23 Sep

Brian Gilbert

The Realityloop team is currently at DrupalCon Barcelona. During the opening keynote this morning Dries Buytart attempted to investigate several questions regarding Drupal's place at the moment.

In particular I was interested when he asked "Is Drupal losing momentum?", even before he continued I thought to myself that this is mostly people waiting on Drupal 8 to get released.

Looking at statistics he showed that this loss of momentum has ocurred in the past, as you can see in the image from Dries' slides shown below, Drupal lost momentum before the release of Drupal 7.

This is known as the Osbourne Effect which posits that "Announcement of a new release slows adoption of the current version." I know that we have clients that are contributing to this as I've had several discussions that start with "should I upgrade my site now or wait until Drupal 8 is released?".

This is a somewhat complex question that depends a large part on the functionality that is required by your site, the budget you have to invest towards module porting, and also the time at which the conversation took place.

The key thing is that after the release, at least since Drupal 6, there has always been a surge in adoption once the next version gets released.

As part of the core mentoring team I am a firm believer that you can predict this by looking at the number of contributors for each release:

• Drupal 5 - 472+ contributors
• Drupal 6 - 741+ contributors
• Drupal 7 - 950+ Contributors
• Drupal 8 - 3,000+ contributors

To me this indicates that there will be quite the surge once Drupal 8 is released, and the exciting news is that RC1 has now been scheduled for release on October 7th.

The Realityloop team is committed to Drupal, and although we are a team of 3, we've been involved in the development of over 100 contributed modules and are already scheduling time to begin work on porting many of the modules that still have a place in Drupal 8.

Drupal already powers close to 50% of the top 100,000 websites, and with one of the largest developer communities of any open source project I truly believe that once Drupal 8 goes stable there will be a surge in growth and a storm of really great sites for us to build.

If you have an upcoming project and would like to talk about building it with Drupal 8 or are interested in supporting the porting of any modules to Drupal 8, please do get in touch with me from October 4th: 

• Brian Gilbert  Ph +613 8609 6966

If you are interested in hearing more about Drupal 8 the Realityloop team are currently also organising Drupal Camp Melbourne, and unconference which will be held on November 27th and 28th 2015.

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