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How is Drupal 8 Doing?
The one big question I get asked over and over these days is: "How is Drupal 8 doing?"
It's understandable. Drupal 8 is the first new version of Drupal in five years and represents a significant rethinking of Drupal.
So how is Drupal 8 doing? With less than half a year since Drupal 8 was released, I'm happy to answer: outstanding!
As of late March, Drupal.org counted over 60,000 Drupal 8 sites. Looking back at the first four months of Drupal 7, about 30,000 sites had been counted. In other words, Drupal 8 is being adopted twice as fast as Drupal 7 had been in its first four months following the release.
As we near the six-month mark since releasing Drupal 8, the question, "How is Drupal 8 doing?" takes on more urgency for the Drupal community with a stake in its success. For the answer, I can turn to years of experience and say while the number of new Drupal projects typically slows down in the year leading up to the release of a new version; adoption of the newest version takes up to a full year before we see the number of new projects really take off.
Drupal 8 is the middle of an interesting point in its adoption cycle. This is the phase where customers are looking for budgets to pay for migrations. This is the time when people focus on learning Drupal 8 and its new features. This is when the modules that extend and enhance Drupal need to be ported to Drupal 8; and this is the time when Drupal shops and builders are deep in the three to six month sales cycle it takes to sell Drupal 8 projects. This is often a phase of uncertainty but all of this is happening now, and every day there is less and less uncertainty. Based on my past experience, I am confident that Drupal 8 will be adopted at "full-force" by the end of 2016.
A few weeks ago I launched the Drupal 2016 product survey to take pulse of the Drupal community. I plan to talk about the survey results in my DrupalCon keynote in New Orleans on May 10th but in light of this blog post I felt the results to one of the questions is worth sharing and commenting on sooner:
Over 1,800 people have answered that question so far. People were allowed to pick up to 3 answers for the single question from a list of answers. As you can see in the graph, the top two reasons people say they haven't upgraded to Drupal 8 yet are (1) the fact that they are waiting for contributed modules to become available and (2) they are still learning Drupal 8. The results from the survey confirm what we see every release of Drupal; it takes time for the ecosystem, both the technology and the people, to come along.
Fortunately, many of the most important modules, such as Rules, Pathauto, Metatag, Field Collection, Token, Panels, Services, and Workbench Moderation, have already been ported and tested for Drupal 8. Combined with the fact that many important modules, like Views and CKEditor, moved to core, I believe we are getting really close to being able to build most websites with Drupal 8.
The second reason people cited for not jumping onto Drupal 8 yet was that they are still learning Drupal 8. One of the great strengths of Drupal has long been the willingness of the community to share its knowledge and teach others how to work with Drupal. We need to stay committed to educating builders and developers who are new to Drupal 8, and DrupalCon New Orleans is an excellent opportunity to share expertise and learn about Drupal 8.
What is most exciting to me is that less than 3% answered that they plan to move off Drupal altogether, and therefore won't upgrade at all. Non-response bias aside, that is an incredible number as it means the vast majority of Drupal users plan to eventually upgrade.
Yes, Drupal 8 is a significant rethinking of Drupal from the version we all knew and loved for so long. It will take time for the Drupal community to understand Drupal's new design and capabilities and how to harness that power but I am confident Drupal 8 is the right technology at the right time, and the adoption numbers so far back that up. Expect Drupal 8 adoption to start accelerating.
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