Drupal

This fits with my understanding of what's happened to the Drupal community since D8:

Over my years working in the Drupal ecosystem, I've come to visualize its sustainability as a four-level pyramid structure. This isn't an official model, but rather a mental framework I've developed to understand the dynamics at play.

At the base of this pyramid, we find hobbyists, personal sites, and small businesses that would otherwise use platforms like Wix. Moving up a level, we encounter growing small business implementations and more complex small projects. The third level encompasses medium-sized projects and agencies, while the top tier consists of enterprise implementations with complex requirements and larger budgets.

This structure isn't just theoretical—it's vital for sustained growth. The broad base creates entry points for new developers and users while generating widespread adoption and brand recognition. It establishes natural growth pathways as projects evolve, cultivates innovation through diverse use cases, and provides a talent pipeline for the entire ecosystem.

When this pyramid is balanced, the ecosystem thrives. New users and developers enter at the base level, projects grow in complexity and move up through each level of the pyramid, and talent develops alongside these evolving needs. The entire structure becomes self-reinforcing, with each level feeding into the next.

The significant turning point in Drupal's evolution came with the shift from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8, which introduced more advanced code practices and architectural requirements. This modernization brought powerful capabilities to enterprise users but simultaneously raised barriers for newcomers. As we continued to evolve through versions 9 and 10, the pyramid shrank even more, with fewer newcomers entering the ecosystem and the base continuing to narrow.

[…]

What we've experienced is a top-heavy pyramid—strong at the enterprise level but with an increasingly narrow base. This imbalance threatens long-term sustainability because it limits the influx of new talent, reduces community diversity, and creates fewer pathways for growth.

Standing ovation for chx:

Karoly Negyesi: Well, even framing this as "AI" is misleading. The entire field is essentially based on a short paper written by John von Neumann in the 1950s. In that paper, he declared—without a single shred of proof, and yet people readily believed it—that the human brain is obviously digital. People have believed this so strongly that even today, neuroscientists struggle to describe how the brain works without using digital metaphors. But the truth is, the human brain does not work like a computer.

So, calling these statistical pattern-matching systems "artificial intelligence" is just misleading. 'Retrieve a memory', your brain doesn’t retrieve a memory. It’s not a computer. It never was. Everybody knows this. You never retrieve a memory the way a computer does. You do not store your memories as a computer does. That whole concept is just not true.  

There was a brilliant book about this a couple of years back that described how, in different eras, people compared the brain to whatever technology was available to them. Descartes compared it to a machine. Von Neumann compared it to a digital computer. None of that is true. Of course, we still don’t quite know how the brain actually works. So then we pursue something called artificial intelligence, and by that, we mean something that matches this completely misplaced and untrue metaphor of the brain.  

The whole premise of artificial intelligence is broken. It’s just not true. You are building a castle on quicksand. There’s nothing there. And beyond this, there’s just so much wrong with it. Almost blindly trusting whatever a large language model spits back at you—because, once again, I don’t think people fully understand or even partially understand what they are getting.  

So, no, I don’t think AI is progressing in the way people think it is. I mean, obviously, there’s some progress, but it is not going where people think it can go.  It’s never going to match a human brain—at least not this way.  And quite likely, not within our lifetimes. Probably not even within a few centuries. We will not have a machine that is capable of doing what the human brain is capable of. Mostly because—we still have no clue how the brain actually works. 

Standing at the helm of a 16-year-old startup, Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, took a trip down memory lane—a nostalgic revisit to a 16-year-old blog that announced his startup idea, Acquia. Little did he know that his fancy trip would occupy the front page of Hacker News, garnering a hundred comments.

[…] 

The discussion concerns the merits and drawbacks of using Drupal as a content management system (CMS) compared to alternatives like WordPress. Several users shared their experiences, highlighting various aspects of Drupal's functionality, including its engineering and backend customization capabilities, upgrade challenges, and suitability for different types of users.

   "I miss Drupal a lot,"

jolted an old Drupal user who wished Drupal would win the CMS battle with WordPress. They feel nostalgic for Drupal's earlier versions and its low-code capabilities for creating custom CRUD apps. They mentioned difficulties with the transition to Composer and the challenges of keeping up with security updates and upgrades, ultimately leading them to explore other technologies like Python.

This book is a quick reference for developers creating Drupal sites. While working on such sites during my career, I have gathered a large collection of notes and code which I use for my reference. I hope it will be useful for you, too.