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Many Drupal insiders recognize that data on Drupal usage that's collected and displayed on Drupal.org have their limitations. Since 2018 there's been a proposed Drupal core telemetry initiative to expand and improve the data collected. Meantime, though, the usage stats are widely referred to and cited. So it's worth spending a bit of time with them. What do they actually capture?

As Drupal 8 entered its last months of life, I found myself reflecting. What did version 8 mean for the project? What was lost? What was gained? What were the roads not taken? To try to puzzle out at least some preliminary answers, I read up on what others had shared and spent some time with various sources--Drupal core and contrib code bases, usage statistics, old conference presentations, release announcements and more. I started the exercise motivated by personal interest but now that I've wrapped it up I figure I may as well share my observations in case they're of interest to others.

A current project we're working on at Chocolate Lily involves upgrading a Drupal 6 site to use the Drupal 7 Open Outreach distribution. It's the first time we've used a Drupal distribution for an existing Drupal site instead of a new one.

What is Drupal good for? Drupal is often used for creating complex organizational websites that might take weeks or months to develop from initial plans to launch. But what if you need a site, like, tomorrow?

What’s new with the Open Outreach distribution for nonprofits? Lots! There are now over 250 sites using Open Outreach. After working on getting this distribution up and running for so long, it's gratifying to see that it's starting to build some momentum.

As the developers and maintainers of the Open Outreach distribution for nonprofits, we’re curious to see who is using the distribution to further their website building efforts.

What if Drupal 8 had taken a different path? What if profitability and expanding market share and wooing enterprise clients weren't the driving aims? What if, instead, we'd focused on stability, usability, and accessibility for small and medium sized organizations.

Browsing joomla.org, I recently noticed the following in the Joomla roadmap: "The Joomla! CMS (content management system) seeks to create a variety of distributions of the CMS to address a variety of common niche markets." Good idea!

In a recent blog post, Drupal 8 co-maintainer Alex Pott highlighted a seismic shift in Drupal that's mostly slipped under the radar. In Drupal 8, he wrote, "sites own their configuration, not modules".