Data-based perspectives from our DrupalCon 2021 session

Thank you for a great DrupalCon! Here are a few key findings and PDF slides from our Thursday talk, Drupal for European Universities: Data-based perspectives.

Drupal is not leading (and not even the runner-up)

Wordpress is the most popular CMS for European Universities (restricted to EEA Countries; data retrieved last week from all the the 1830 HEIs from those 30 countries). Surprise, Drupal is not the runner-up either: Typo3 beats it by a few installations.

But many countries still love Drupal

Wordpress (green in this map) leads in 15 countries, Drupal (blue) in 12, Typo3 in 2 (Germany, Austria), Joomla in Slovakia. This is a good sign for the expansion potential: Typo3's success is based on a couple countries only. The most Drupalized countries are Estonia (44% of HEIs sites are Drupal sites), Iceland (43%), Finland (34%), Italy (33%), Belgium (33%).

European Universities like Drupal 7

Drupal 7 (red in this map) is still the most common Drupal version for University sites in 16 countries. In 9 countries the most common version is Drupal 8 (yellow), only in 2 countries it's Drupal 9 (green); other EEA countries are omitted due to non-significant data.

Overall, Drupal 9 sites account for only about 10% of the total, with Drupal 6 (yes, 6!) still beating Drupal 9 in four countries. 45% of the Drupal websites used by European Universities are running on a version that will be unsupported in one month.

And the future?

Drupal 9 has a lot of solid selling points for Universities, see the slides below for a summary and a case study. But it needs to be marketed well to people who are still on Drupal 7, and still facing problems the Drupal community solved years ago.

It will be interesting to re-run the analysis in one month, perhaps in an extended version including the non-EEA countries that were left out of this initial survey, like the UK and Switzerland. Stay tuned!

Tags: DrupalConDrupal PlanetAttachments: Drupal-for-Universities-DrupalCon-Europe-2021.pdf