While this article makes some good points, I flatly disagree with several statements including the assumption that "the first (Drupal 10) option certainly the best?"
I regularly encounter organizations that do not need nor can they afford Drupal 10. Many active members of the community have acknowledged that Drupal 10 is NOT the best option for every Drupal 7 site.
Many sites have different (simpler) requirements than they did when they first built a Drupal 7 site.
Drupal 10 is a great option for many organizations and ECA module makes it an even better option for many of them.
But, many organizations and/or individuals built Drupal 7 sites because it didn't require sophisticated developer skills. It was a powerful option for beginners. This is no longer true.
I hope that we do better at acknowledging this change and pointing people at more than one solution when that one solution may no longer meet their needs.
Exactly, Tim. Like many developers this article fails to understand the kind of organizations that are using #Drupal 7. It's not just a matter of the cost of rebuilding the entire site. People who spent years developing the skills to manage D7 now have to learn multiple entirely new and sometimes more complicated tools and languages. That's just not going to happen at many grassroots & nonprofit organizations.
And this really bums me out because it's just these kinds of users and site builders that adopted and evangelized Drupal from about 2005 to 2016. When Dries started taking about "ambitious" sites, we knew he wasn't taking about us.
@ruby@stpaultim@ultimike I take your point, still the reflection is worth having. There are so many professions that had decades of knowledge and experience, which eventually became less usefull - and they all have to progress. The same happens in the "web industry", just at a much much higher pace.
This is where my argument comes from: the longer you don't learn the new tricks, the more expensive it becomes.
@jurgenhaas@stpaultim@ultimike Yes, and that's why Drupal is no longer the logical tool of choice for so many small organizations. The project has made a choice to pursue enterprise customers and leave a community that helped spread Drupal behind.
Some attempts are now underway to re-include site builders, but it doesn't change the fact that the cost of owning a Drupal site continues to increase for organizations without a team of developers on staff.
@ruby@stpaultim@ultimike Sorry, I'm not seeing how this is a conclusion of what I've said before. It's just the opposite: learning new tools is very important, so Drupal is not leavoing anyone behind, it is the highway to the future.
That #Drupal is only for enterprises is a myth, that doesn get true just because we continue to repeat it.
And the cost for owning a Drupal site has never been lover than today, and as I explained in my blog cost, it's declining even more.
"And the cost for owning a Drupal site has never been lover than today."
I haven't heard anyone else claim this. Maybe the cost of owning a symphonic #Drupal site is lower than it has been, but are you really suggesting that it was more expensive to own a Drupal 7 site than it is to own a Drupal 10 site today?
"There is no website being small enough, not to be perfectly suitable to be done with Drupal."
In other words: #Drupal is suitable also for small (and simple) sites. This is even more true with Drupal 10. And with Drupal as your underlying framework, your site easily grows with your requirements - and if they didn't grow, that's fine too!
I agree with you that Drupal can be fine for simple sites if you have the skills or the budget to hired skilled developers.
But many folks who built their own Drupal 7 sites do not have the skills to work with modern Drupal. Many organizations who built simple sites with Drupal 7 do not have the budget to upgrade to modern Drupal.
Both of these groups have other options available that meet their needs. Why push them into modern Drupal?
My thesis in the blog post: "...not having a budget for a Drupal 7 to 10 update makes me wonder where the budget for the continued use of either outdated, or in the case of switching the platform, less capable technology should come from"
My prediction is, that a #Drupal 10 upgrade will pay back in the long run. But I'm not pushing anyone, it's more like providing a perspective which may help people see a bigger picture.
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