Twenty-five years! In the world of technology, hitting a quarter-century milestone while remaining a top-notch powerhouse of the internet is an achievement so rare it's almost unheard of. Today, we're popping the confetti and cutting the cakes around the world to celebrate a colossal journey. This isn't just a birthday for a piece of software; it's a testament to resilience, constant evolution, and the deep-seated belief in doing things the right way. Join us as we look back on 25 years of shared passion, contribution, and the incredible community that has made Drupal so powerful. Happy birthday, Drupal!
Trusted by millions of sites and applications, Drupal has been the secure, flexible backbone for everyone from global governments and prestigious universities to world-renowned NGOs, major media outlets, and countless ambitious startups. Drupal's versatility allowed it to power a wide array of systems far beyond traditional websites, including intranets, booking systems, learning platforms, data hubs, and IoT dashboards.
For a quarter century, Drupal remained true to its technical soul. Its strength remains in structured content, best-in-class workflow features—including moderation, granular permissions, and multilingual support—and delivery to various displays via reusable content and APIs. Under the hood, proven performance, precise caching, and a mature security process ensure scalability. Its core strengths of extendability, customizability, and openness solidify its status as a uniquely flexible and sovereign digital platform.
Not only technically capable itself, Drupal's design and culture inherently promoted sharing and reuse. This encouraged people to build widely capable and powerful general components, and contribute them back, a mindset that fueled the growth of over 50,000 modules.
But beyond the millions of sites, the technical power, and the tens of thousands of modules, Drupal's true magic lies in the people. It's a platform that created careers. For many, Drupal was the first step into the world of content management. For tens of thousands more, it blossomed into a fulfilling career. Developers, architects, designers, editors, trainers, marketers, agency founders—a full spectrum of digital careers have flourished around Drupal.
Drupal's influence stretches far beyond the codebase and business, it is also a world-class social network. It sparked friendships, and yes, even led to a few real life Drupal families. People who would otherwise never have met have become lifelong friends. We have learned together, collaborated on projects, and passionately argued over UIs, policies and APIs, but with the goal of emerging with a stronger connection. This vibrant, global community is the true essence of Drupal: a place where even disagreement comes from a shared passion, and where professional collaboration blossoms into genuine human friendship.
Without the community, Drupal wouldn't be here today. So raise a glass for yourselves! The thinkers, designers, marketers, organizers, testers, developers, maintainers, managers, documenters, trainers, reviewers, bugfixers, funders, accessibility professionals, translators, authors, photographers, videographers and countless others who made Drupal what it is.
Drupal is here today not because it chased trends. But because people cared and they did the right thing. Happy birthday, Drupal!
Thanks to Gábor Hojtsy, Frederick Wouters, Surabhi Gokte, Nick Vanpraet and Joris Vercammen for their contributions to this post.