Drupal at 25: Like a Toyota Landcruiser, Still Getting You From A to B

Solid stuff never breaks! Drupal just goes faster and faster while carrying more and more.

Yes, we had a blast!
The question/challenge came late in the evening from a non-drupal user "Drupal is old. I wouldn't use it. Would you?"

Being thoroughly sloshed from all the great Belgian beers we'd consumed during the birthday party, it took a while for the right response to bubble up.

"I'd use Drupal. Tomorrow. On most new projects. Just as you would gladly use

Age is irrelevant when great engineering is present!

Were we to once more publish thousands of (film)reviews or make a podcast client we'd never use Wordpress (too docu-centric) or some no-code or Javascript-centric framework (too much work, cost and technical debt). We'd use Drupal. We'd be up and running in minutes and the structured data approach of Drupal would make it infinitely expandable and robust. We'd have user management, asset management, SEO, import/export, REST, RSS etc. up and running in no time. Having great structure would also mean that adding AI intelligently would be a breeze."

But it all started a few weeks before.

The email <

Drupalcon Copenhagen 2010 was massive. The Drupal Denmark 25th birthday party less so.
"Drupal is celebrating its 25th birthday next week. Would you like to come?" I asked a subset of the thousands of members of DrupalDanmark, the Danish Society for Drupal users that started attracting people more than 20 years ago.

Some said yes, some said no. Some never answered. Some promised to come, but never showed up.

But there we were!

Nordens Hus <

We, tenured Drupal developers and users, met at Nordens Hus (also running on multilingual Drupal) where Drupal pioneer Ole Nørskov welcomed us.

In an age of Microsoft Frontpage (ptuii!), Adobe PageMill (vomit) and other tosh 20 years ago, he'd built the second big Drupal driven magazine website in Denmark, Journalisten, hot on the heels of Denmark's great engineering weekly, ing.dk. Decades later he's still working in Drupal - now at Nordens Hus.

Same goes for the other Drupal pioneer Morten Wulff (wulff@Drupal). Decades ago he was instrumental in translating Drupal into Danish and have since put magazines, tv-stations, churches and whatnot online using Drupal while giving loads back to the community.

Back in the old days we had loads of merchandise. Wullf can be seen in his «Wanted!« T-shirt right behind «Crew« talking to fellow pioneer Mikkel Høgh.
I, Steven Snedker (steven-snedker@Drupal), also did a short speech during the birthday celebration. About old days and about new days. About how solid engineering never goes out of fashion. Or, if it actually goes out of fashion, how it's still the least expensive and most robust vehicle to bring you from A to B. I also made some honourable mentions of other pioneers who couldn't be present, and we toasted to them. We'd thought about inviting them in on Discord, but thought better of it. This was about being present, present in the moment... And drinking lots of free beer.

Thor Larholm was there too talking about getting Denmarks national broadcaster, DR, online on Drupal. But we also had time to discuss politics for a bit.

We even found some time to badmouth Drupal CMS and - mostly - marketers, Comic Sans landing pages, Facebook ads.

Later Ernst Poulsen joined the party fresh from a party at lex.dk and we all spoke warmly of ambitious publishers.

We could have taken a bunch of photos from the birthday party and published them. But seeing as most of us weren't conventionally sexy, we decided not to. Also, in case some of us actually looked sexy, we'd been a distraction and with me being the events code of conduct contact, I'm sensitive to such things. Luckily there were no incidents.

Time Out <

Later in the evening the remaining handful went to dine with a former Drupal booster and it all ended late in the evening after a fine jazz concert.

Congratulations, Drupal!

25 years and still hobbling strong <

From a peak of 1.000 members DrupalDanmark has cratered. The old website has been taken over by spammers, and only a small percentage of the original members do Drupal work these days. Recruiting new Drupal clients, users and developers is getting harder. You can get richer selling closed source software than open source software.

But it's really hard finding or making software that's better at handling loads of users and structured data in a timely manner.

As the big man himself put it at his birthday celebration:

Drupal is still here because we resisted the urge to chase every new trend and kept building on things that last, like structured content, security, extensibility, and openness. Those things mattered twenty years ago, they still matter today, and they will still matter twenty years from now.

 

 

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