A lot of developers got burned by Drupal in the 2010s. "The drop is always moving" may be gone, but having to do a massive rewrite of a site's template every couple of years and rebuild its plugin ecosystem—even if all one wanted was a secure site—was a lot to manage. Add to it a community that was oriented toward only listening to folks who contributed to the project or made plugins and the bad reputation was earned. I'm not a professional web developer, but I know a few who gave up on Drupal during this time, just as I did. My nonprofit now runs on Wordpress, which isn't perfect, but can handle 1,600 paid members (via a paid plugin) and just works from day to day. My personal site is vastly more sophisticated than it ever was under Drupal since the maintenance is so much less. It's going to take a lot to rebuild this reputation. A lot of love was lost.

Drupal earned that reputation for so many architectural upheavals and pointless version churning. I grok innovation, but one of the core properties of web infrastructure is that it's relatively (in a software sense) architecturally stable. Drupal was not that.

It isn't quite as bad as when the codebase was switched to Symfony, but the Drupal project has just kind of abandoned it's core presentation system in favor of the new Canvas tool, and compatibility with the rest of the core seems like an afterthought. So now you have at least 3 competing display configuration solutions, which don't necessarily work together, or entirely work alone.

It's a situation entirely inline with Drupal's reputation: they couldn't just get it right, and now serious Drupal teams don't know which way to go in the ecosystem.

What are the best reasons for a new project to choose Drupal in 2026, apart from familiarity ?

> React has one of the world's largest developer communities. Drupal Canvas code components are written in React, and we designed the developer experience around the tools, patterns, and workflows front-end JavaScript developers already know. They can use their preferred development tools, including modern AI-assisted workflows, without having to learn Drupal-specific concepts or conventions. We've continued to make that experience better, lowering the barrier for a much larger community of developers to build with Drupal.

Ok. As someone who hasn't shipped a Drupal site since halfway through the D8 cycle: is this better or worse than the tumor that is Gutenberg?

Drupal made me care about abstraction with every feature in any language I worked with. Drupal made me faster by being a little slower. While working with teams where people were doing one off solutions as fast as they could, I never painted myself into a spaghetti code corner.

There isn't a day I don't ask Claude "What would Drupal do?"

I would not be surprised if approaching vibe engineering from the Drupal perspective is the way out of AI slop.

Nonetheless, although I had a blast one evening building custom modules using Claude wishing I had this tool during those hours of stress I suffered 15 years ago, I don't think there is a place for Drupal outside of higher educations marketing.

I will say, I liked Drupal more than I expected to the last time I used it. But... it's still Drupal.

It feels dated. Even the "new" designs they're rolling out still feel old. They're working with a dated design system, and honestly, it feels like they had developers build it without bringing actual designers into the process. The result is always functional, but somehow a little awkward. Not unified. There's still like 3-4 different ways to do the same sorts of actions depending on where you are. It's clumsy. It's Drupal!

And true to its roots, Drupal still requires way too many third-party modules to get a build working the way I want. Half of those don't even have the "new" design system applied. So even for a CMS that cares about WCAG, they're still falling short. I'm not sure they'll ever get all the open-source developers on the same page. (I know they have a stated goal of 2027... I don't see it happening.)

More broadly, I don't have much confidence that Drupal modules will be maintained beyond a version or two. That makes anything you build on top of them inherently disposable. Which is fine; a lot of the web is disposable. But it also means I don't want to take ownership of long-term maintenance for projects built on Drupal.

Every time I have to install a third-party module in Drupal, I cringe a little. I know that two or three years down the road, when a new major version comes out, I'll be hunting down the guy who wrote the module, hoping he'll update it. Otherwise, we're forking his repo and taking responsibility for maintaining it and applying security patches ourselves. Cringe.

Meanwhile, I've really enjoyed working with Contentful, Directus, and even Statamic. There are a lot of great CMS options out there these days.

One platform I'd actively warn people away from, though, is Strapi. I've had two false starts with projects where people wanted to use it, only to run into some fundamental flaws.

Like, "Oh, you want to associate one of your 10,000 files with this page? Sure, we'll put them all in a dropdown for you to sift through... and that'll make pages take 2 minutes to load." Cringe. Run. (Ha, wait... and the whole, "We are in France, so we don't answer support emails in August." Literally what their support email told me. Yikes.)

In the last five years, Strapi is the only CMS I've built with that I just couldn't get behind on any level. I would have rather used Drupal for those projects. Ha!

Is there an AI-first strategy for CMS design?

It's too late. Drupal 6 turned me off ever using a CMS again. Now I purely use html files in folders with other files in folders. It's great. No maintainence burden, no attack surface, no resource eating always running programs or database that can get corrupted or otherwise in a bad state. And especially no migrating to the new version and everything breaking (especially with non-core stuff).

Is there a compelling reason to even use a CMS at all anymore? I feel like the majority moved on well over a decade ago.

Is it just the last remaining pockets of "that kind" of web dev?