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I recently came across a discussion on LinkedIn regarding the longevity of Drupal. Alex, who posted the question mentioned about how the Post Nuke CMS forked into Zikula, which has lost a lot of its past popularity. We can see how the popularity shifted back in 2005 with Drupal leading the way. We can also see some of that trends here with Google Trends.

A lot of other users have posted their views on this. Some have mentioned that Drupal has been around for 8 years, while others mentioned that it is used by a lot of major companies.

My view on this is as follows:

Over the past few months, a few prospects have approached us about a wide range of projects. After reviewing the requirements with the prospects, I have found that Drupal may not be the perfect solution for some projects. Here are a few examples:

1) E-Commerce System with all user data and transaction data situated on external Java Platform

I was at the J.Boye Content Management Conference last week in Philadelphia. It was also great to say hi to Alex and his team over at Zivtech in Philly. The conference was mostly attended by CMS users from bigger companies, mostly in traditional businesses such as finance and pharmaceutical. Most of these companies still focus on using proprietary systems such as Microsoft Sharepoint and Ektron. Seth Gottlieb (who used to work at Optaros) were pretty much the only people with a great deal of Drupal/open source exposure at the conference.

One of the presenters is Wyeth, the pharmaceutical giant and WestJet, the Canadian airline. From speaking with both of the presenters and other conference attendees, I have found that there is a misconception about Drupal: