Drupal 7 is a powerful, robust tool, that allows your site to grow in almost any way imaginable. But with this flexibility comes a learning curve. Drupal 7 has a reputation for being hard to use, harder to learn, slow, and only easy to develop if you know exactly what you're doing.
Don't get me wrong, those of us who do know Drupal, usually love Drupal, and we can become very efficient at using it to do a great number of wonderful things. We often love Drupal so much that we pour hours of our time, our hearts and often our souls into maintaining contributed modules, creating and posting patches, and helping others in the community.
But let's look into the future for a minute. Drupal 8 will probably be easier to use, but harder to learn. It will be slower to run (unless you have a beefy hosting environment), and completely different to develop code for. Developers for Drupal 8 are going to be more expensive, harder to find, and development time is going to be longer (at least initially) as everyone learns the new systems.
Small to medium-sized businesses are already feeling the increasing development (and hosting) costs that are associated with running Drupal websites. How much of the Drupal ecosystem is made up of these sites, people, and developers? How will they fare in a Drupal 8 world? How does that affect the entire Drupal ecosystem?
I'd like to offer an alternative to Drupal 8: Backdrop CMS.
Backdrop CMS is a fork of Drupal. It splits from Drupal 8 very early in the development cycle, before the introduction of the Symfony framework. It's code is similar to that of Drupal 7 (meaning any Drupal 7 developer should be able to get Backdrop) but also includes features comparable to those in Drupal 8 including CMI and views in core.
The primary goal of the Backdrop project is to decrease the barrier to entry. This includes lowering the system requirements (meaning more affordable hosting) as well as making the interface easier to use, and the code easier to learn. With each significant change that's made, the benefits are carefully weighed against the cost of change.
Come hear more about Backdrop CMS.
