A Brief Comparison Between Drupal 7 and Drupal 8

Drupal is one of the better known CMS (Content Management System). Drupal has a great set of features such as easy content authoring and excellent security. But the thing that sets it apart from other CMSes is its flexibility and modularity. Not to mention it is fully an open source.

Whenever we choose Drupal for our website, the first and foremost question that everyone asks themselves is whether to go with Drupal 7 or Drupal 8. Let’s get some basic understanding of the both.

1. Drupal 7 is the like a well-trained beast that has been tried and tested and has a lot of support in the development world. It is similar to Lego. The core of Drupal 7 can be combined with a plethora of modules that are available in the community that are already tested for production. We just download them and plug it with the core.

2. Drupal 8 is the new and improved and very well showcased CMS in the market. The core of the Drupal 8 comes improved with different updates that were lacking in Drupal 7. After all, that is the reason for creating a new version of anything.

3. The Comparison or debate of whether to use Drupal 7 or 8 is basically possible only due to the fact the Drupal at any time has 2 versions of Drupal that it supports. Maybe they are like Sith lords, always 2, no more no less.

Drupal 7:

 

    PROS:

1.     Many Contrib modules available
2.     Immediate support and solution from the community
3.     Most of the security and other disadvantages have been patched
4.     More experienced of the two
5.     More documentations and tutorials

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CONS:

1.     Support from Drupal will end by 2020
2.     Not much of OOPs concept implemented (this is basically a disadvantage of php rather than drupal7).

 

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Drupal 8 :

 

   PROS:

1.     The Twig theming system is much more improved.
2.     Considerable increase in the use of OOPs concept
3.     Requires php > 7

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CONS:

1.     Not many contrib modules have been upgraded from 7 to 8
2.     The learning curve for someone who knows 7 is very steep
3.     The CMS is relatively new and is bound to have more exploitations that need to be patched.
4.     Finding expert solutions in the sparse community is very hard.
5.     Less documentations and tutorials

This link gives the amount of usage between the different versions. It is recorded whenever a site update is done. Even if we consider that not every site is genuine, the amount of people using 7 is visibly more than 8 (based on time when I’m writing this).

 

Reference- https://www.drupal.org/project/usage/drupal

 

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Final Verdict:

The answer to Drupal 7 or 8 basically boils down to the particular person.

Are you a person who wants to just get a site up with multiple facilities embedded in it without much hassle, then I think it’s better to go with Drupal 7. We can add the required modules to them and also change them if we want from that point instead of creating the module from scratch.

 

Also Read: How to Optimize Your Drupal 7 Website Performance

 

If you are a person who knows coding and also wants to use the latest things in the market, then you can go with the Drupal 8 and write the required functionalities as modules from scratch.

You can also check out the below interesting forum regarding this,

 

Reference- https://www.drupal.org/forum/support/post-installation/2016-04-17/drupal-8-vs-7

 

Contributed By:

Anand Kumar