I've been supporting my old friend and colleague, Tomas Remiarz in setting up a Drupal 8 website for his new book, called Forest Gardening in Practice, published by Permaculture Publications (who I also work for).
Drupal 8 came out at the end of 2015, and according to Dries Buytaert, the creator of Drupal, by March 16 there were over 60,000 sites under development using the new software! The chart shown is from a survey of 1,800 developers, and asks, 'If you have not yet used, or migrated to D8, then why not?'
So why has it taken so long for me to get my first D8 site out? Well I guess I would have to go with:
- Waiting for certain modules and themes;
- No rush, happy with older versions; and
- Don't have budget to upgrade.
Most of my clients are non-corporate: not for profit organisations, or small green enterprises, and although Drupal has come a long way over the years, the upgrade path to a new version is a considerable investment. In fact, Permanent Publications only upgraded their Permaculture Magazine site from Drupal 6 to 7 this year, after Drupal.org finished officially supporting Drupal 6.
Perhaps one of the most interesting stats in the chart is that only 3% of us developers are leaving Drupal. If you do a web search for 'Drupal' you will see loads of articles on why Drupal is rubbish, and why you should use Wordpress instead. I wonder where these come from - clearly not from Drupal developers, or their clients!
Forest Gardening in Practice:
I worked with Tomas a long time back, before I became a 'webbie', when we were both trustees of the Permaculture Association in Britain.
In the words of Tomas, "A forest garden is a place where nature and people meet halfway, between the canopy of trees and the soil underfoot. It doesn’t have to look like a forest – what’s important is that natural processes are allowed to unfold, to the benefit of plants, people and other creatures. The result is an edible ecosystem."