Drupal emigration, immigration, migration

Drupal 7 is going out of business. It’s being deprecated (an IT term that I never loved) in favor of D8. D7 is on life support and that support will end in Q3 2021. Meanwhile, there are a ton of other open source content management systems (CMS) that are jockeying for position.

Google trends: WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Wox, Squarespace

Over the past 10+ years serving government agencies, member associations, nonprofit organizations, and government contractors; we have assisted them in migrating their websites:

  • Migrate from Drupal to WordPress
  • Migrate from Drupal to Symfony
  • Migrate from WordPress to Drupal
  • Migrate from WordPress to Django (Python)
  • Migrate from Joomla to WordPress
  • Migrate from Joomla to Drupal
  • Migrate from ColdFusion to Drupal
  • Migrate from .NET to Drupal
  • Migrate from DNN to Drupal

I’m sure there are others, but the pressing decision du jour is what to do with the quarter million + sites currently powered by Drupal 7. Organizations running D7 need to decide:

  • Migrate from Drupal 7 to D8 (based on Symfony)
  • Migrate from Drupal 7 to D9 (based on Symfony)
  • Migrate from Drupal 7 to WordPress
  • Migrate from Drupal 7 to Symfony
  • Migrate from Drupal 7 to Laravel (Pyro, October, Lavalite)

There are different cases, factors, and considerations to help organizations make the right decision. As of this writing, D9 is not even an option. Most of our clients are moving from D7 to D8, WordPress, or Symfony. These would be the main considerations:

  • WordPress: If your organization anticipates only a few well-trusted content managers responsible for updating the website and you do not expect members of the public to create an account and/or log in to the site to perform specific or complex tasks, and if your website is primarily for publishing content, then you should probably go with WordPress.
  • Drupal 8: If your organization has a distributed team of remote content managers, some of whom might be 3rd parties or contractors, and you expect the public to create an account or login and/or perform specific or somewhat complex functional tasks, and perhaps you have or anticipate a mobile app that needs to integrate with the back-end then you might want to go with Drupal 8.
  • Symfony or Laravel: If your website is not really meant for publishing content, i.e., if it is really more of an enterprise-level web application that requires the public to create an account, log in, submit data, retrieve data, retain data, change data, and you expect to run reports or analytics on that data, then you might want to go with Symfony or Laravel (or Python) or some other custom language or script such as Angular, React, Vue, or Node JS.
CMS trends by BuiltWith: WordPress 49%, Drupal 4%, Other 47%

If you need help deciding with CMS to power your organization’s website or web app, please give us a call, perhaps we can help.


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