25 Years of Drupal

Canvas is a new, default visual page builder for Drupal, offering a no-code/low-code drag-and-drop interface for content managers

Recipes, Workspaces, and Single-Directory Components are launched. They represent a significant shift in how developers and site builders work with Drupal and set the stage for even more significant improvements in future releases. Recipes simplify configurations, Workspaces elevate content collaboration, and Single-Directory Components streamline theme management.

Claro administration theme and Olivero default theme, the introduction of CKEditor 5, further jQuery replacements, theme starterkit tools for theme creation, and Symfony 6 under the hood with PHP 8.1 requirement.

PHP 8.0 is a major update of the PHP language. It contains many new features and optimizations including named arguments, union types, attributes, constructor property promotion, match expression, nullsafe operator, JIT, and improvements in the type system, error handling, and consistency.

The package manager that assembles virtually all modern Drupal sites gets a significant performance and memory utilization boost. Developer productivity and mood noticeably improve.

The first Drupal release with no new functionality - and that's great! Drupal 9 has the same functionality as Drupal 8.9, but without a lot of backward compatibility code. The release parties were virtual, as this happened during the times of Covid.

Drupal's initial experience goes from a boring river of news to a food magazine replete with tasty looking recipes. This fine meal was cooked by the Out of the Box Initiative led by kjay, markconroy, smaz, and laurii. It shows all of Drupal's spices working together: design, product management, engineering and accessibility.

Drupal was doing Move Fast and Break Things a few years before Facebook. New features were routinely committed to Drupal without backward compatibility. Recognizing its large installed base, Drupal announces that all changes must be backward compatible, and that major version upgrades will be easy forever.

A major language renewal comes with the new Zend Engine 3 (PHPNG), It’s also twice as fast as the previous PHP 5.6 release.

Drupal's fun/art side thrives at these late night Drupalcon parties. This year Drupalers chatted among fire throwers and wild art installations at the Intergalactic Krewe of Chewbacchus in New Orleans.

Five years in the making, Drupal 8 embraces objects and declarative configuration. Entity API, Twig, and Accessibility are the talk at the Celebr8 worldwide release parties.

jam & robertDouglass wake us up for an infotainment extravaganza featuring sing-a-longs; bad jokes; Git tutorials, yodelling, use of alphabet, or beer pouring technique. On this day we belted out a Drupal flavored Let it Go from Frozen.

Drupal had always relied on a single release manager to review and merge core changes. On this day Drupal embraces multiple committer roles and adds a process for adding new committers. In 2020 are about a dozen core committers.

govCMS embodies Drupal's popularity with governments all over the world.

Drupal core adopts semantic versioning and a sustainable, predictable minor release schedule.

Crell leads a push to replace Drupal's bootstrap with Symfony flavored request handling. This large change nearly assassinated Drupal 8, but the mighty Drop prevailed

Before this change, it was customary to post a comment with only the word <em>subscribe</em> in order to start following an issue. Unfortunately, this marked the issue as new and spammed all other followers. This practice ended when the community used Chip-In to fund a flag module implementation.

Alan Burke proposes an in-person, team based trivia contest on the last night of Drupalcon Chicago. Drupalers have a jolly time, nobody recalls who wins, and Irish Drupal hosts many more trivia nights.

Drupalcon attendees open their tote bags and find Drupal Watchdog magazine, the first print magazine dedicated entirely to Drupal. The first issue features Dries on the cover. Tag1, the publisher, makes the magazine available for purchase in bookstores in 2014. The name comes from Drupal's hook_watchdog function.

More than 250 parties in over 90 countries were held to celebrate this great release. Drupal 7 is still the most popular Drupal release, featuring the Seven theme, designed by Mark Boulton and Leisa Reichelt.

First edition of the yearly european event Drupal Dev Days. The event is independently organized in a different country every year and gathers hundreds of developers or contributors.

webchick opens a two week discussion assessing bzr and git for our next VCS. Then she reviews the discussion and announces that Git has been chosen. This is how bike sheds are overcome. The initiative is named the The Great Git Migration, and involves integration of several drupal modules, and even a custom SSH daemon to handle drupal.org high load. sdboyer leads the initiative, and receives help from lots of people on the implementation. Among them are chizu, dww, eliza411, halstead, marvil07, mikey_p, mikl, neclimdul, and tizzo.

Barack Obama's administration launches whitehouse.gov and We the People, a site where constituents can directly petition the White House for change. The projects are featured at Drupalcon San Francisco.

Launch of this new central web-based translation service meant a great leap towards community collaboration on more consistent, higher quality UI translations for all Drupal projects.

Do It With Drupal was a three day conference that paired Lullabot's training expertise with various Drupal contributors' experience to show attendees how to Do It With Drupal. The conference was notable for being the first sizable conference targeted at business and commercial users. It was priced accordingly.

Drupal.org becomes too popular for its home grown web hosting, and starts throwing errors regularly. Sun Microsystems donates its servers and restores stability to our home.

This large, annual event remains free to this day. Kudos to Jen Lampton for her many years of organizing. Other notable Camps include Design 4 Drupal, Drupal Dev Days, Frontend United, and Midwest Developer Summit

Drupal contributed projects are able to make tagged releases, ending the era of date-based tarballs and CVS projects inside SVN checkouts. The release system built on prior work to partition commit access by project owner.

Drupal's governance formalizes from BDFL to a non-profit model. Led by Jacob Redding, VZW is initially a money manager only. Drupal VZW transforms into the Drupal Association in 2011 and becomes more prominent in promoting Drupal and runs Drupalcon.

CCK was incorporated into Drupal 7 as the Field API. JonBob led a session about it at very first Drupalcon, and made the first iteration in Flexinode module. yched and KarenS evolved that work into CCK, and bjaspan led a code sprint bringing Fields in Core.

This podcast, founded by Jeff Robbins, still runs today. This marks a growth in the marketing and communication of Drupal.

Robert Douglass authors the first Drupal book, recognizing a growing demand for Drupal education.Later popular books include Pro Drupal Development, Cracking Drupal (greggles), and High Performance Drupal (nnewton, catch, jeffsheltren).

Drupal enthusiasts meet in person for the first time. Amazingly, 45 people fly to Antwerp from all over the globe. Marc Canter (Macromedia founder) and Chris Messina (aka FactoryJoe, later invented the #hashtag) attended. Photos by Dries.

Deanspace was a milestone in the rise of the Internet for political campaigns and grassroots initiatives. It also kicked off a long love affair between Drupal and non-profits (e.g. Greenpeace, American Cancer Society, Red Nose Day, ...).

Marco wrote taxonomy because he needed a way to group forums into categories. Drupal's rich taxonomy system foreshadows what will become known as tags/labels in Delicious, Flickr, Twitter, etc

3.0 major had a whopping 6 month development cycle. Nodes are introduced as a building block for content. They can be specialized into many content types.

A mere 2 months after 1.0, Drupal ships 2.0. Backward compatibility was not yet a concern. The translation system is introduced, with its brilliantly simple t() function.