The Journey of Drupal from 1.0 To Drupal 8
Drupal has been in the market for the past 19 years now. Way back in December 2000 Drupal launched its first version and slowly became a stable and popular platform that is used by millions of websites today.
The word Drupal is a variant of Drupal which means “drop” in Dutch. The primary purpose of Drupal was to help people use the flow of ideas and then encourage the latest methods of development, which later on succeeded tremendously. Drupal development has been well received for its powerful API and also for its unique architecture that allows the users to intuitively and easily manage the content from various sources all over the web.
Here, in this blog, let’s know a little more about the early versions of Drupal and how it has evolved till today!
Drupal 1.0:
This was the very first release of Drupal, which was based on a modular CMS named Scoop and Slash. The first build had 18 core modules with a set of routines that were stored in the PHP file format. Since there was no menu router, everything had to be accessed via the PHP files.
The first version had many limitations and one could have only have 15 tables and needed to import and SQL file in order to modify the database. But even in its infancy, Drupal development had many great features, which also includes customizable layouts and themes.
Drupal 2.0:
The second release saw a major development in the translation feature, which allowed the users to create or even overwrite the site in different languages. To do this, you had to edit the SQL database with the t() function and edit the configuration file. Version 2 also made contributions by adding user ratings, user permission system, sections for stories and etc.
Drupal 3.0:
The 3rd version came with about 26 modules and a new concept- the concept of nodes as opposed to the web pages. All the content like articles, forums, news, diaries and more are created as nodes and are also handled by the Node module.
Drupal 4.0
This version was released in 2002 and it introduced the taxonomy module that stood in place of attributes and meta tags. The structure is still a core feature of Drupal and the versions 4.1 to 4.7 kept coming till 2007. They introduced a friendly user interface and the WYSIWYG editor that made Drupal easy to use for people without technical knowledge.
Also Read: Why Drupal Is the Best CMS for Non Profit Organizations
Drupal 5.0:
Drupal 5.0 was released on January 2007 and in addition, it already had as many as 2,500 contributed modules and it featured jQuery, a JavaScript library that has made the development process much easier.
Other features included pre-created, customizable Drupal packages, improved CSS management to speed sites up and an enhanced directory structure and etc.
Drupal 6:
This release came up with over 7000 contributed modules in addition to the 34 core ones, rewritten menu structure, 600 custom themes. Many drag and drop features, easy installation process, enhanced security and many more.
Drupal 7.0:
It is after ten years of Drupal 1 that Drupal 7 came to the market and it was used to create any kind of websites. It had over 11,000 contributed modules, 200 distributions and 600 themes, and 200 distributions. From content types to taxonomy and users, everything was now an entity.
Drupal 8:
In November 2015, came Drupal 8 with its enhanced multilingual features, mobile friendliness features, inline content editing, better theming and Twig, new level of web accessibility, built in support for web services, Symphony, modern PHP and many other innovative features. It began to be called a content management framework.
This was the journey of Drupal and the future looks bright for this CMS as it has evolved with the latest trends.