017, two years after Drupal 8 launch, many in the digital development community still thought of Drupal as difficult to use and manage, a holdover perception from past Drupal versions. But as more and more users experience Drupal 8 or migrate their sites to the updated platform - that perception is rapidly changing. Drupal 8 has drastically changed the way users work in Drupal and it shows in the market and community growth.
Digital technology and the industry change constantly. According to Steve Francia, Google’s open source strategy lead, “Drupal thrives because it has a strong community and both the community and the product embrace change.” Francia continued, “Over the course of seventeen years, Drupal has evolved into one of the most powerful CMS’s on the market and one of the most mature open source projects in the world.”
Drupal is built for a mobile-first experience, supports more languages, as well as better interface translations. The Drupal Association, which helps support the Drupal project infrastructure, also touts that as compared to Drupal 7, Drupal 8 supports a better ecosystem for digital integrations, which means that it has better support for email, analytics, marketing automation, and other digital tech solutions.
About Drupal
Drupal is content management software. It is used to make many of the websites and applications you use every day. Drupal has great standard features, easy content authoring, reliable performance, and excellent security. But what sets it apart is its flexibility; modularity is one of its core principles. Its tools help you build the versatile, structured content that ambitious web experiences need.
About the Drupal Association
The Drupal Association is dedicated to fostering and supporting the Drupal project, the community and its growth. The Drupal Association helps the Drupal community with funding, infrastructure, education, promotion, distribution and online collaboration at Drupal.org.