New users universally do NOT understand that Drupal 8 is not near release

Okay, so the title of this post is a bit tongue-in-cheek (it’s a reference to a particular Drupal 8 usability issue); I don’t really think this misunderstanding is “universal” but there does seem to be a bit of confusion about when to expect Drupal 8. The confusion seems common among the greater Drupal user-base, and it seems to affect more than just new Drupal users and those evaluating or considering using it, but also Drupal stakeholders who have several years’ of experience. According to Dries, we should not expect to see Drupal 8 released for at least another 18 months. Yes, I’m aware that he was talking about 18 months after Drupal 7 hits its “productivity plateau”, and since he also indicated that he would announce when he thought we were at that plateau (and to my knowledge, he has not yet) it’s likely to be more than 18 months before we see Drupal 8’s release.

And yet, for the past few months, we have been seeing increasing questions about Drupal 8 (in the greater developer and discussion community); questions which make the assumption that Drupal 8 is very close to release; a couple examples of such questions:

One user wrote:
... I have several years working with Drupal 6 and I am thinking to start building sites and develop over Drupal 7, but it seems that Drupal 8 will be launched very fast. Is it best to wait some months and learn about Drupal 8?

It’s easy to just think “Well, that’s just silly!” when we see one question like this, but when we see many such questions popping up, we have to know this points to some murkiness in terms of the Drupal release cycle.

We need some clear announcements about Drupal 8’s status

While a release date announcement is certainly premature, we should probably have some kind of clearly-posted announcements that Drupal 8 almost certainly will not be released before 2013. There is so much information and “buzz” about Drupal 8 on Drupal.org, Drupal groups, blog posts, and other internet sources that it’s not at all surprising that people will start to think it’s coming soon, but of course the fact is that Drupal 8 is simply in a very active state of development by the community and the discussion is not hidden from the public, indeed, the public is encouraged to become a part of the process and find ways to contribute; hence all the regular flow of information about a product that is far from release.

In commercial technology companies, there is often much pressure to hide details of a planned product right up to the point it’s ready for the market. This helps prevent any ideas in the user-base that they are advertising vaporware or otherwise producing too much hype too early on. But a healthy open-source community thrives on the discussion and open planning, which can lead to a lot more information about a coming product than they (e.g. someone searching for information about Drupal) might even find in a Google search for the current release. This can contribute to the confusion, so those of us writing about Drupal need to make sure that references to Drupal 8 come with a reminder that it’s still far from release.

Drupal 7 release numbers seem to cause part of the confusion…

Part of the confusion seems to be associated with the greater user community not quite “getting” the Drupal release numbering and assuming that the current version numbers (getting close to 8.0 if seen as decimal fractions) indicated that Drupal 8 was just around the corner. This should hopefully be ameliorated as soon as a 7.10 release is made, next Monday; but it couldn’t hurt to have an announcement that the Drupal 8 API is not even complete yet (and won’t be for some time). Currently it’s too easy to find information on Drupal.org about Drupal 8 without any information that the pages are essentially “placeholders” (e.g “stubs” for the documentation team to work on) or are for people actively working on core development.

In conclusion... encourage Drupal 7 use and Drupal 8 involvement

Personally, I think that we can, as a community, recommend that most users starting a Drupal site today should consider Drupal 7 rather than Drupal 6 (though many people maintaining Drupal 6 sites may not have much reason to migrate, especially if the state of necessary contrib modules make a smooth migration non-trivial). Drupal 7’s end-of-life is much further away and most of the important modules most people will want have now been ported and have a stable release for Drupal 7 and many other nice modules have been written from scratch and are only available for Drupal 7. But Drupal 7 has taken a long time, since it’s release, to get to this point — and while I’d like to think otherwise, realistically it’s likely that when Drupal 8 is released there will also be a “pain period” during which most developers working on complex sites will probably still want to use Drupal 7 (because of core issues and lack of modules). So recommending Drupal 7 for new sites and an announcement that Drupal 8 won’t be released for more than a year really ought to be added to the main downloads page on Drupal.org, the Drupal 8 API page, and other places where people might encounter information about Drupal 8. We, in the greater community, should get the word out that Drupal 8 will be awesome, but we shouldn’t give people the impression that it’s closer to release than it really is. And we should also make sure they know that there are modules and themes which will help them achieve the “coming-to-core-in-Drupal-8 features” they might be eager to use (HTML5 support, targeting mobile devices, etc).

Now is the time to bring new Drupal 7 users into the fold and recruit more people to help make Drupal 8 as awesome as it can be… so we need to ensure that anyone new to the community knows that there are ways that they can help and that it’s not to late to pitch in for the effort!