Searchability of Drupal 8+ vs Drupal 7

Created on 19 May 2022, almost 3 years ago
Updated 1 April 2025, 1 day ago

Problem/Motivation

With the total architectural difference between Drupal 7 and Drupal 8+ there are just some issues with things like naming and search.

When we only had Drupal 8, it was simple enough to do web searches with 8 in the title. Since Drupal 9 came out that doesn't work, to get around this I've created a custom search engine in Chrome which looks for results in the last 5 years but it is imperfect.

It's not the only place this turns up, for instance all of our issue queues, development servers and databases are called d8, which is no longer true. This even relates communicating to non developers and documentation as we migrate our last site from D7 to D8, now D9, soon D10 etc.

Steps to reproduce

Not really applicable, but we still get first hit D7 results for a lot of searches eg 'drupal database connect to multiple'

Proposed resolution

I was wondering if Drupal 10 is a chance to remedy this. The idea would be to call it Drupal X, and from then on Drupal X 1, Drupal X 2 etc.

Then in naming, there is a clear distinction between the old architecture of Drupal and the new X architecture.

Improving the searchability of issues improves the productivity of every developer and our communicatons to non developers. I'm not sure that this is a bit late to suggest and should have done it at the Drupal 8 stage, or if it is completely workable technically, or maybe there are other solutions, or the problem will go away once Drupal 7 is EOL'd.

In any case I suggested it at a local Drupal meetup and people thought it was a good idea, so I just wanted to put it out there.

Remaining tasks

N/A

User interface changes

N/A

API changes

N/A

Data model changes

N/A

🌱 Plan
Status

Closed: won't fix

Component

Idea

Created by

🇦🇺Australia camerongreen Brisbane

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  • 🇳🇿New Zealand quietone

    @camerongreen, thanks for the idea.

    Yes, doing this when Drupal 8 was released might have been helpful. But that didn't happen and now Drupal 7 is past End of Life, results for modern Drupal should be more prominent. And that is true for my simple tests just now when searching for Drupal tasks. Ans since, there hasn't been discussion here supporting this idea in 2 1/2 years I am closing this issue.

    If anyone wants to explore this more, move the issue to the Drupal core issue queue.

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