Drupal's path from 4.0 to 8.0

Last time we guided you through early beginnings of Drupal. We explained how all started and how first versions of Drupal were made. This time we will look how this open-source content-management framework evolved from its fourth to its latest, eight version.

Drupal 4.0

Drupal’s fourth version was released on 15. 6. 2002. It became a platform for any type of web application. Users were able to modify it and extend it to fit their needs. Developers came from all across Europe and US, so Drupal became international open source project with over 100 major pages using it. Taxonomy module, who is still one of the features in Drupal’s core, was introduced and replaced meta tags and attributes. Users were able to create vocabularies based on keywords and create, assign, and modify content types.

This phase later included tons of modifications and growth starting with Drupal 4.1, which added profile module and pager support. On Drupal 4.2 there were cleaner URLs and new features including Node API for better integration and a new template driven theme engine known as “Xtemplate”.

 

Drupal 4

 

With such improvements there was only a matter of time before Drupal gets spotted on a global level. And it did in 2003, when Howard Dean, one of the candidates in the U.S. presidential election, build "DeanSpace". It was his site, which anyone could download and install to communicate directly to the campaign and between their political supporters. This helped to a 300% increase in content activity on Drupal.org. Furthermore, CivicSpace became the first company with full-time employees that was developing and distributing Drupal technology in 2004.

New path module was introduced on Drupal 4.3, first e-commerce contributed module on Drupal 4.4, translation improvements on Drupal 4.5, multi site support for running multiple Drupal sites from a single code base on Drupal 4.6 and new forms API on Drupal 4.7. Everything resulted in more than 338 contributors with over 1500 patches.

Drupal 5.0

HTML scripting became easier on version 5.0, because it featured jQuery and JavaScript library. This version was released on Drupal’s sixth birthday. A new feature was also a support for distributions of pre-created Drupal packages, which people could then customize to their liking. Other features were a web-based installer with no more manual import of sql dump, pluggable cache backends, so users could cache files from the backend, and custom content types. Modules were moved to their own directory. There were also theme improvements.

 

Drupal 5

 

Drupal 6.0

Installation of sixth version became friendlier. The menu system was rewritten from scratch, making it more efficient and powerful. Administrators were able to drag-and-drop a number of features, including blocks and menu items. The language system was modified in a way that it was easier for non-English usage. Security also improved. It included an Update Status module to automatically check for available updates and warn sites if they were missing security updates or newer versions. No wonder Whitehouse.gov adopted Drupal 6.0 as its CMS, which was another big step up for Drupal.

 

Drupal 6

 

Drupal 7.0

It was three years until Drupal improved core and usability features with its seventh version. Drupal became available for building any kind of websites from blogs and microsites to enterprise systems. Everything became an independent entity (content types, taxonomy, users …), because all modules were able to interact with any node at runtime, meaning that nodes were no longer dependent on a specific module. This version added a queue API and upgraded jQuery. From that time on, everything became associated with web apps.

And we come to the latest version of Drupal, known as Drupal 8. We have written many blog posts about it and will do that in the future as well. Moreover, there is no worry that there won’t be another version of Drupal. It will be. We just have to wait and see when.

 

Sources used:

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drupal

Drupal.org: https://www.drupal.org/about/history

WEBSOLUTIONS | HR: http://www.slideshare.net/WEBSOLUTIONSHR/history-of-drupal-from-drop-10-to-drupal-8-59198423

Opensource.com: https://opensource.com/life/16/9/drupal-evolution