Drupal: Why the 20-Year-Old CMS Is Still Relevant. This year, Drupal celebrates its 20th anniversary. The CMS has been in the market since 2001. Even though it has been developed less rapidly than the competitors, it can boast a rather huge customer base. The Belgian system is used by 1.5% of the world’s most respectful sites. The market share of the CMS is about 2.4%.
In fact, there is no CMS except WordPress, which occupies more than 6% of the world market. The second place is occupied by Shopify with a market share of 5.3%. It is followed by Joomla (3.4%), Squarespace (2.5%), and then Drupal. Nowadays, thousands of Drupal based solutions have been released, the majority of which turned out to be very successful.
Drupal 9: Big Ambitions
If you look at the above numbers correctly, Drupal is among the best CMS in the world. The development team confirmed this claim with the release of the ninth version in June 2020. On its 20th anniversary, Drupal can not only recall a successful past but also look forward to the future, if it continues the path it has chosen
The ninth edition of Drupal (D9) constitutes the foundation for the brilliant future of the popular CMS. There are no new features provided, but the main emphasis is made on rejuvenating its efficiency. At least we can say that the recent updates of the PHP framework Symfony and the template language Twig to the latest versions contribute to this.
With the ninth edition, the developers committed themselves to a half-year release pace. The latest edition 9.1.4 was shown in February 2021, introducing the new front-end theme called Olivero and getting the PHP 8 support.
The half-year iterations are consistently altered with one point after the main version number, i.e., 9.0, 9.1, and so on. Each subsequent version will be compatible with all previous versions up to 9.0.
That’s Why Drupal Is Called Drupal
The name “Drupal” appeared by mistake. Originally, Drupal’s developer Dries Buytaert wanted to call his CMS “Dorp”, which means village, but made a mistake when registering the domain and incorrectly called it a “drop”. Having realized his mistake, Buytaert decided to change the title of his system, and instead of Dorp, he called it Drupal, which was a good idea in the long term. The word Drupal is an Anglicization of the Dutch word “Druppel”, which means drop. This also explains the CMS-friendly mascot — a drop of water.
Conclusion
Having looked in the past, no doubts are left that this CMS has made a long way to its success. The 20th anniversary is only the beginning of the path because thousands of Drupal developers continue to improve it from day to day. All the mentioned above makes this CMS relevant even today.
