drupal 9

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:

I just released Drupal VM 6.0.0 today, and it is the best version of Drupal VM yet!

The main goals for this new version are stability and compatibility.

Originally I was going to drop some features that are helpful for people running older Drupal 7 sites, but since Drupal 7's End of Life was just extended into 2022, I decided to extend the support for some features like Drush make files, as many users of Drupal VM still maintain Drupal 7 sites, or use Drupal VM to test the upgrade from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 or 9.

The default PHP version was upgraded from PHP 7.2 to 7.4 in Drupal VM 6, and this new version should work great with almost any Drupal 7, 8, or 9 website (in fact, PHP 7.3 is Drupal 9's minimum requirement!).

Update: The upgrade was a success! The site is now on Drupal 9.0.0, yay!

I'm planning on upgrading my www.pidramble.com website from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 LIVE on my YouTube channel today, in honor of the #D9Launch today!

The site is currently running on a single Raspberry Pi on my desk in my basement... so this would not only be the world's first live Drupal 9 upgrade, it may possibly be the first-ever Drupal 9 site running on a Raspberry Pi!

Fingers crossed, I hope Drupal 9.0.0 will be ready to go by 5:00 p.m. US Eastern time (today, June 3rd)—if so, the stream will begin at that time, and I've embedded it below: