Yes, the end of the year is just around the corner so the old habit of looking back and forward regarding all things Drupal is here again! It is time to see what we predicted right, where we where not really on the spot and where we failed to see what was going on. And of course to make our new predictions for 2008! Take a look at last years predictions.

The Right's

This year must be the year where we made our own predicated future since so many predictions where right. Let us take a look at some of them:

  • Steven was right about many:
    • "Drupal wins a major open-source award for all the effort put in to make Drupal more usable, without compromising its flexibility." And so we did by claiming the Packt Publishing CMS award!
    • "2007 sees the inclusion of some form of drag-and-drop blocks to the admin. Possibly reordering book pages and menu items." Code has been written to make this happen, weights in an ultralight form.
    • And then there was: "Dries starts a company." Dries is indeed making a new a splash in the Drupal community.
  • More good predictions: "There will NOT be a huge explosion in Drupal installation profiles." Not many indeed, but more then I expected. And "Drupal will 'arrive' and no longer be seen as the hot newcomer." Since many RFP explicitly ask for Drupal and we are on the radar of all big technology research firms, I will not say we are "there" yet but Drupal sure is no newcomer any more, not even in the boardroom.
  • And then people suggested Dries to work on other stuff than Drupal: "Must be time for Dries to produce something other than Drupal releases." And he did resulting in Axl and (any time now) in "Dr. Dre".
  • Another one: "Oh and a few (more than 2) US presidential campaigns will use Drupal to power their site.". I know of at least one.
  • "AJAX and JS effects will become a major part of Drupal but a core value of always-degrade-gracefully will persist, but this will come under fire from both sides.". True, Drupal now with 8% yummy.
  • "Views and CCK — will be incredibly versatile / extensible / themable / swiss-army-like, and will instantly make another 5 existing core modules redundant.". Controversial, yet not far off.
  • "Drupal will be in the 2007 EContent 100 List". Yes, they did recognize us.

The Wrong's

Not everyone and everything was right. Here are some of the wrong's.

  • "And this extra one is for the developers, cvs will switch to subversion (svn)." No, we still use CVS.
  • According to Google trends, Drupal will be more relevant than Joomla.. Not even near, if we want to be there in the first place.
  • An old request: "The downloads section of drupal.org will be redesigned again, with a lot of goodies like community rating of contributions." and prominently featured install profiles." That did not happen in 2007.

The Unforeseen's

Nobody saw the new core committer Gábor Hojtsy that has done tremendous work to bring i18n in Drupal 6. Nobody mentioned the Best DrupalCon ever in Barcelona with 430 people attending. Neither did anyone predicted that Drupal would lead the GoPHP5 movement or saw the impact of OpenID on Drupal. And last but not least, no mentioning of the song everybody loves, or at least loves to hate.

... and more

My own predictions? "Drupal will be mainly used by Big Companies as a "site"kick for their corporate site. So example.com will get a smaller blog.example.com or debate.example.com.". That happened, a lot. In the Netherlands and in Germany newspapers started using Drupal next to their proprietary main site. But the NY Observer even went for their main site over to Drupal

Only Dries can answer his own prediction:

There are many million websites out there. But by the end of 2007, if you take 1,000 random websites, at least 3 of them will run Drupal. Spam sites and pornographic websites must be excluded from any such experiment.

Maybe he will here?

And for 2008?

For 2008 you can make your predictions here. Make them unpredictable, funny and say what will and will not happen. And most of all, work on making sure your predictions become reality during 2008 so next year you will be "The Grand Winner of 2008".

Comments

RobLoach’s picture

Drupal becomes even more of a web service platform, offering more and more ways of interaction between third party applications and websites. This includes having parts of Services in core.

newms’s picture

I second this.

Macronomicus’s picture

Oh yeah ... that would be nice!

ICEcoffee-1’s picture

I predict Drupal will build a big reputation amongst web developers for being truly "open source" and "standards compliant", and attract said developers for said reasons. This will be the biggest drive to set Drupal apart from other CMSes, and drive Drupal growth.

-------------------------
If it is all about me, we are in for a crappy ride - So if I can help someone else, I will.

simplulo’s picture

"Oh and a few (more than 2) US presidential campaigns will use Drupal to power their site.".
I know of at least one.

Here is another Drupal-powered campaign site, advised by John VanDyk:
http://www.dailypaul.com/taxonomy/term/426
Just need one more....

newms’s picture

I was the one that made this prediction. Candidates using Drupal for their official site:

Chris Dodd
Mike Gravel

That's two that I know of. Not the biggest names, but they 're using Drupal for their official sites. Also there's Mike Bloomberg if he decides to run. Also there's the Ron Paul site mentioned above although it's not the official site. Does anyone know of any more?

There are also non official supporter sites, like Hillary's that Dries pointed out as well as one for Obama.

I was wrong with my other prediction though. I said that there would be more than 300,000 drupal.org users, but we are just about 220,000 users now.

sethcohn’s picture

George Phillies uses Drupal: http://phillies2008.org (I formerly webmastered it)
Steve Kubby uses Drupal: http://kubby2008.com

Unity08 was using Drupal, but they shut down recently: http://unity08.com

And I suspect if you look you'll see more 3rd party candidates who use Drupal for their sites...

newms’s picture

Another site (unofficial) asking Mike Bloomberg to run: http://draftmichaelbloomberg.com/

quicksketch’s picture

Personally, I hope to be involved in these things somehow which I think will come to pass:

  • Javascript modal dialogs will become a common place tool in Drupal core
  • CCK and Image handling will become part of core
  • Module ratings and reviews through the Fivestar and VotingAPI modules on drupal.org
  • O'Reilly will publish a super-kickass book on using the most common contrib modules, even though at least half the contrib modules will get major UI overhauls within two months of the books release ;)

Nathan Haug
creative graphic design        w: quicksketch.org
& software development       e: nate@quicksketch.org

starbow’s picture

More of a battleplan than a prediction, but I am with Nate on predicting modal dialogs as a core Drupal tool. They are just too useful to ignore. Of course, there will probably by a couple dozen contrib modules all with there own version of popup modals until we settle on one.
My entry into the ring is at: http://drupal.org/project/popups

Other predictions:
The Axajification for Drupal administration with get more and more exciting.
The OOP wars will heat up to a boil.
D7 will absorb CCK entirely and some of Views.
Drupalcon Boston will sell out.
jQuery UI will not get included in D7 enmass, but a couple pieces of it might.
Some major campus-wide infrastructure at UC Berkeley will move over to Drupal.

JohnForsythe’s picture

DrupalModules.com launches and becomes the preferred reference for module information. :)

--
John Forsythe
Need reliable Drupal hosting?

Michelle’s picture

You need to predict before 2008 :P

Michelle

--------------------------------------
See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.

JohnForsythe’s picture

I edited my post to fix the link. It's actually from 2007, hence why the post above and below are both from December 31, 2007. ;P

Michelle’s picture

LOL! I didn't look that close. It just showed up as a new comment. :)

Michelle

--------------------------------------
See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.

Etanol’s picture

  1. Drupal version rotation will slow down due to module developers complaints. We will not see Drupal 7 beta in 2008
  2. We will see more "modular approach to modules" - there will be more little, single purpose modules using and/or providing APIs being a part of more than one level dependency tree
  3. There will be more modules/code sniplets which sole purpose is to be eye candy - animated adding of a new comment, etc
  4. A module and/or theme will be created for admin page only usage and becomes popular enough to be considered as an option to be included in future releases
  5. Increasing use of Drupal in heavy traffic sites will result in funding new modules enhancing performance
  6. Switching over to Drupal will be easier (I am working on this one :-) )
  7. A more stable and reliable JQuery 1.2.x will allow JQuery updates in new releases of 6.x without any backwards compatibility addons
  8. There will be at least one serious rewrite of important core element withing 6.x branch (defective by design issue, the change will be internal only and it will be possible to release it before 7.x)
  9. Available translations list will be visible on per module basis

I will get at least 1 :P

jvandyk’s picture

I predict a second edition of Pro Drupal Development in late spring, documenting the ins and outs of Drupal 6.

KentBye’s picture

Growth Predictions

  • There will be at least four Drupal training series DVDs released in 2008.
  • On January 1, 2009, there will be at least 410,000 nodes & 390,000 users on drupal.org
  • There will be at least 3 new & major companies specializing in Drupal design
  • A significant portion of Drupal's growth will be driven by non-native English speaking developers due to the new i18n features
  • Google will fund 26 Summer of Code projects for Drupal
  • Drupal.org will be redesigned and more than double the number of actively used subdomains

Development Predictions

  • The Drupal Association will start funding more modules critical for Drupal.org infrastructure
  • Views2 UI will depend upon jQuery UI and pave the way for jQuery UI being integrated into Drupal 7 core
  • Drupal 7 core will have a new default admin theme that uses icons
  • It will be easier to review, evaluate and find Drupal modules on Drupal.org
  • Files will become PHP objects in Drupal 7
  • An image module will be committed to Drupal 7

Finally, Acquia will turn a profit in 2008.

themeartists.com’s picture

Agree with you, especially on this one:

There will be at least 3 new & major companies specializing in Drupal design

themeartists.com

HongPong’s picture

I am hoping to see many more languages become available with Drupal 6. Here in MN there is some interest among the local dev community (which meets near my house) to work on bringing Hmong, Somali and Ethiopian support in. Once the interface strings are in, it can be grafted onto any site, right?

And then there could be Drupal Somalia. How badass would that be? This could also help Drupal corner certain languages as a CMS, if we're first on the scene!

Gerhard Killesreiter’s picture

I'd really love to have more languages available.

newms’s picture

I think with the release of D6, we'll see a lot more use of Drupal in the non-English speaking world with some pretty big non-English websites popping up in Drupal. How about a major Chinese media site?

I also predict that we'll see the redesign of drupal.org in production.

newms’s picture

Drupal will repeat as the Packt Open source CMS winner.

We will see greater contributions from software companies such as Adobe, especially with the advance of the Services framework that Rob mentioned.

dmitrig01’s picture

The obvious:

  1. Drupal 6 will be released and will be a major hit
  2. Drupal 7 will have many new features
  3. Drupal.org will grow very much

The not-so-obvious:

  1. Comments and User Profiles will become nodes in Drupal 7
  2. The Drupal 7 code freeze will be extended by at least 1 month because of the major changes.
  3. At least three of the core modules will be overhauled or removed
  4. At least one new module will be added that has to do with media handling
  5. Drupal's usability will improve significantly with even more JavaScript

The obscure:

  1. There will be more people my age working on Drupal (my age now, not in one year)
Pasqualle’s picture

1. The project* module with new user interface and usability improvements will be the biggest hit on drupal.org in 2008.
2. There will be an eclipse mylyn connector for project* module, which will be the first significant step for Drupal to become the no1 bug tracking and project management system.

mlncn’s picture

benjamin, Agaric

Dries’s picture

I've posted my predictions at http://buytaert.net/drupal-predictions-for-2008.

Thanks for the amazing year 2007. :)

catch’s picture

Growth

  1. The numbers of drupal.org nodes and users will more than double during 2008
  2. Drupal 6 downloads will more than double compared to Drupal 5
  3. The number of people contributing and reviewing patches for core will increase significantly less than 1. or 2.

Drupal 7

  1. Major usability improvements building on the momentum from D6
  2. CCK in core with at least text module included
  3. Comments and user profiles will use nodes
  4. At least five D6 core modules will move into contrib for D7 or be transformed beyond recognition
  5. The issue to include a wysiwig (or better wysiwig support) in core will be long, and hard fought on all sides

Also:
Panels 2 will become as ubiquitous as CCK and Views
AdvForum will decrease the frequency of posts with the words "drupal's forum sucks" in them by at least 60%.

julma’s picture

Drupal is certainly one of the most powerful content management system nowadays.

Drupal will also become one of the most powerful user management system on the web in the two coming years.

Drupal will serve for most web applications whenever we built it fully with drupal or using drupal combined with other framework like phpcake http://drupal.org/project/drake, any javascript frameworks or any other third party modules http://drupal.org/project/Modules/category/52

Even if we made our applications also available on facebook or other social web sites. With drupal we will be able to keep the control on our users base.

Drupal will bring us the power to build any web applications with the ease of a fully integrated user management system behind which repect privacy laws, which is already compatible with openid, which is already ready to allow our users to invite their friends and promote our site etc...

My prediction is that drupal will be a required brick for more and more different type of web application by empowering them with a fully integrated user management system.

Joe Matthew’s picture

I am bit biased here in that Drupal is the best and most powerful Web content management system out there - bar none.

I just hope all the modules (like ecommerce) get ported to Drupal 6 and 7, as fast as the new releases of Drupal keep coming out in 2008!

-------------

Joe Matthew | Free Drupal CMS training videos

marcrobinsone’s picture

I predict that there will be a great buzz and effort in optimizing Drupal for "mobile platforms".

>>With the introduction of the iPhone, the Olpc device and other web-enabled gears/portable devices, I'm sensing that Drupal will have a good fortune of being primed to run on these cute little inventions.

>>Market & availability: I visualize that more themers and creative people will harness and wow us with what they can do with Drupal. I also see developers get younger by age and by heart.

>>Local forecast: I predict that Drupal will be more popular here in Asia. I also feel that there will be significant event(s) that will make Drupal shine in our region.

*Not so good forecast (read at your own risk)*
: I feel that the community will miss a special opportunity (one that will serve a very good leverage if taken) --I won't give a hint :p
: Something other than AJAX will be a better hit
: Some people will switch due to several stressful surprises

dmitrig01’s picture

>>Market & availability: I visualize that more themers and creative people will harness and wow us with what they can do with Drupal. I also see developers get younger by age and by heart.

LOL. You refering to me in the age thing? ;)

marcrobinsone’s picture

I'm young and child-at-heart too. ;D

I wish there's a Drupal camp for Drupal kids this 2008.

ericG’s picture

1) The tension between those with a community-centric perspective and those with a corporate-centric perspective will explode into a lively and productive debate.

2) The "comments should be nodes" debate will continue but comments will remain comments

3) Drupal 6 will be the only major release of the year.
The pace of drupal development will finally slow as more developers start to feel the pain related to the current pace, giving a voice to the perennial main complaint from non-techie users.

4) A hundred drupalSOMETHING.com domains will be registered by well-meaning folks and this year the majority of members of the community will realize that building separate islands is a counter-productive proposal, All of those domains will end up unused and eventually owned by domain speculators. The domain name renewal fees will instead be donated to the Drupal Association.

5) There will be new X.drupal.org domains to create a community focus and shared infrastructure for various things such as drupal camps, conferences, training materials, etc..

6) Attracted by the rapid growth of drupal, a number of companies will start up as drupal-specific shops and fail. As well, a number of companies will adopt drupal as part of a broad-based use of Free Software tools and succeed.

7) People in the non-profit world will start to discuss the dangers of the "Drupal Monoculture" and turn their focus to enhancing the interoperability of Drupal with other existing Free Software tools instead of trying to make every problem a nail for their Drupal-hammers.

8) Due to the above mentioned struggles and debates -- combined with the developer-centric and community-focused nature of Drupal -- both Drupal as a community and Drupal as a tool will continue to grow and attract talented techies and users.

9) The modules page will be reorganized to provide more useful information and a separation between alpha/in-development modules and modules that are really ready for use.

10) The Drupalicon will become recognized outside the drupal community and will be the new balloon in the 2008 Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York.

bertboerland’s picture

1) The tension between those with a community-centric perspective and those with a corporate-centric perspective will explode into a lively and productive debate.

Right on the spot. Yes, there is and will be more tension between "money" and "community"

4) A hundred drupalSOMETHING.com domains will be registered

Funny, I wanted to do a blog posting about this. 1260 so far. Not the trademark Dries owns and the association protects.

5) There will be new X.drupal.org domains to create a community focus

Right on, more about that later.

--
groets
bert boerland

--
groets
bert boerland

kulfi’s picture

4) A hundred drupalSOMETHING.com domains will be registered

Funny, I wanted to do a blog posting about this. 1260 so far. Not the trademark Dries owns and the association protects.

So what does it signify for the 1260 domain owners if the Drupal TM is owned and protected? (Just curious, I'm not an owner of one of those domains.)

bertboerland’s picture

1) the association doenst have a (sub)license document yet
2) there are some legit domain names dr. uval hostital dot com for example
3) trademarks dont translate to domainnames 1 on 1
4) we -dries/the association- will never go after all of them (as long as I have a small say in this), just the ones that are abusing drupals name
5) if you start a drupal business, dont describe the business name (drupal-shop.com) but be more creative (krimson.be for example)

--
groets
bert boerland

--
groets
bert boerland

Bevan’s picture

In 2008, Drupal becomes to websites and the website-producing industry, what Linux is to webservers and the web-hosting industry.

Cross-link; I blogged this on Drupal.geek.nz

wundo’s picture

1) Growth of drupal community in the South Hemisphere
2) Releasing of the first brazilian drupal company

JJacobsson’s picture

cvs and svn are death. mercurial or git for the win.

Now go switch! :)

.02$

morphir’s picture

I call and raise you with another .02 ;) If drupal.org doesn't make that move, someone else will..

morphir.com

greggles’s picture

The Drupal community can only move to something that is as easy or easier than CVS.

Any project that uses a more complex RCS for a tool like Drupal is guaranteed to have a very small developer base.

--
Knaddisons Denver Life | mmm Chipotle Log

alexandreracine’s picture

Well, since I did not got the svn cvs last year ;) this wont stop me from predicting more unpredictable predictions for 2008 :)

What will happen...

-With the new way to install drupal, more flavor out of the box will be available. (not all on drupal.org)
-Drupal 6 will be a success for mostly big corporations who can put a lot of time on building a website.

What wont happen...

-Drupal will still lac in the themes area compare to the others big two.
-No Drupal 7 yet. No betas, no RC.
-Within the first year of the foundation, nothing will happen much differently. We will have to wait for year two.

In this day, witch I am really sic, this is what I can do ;)

Alexandre Racine

www.alexandreracine.com - mon site perso
www.salsamontreal.com La référence salsa à Montréal

matt_harrold’s picture

I think Drupal will follow Linux and end up as many different flavors (pre-rolled packages) maintained by Drupal users or entrepreneurs.

I expect to see DrupalEd and other custom Drupal distros (not installation profiles) become more polished and take an identity for themselves.

Many useful modules available for Drupal 5 will either be forced to merge together, or forked/merged substitutes will appear as people become tired of dang diddly modularinos (sorry Ned Flanders).

So to summarize my tea leaves ... more Drupal distributions, less Modules to assemble ... faster TTL for Drupal newbies who pick an appropriate distribution.

s.Daniel’s picture

I expect to see DrupalEd and other custom Drupal distros (not installation profiles) become more polished and take an identity for themselves.

Let's hope you are wrong about this one!

  • In Germany the word of Drupal will spread and start to attack the market of typo3 and proprietary CMS
  • Drupal still wont have more people searching for it than joomla according to Google trends because less people will be searching for "drupal is broken help me!!!!!" ;)

Sebastian

greggles’s picture

What is your hope for distros, then? Or is it just DrupalEd that you have concerns about?

I think having them become highly polished helps bring people to Drupal. Ubercart is a great example of this phenomenon - people looking for "free ecommerce" find Ubercart on page 2 of google. Having external polished distributions helps bring new people/developers/themers/etc. to the project.

There is of course concern about them forking, but given that Drupal is so modular there is little reason for these projects to fork and plenty of value for them in not forking.

--
Knaddisons Denver Life | mmm Chipotle Log

s.Daniel’s picture

Yes forking is my only concern and I have to admid that I partly missunderstood matt_harrold (or didn't read his words exactly).
I guess I'll have to take a closer second look at Ubercart as well as DrupalED.

matt_harrold’s picture

Yes, I suppose I should have elaborated ... neither Ubercart or DrupalEd, or any other SANE package would be a fork, just a "compilation" of modules, data, and Drupal .. tailored for a specific usage pattern.

I tend to agree that forking would be an awful outcome, and probably a failure for anyone who tried.

The UberInstaller project for Ubercart has an interesting way of helping new Drupal users obtain and install all the modules required to get an online cart up and running ... this is the kind of "distribution" I expect to see more of.

mlncn’s picture

Many useful modules available for Drupal 5 will either be forced to merge together, or forked/merged substitutes will appear as people become tired of dang diddly modularinos (sorry Ned Flanders).

I don't think that will happen, and if it does I think it will be a bad thing.

I do think people will see the importance of letting newbieuser (or expertuser for that matter) pick module W and have X, Y, and Z installed automatically.

This won't be solved in 2008 I'm afraid, but I hope we'll be on our way to a solution by 2009. Ideally Update status module could download the code from Drupal.org for you. Professional hosters would use a different approach but the potential security risk of the web server writing to sites/all/modules is a lot smaller than the out of date Drupal, I think.

Imagine selecting and installing modules from within your Drupal site! Then Drupal will be like Linux ;-)

Alternatively (and suboptimally) Drupal.org could package all required dependencies with modules and user-admins are expected to open their tarball first in sites/all/files (may not exist) or something where a helper module could zap duplicates, before the user-admins moves the module files into sites/all/modules or wherever they like.

I agree many dependencies for Drupal modules will be a problem, but bigger, less-modular modules will be a bad solution.

benjamin, Agaric Design Collective

benjamin, Agaric

catch’s picture

There's seems to be a good chance we'll see packaging of install profiles on Drupal.org this year. I think a step further than that, would be "runtime distributions" - so you can install drupal core, then grab one or more distributions (without core) which give you additional modules and presets in one big chunk. That won't happen in 2008, but it'd be one way for complex modules with lots of dependencies to get around this issue.

Also drush seems to be getting very close to "apt for drupal", so that might be an option for some of us.

Lots of little modules that interlink are what makes Drupal such a flexible system to work with, no-one wants to go back to monolithic all-in-one modules that can't do anything else do they? In the end - you end up using more modules that way if you have anything other than very basic requirements- and more importantly a lot more duplicate and buggy code - since everything has to implement it's own features internally rather than sharing them with others.

TapocoL’s picture

Higher-level Education will have a greater focus on open-source, not to mention Drupal as the Website Creator. Hard to measure, but I believe the focus within college classes on open-source will be perceptively much higher.

With the free access to the software and the community that comes along with drupal, this will allow education to be less expensive and more productive in web development specific courses.

-Craig Jackson
-Web Developer

Frando’s picture

So here we go. My predictions.

The Drupalcon in Europe this fall will be the biggest ever and the first one with about 1000 participants.

With the release of Drupal 7, simpletests and automated testing will have become an integral part of core development.

Work on Drupal core will increase significantly thanks to Aquia.

Aquia will be the driving force behind the inclusion of most parts of CCK and the query builder/API parts of Views in Drupal 7.

Drupal will receive at least one major financial contribution of a major industry member (e.g. yahoo paying someone to work on Drupal).

Drupal 7 will not be released before 2009, due to major code freeze extensions thanks to lots of API redesigning/streamlining/oopifaction.

The Drupal community will yet again suffer from flame wars about a VCS change thanks to the new possiblities provided by the project VCS abstraction modules, but finally resulting in a switch to SVN, which will leave many unsatisfied.

Drupal.org redesign will be one of the major tasks in 2008, but won't be completed until 2009.

With the release of Drupal 7, we will finally have core documentation as docbook in CVS and a docbook module developer's guide will be in creation.

Drupal 7 will finally provide more reusable javascript widgets, e.g. modal dialogs, floating popups (windows), and more drag&drop.

Drupal 7 will finally make distribution profiles a big thing.

robertgarrigos’s picture

Drupal distributions will flourish this year, both thematic (like drupaled) and linguistic (language distributions).

---
Robert Garrigos
Professional site: robert.garrigos.cat
Catalan Drupal Users Group: drupal.cat

eaton’s picture

  • By May, large-scale Drupal 6 sites will begin launching.
  • As more large-scale sites roll out using Drupal, the community's collection of high-performance scaling techniques for Drupal will grow, and become common knowledge rather than black arts. Memcached and complex database configurations will receive even greater attention.
  • A greater percentage of the community will focus on user experience issues, and the value of our long-standing emphasis on progressive enhancement will become more and more apparent. Adding UI 'sugar', reworking troublesome portions of the interface, and improving fundamental workflows will all be easier because we have resisted the temptation to tightly couple client-side script code to server-side processing.
  • The groups using Drupal will diversify even further. Large-scale corporate site building, web-app design, hobbyist blogging, and home-grown community management are wildly different domains with different needs. Attempts to compare Rails and Drupal will further muddy the waters. One of the greatest challenge for Drupal in the coming year will be maintaining a coherent and focused project with a clear vision.
  • Projects to rewrite several major core APIs will be launched, and at least one will stall and ultimately be shelved or delayed for the indefinite future -- much disappointment and doomsaying will result.
  • The community will begin to realize (in part due to the above stalled project) how much design debt Drupal has accrued over the past several years of rapid expansion and development. While the problem will not be solved in 2008, the realization that it IS a problem will help prevent a long-term meltdown.
  • The non-UI portions of Views will be integrated into Drupal core, and a round of deep structural changes will begin as core pages are rewritten to use it. In the long term, this will be more significant and useful than the shelved API rewrite.

--
Lullabot! | Eaton's blog | VotingAPI discussion

--
Eaton — Partner at Autogram

Robert Castelo’s picture

  • Year of the Consultancy
    Many experienced Drupal developers will team up to form consultancies
  • SOA Integration
    Drupal integrates with SOA middleware to be part of massively scalable, high redundancy systems
  • Asset Handling
    Unified and coherent system for handling media and files
  • Media Attention
    Mainstream press articles. Drupal will also be featured on TV tech reports, mainly as part of stories on Open Source
  • Action Figures
    Collectable Drupal developer action figures become available (OK, I'm joking, but I would seriously buy them if they existed)

------------------------------------------
Drupal Specialists: Consulting, Development & Training

Robert Castelo, CTO
Code Positive
London, United Kingdom
----

Michelle’s picture

"Unified and coherent system for handling media and files"

Oh, man, I sure hope so. I consider myself pretty good with the contribs but media handling makes me dizzy with all the choices. LOL

Michelle

--------------------------------------
See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.

greggles’s picture

  • More users will demand "X module in core" and more contrib authors will struggle against that
  • More users will demand "X module in core" and some contrib authors will be happy to slide their mature modules into core
  • The powered by Drupal block will solidify Drupal in the SERP for the the best php/mysql cms
  • More major contributers will leave the project (either with whispers or with bangs) but they will be replaced by many more new contributers
  • The new association members will help clarify it's goals. This clarification comes about equally by what the new members do and also based on who the current members select to add to the group.
  • A Drupal Association will incorporate in the USA as a non-profit organization with the same purposes and as a child organization of the Belgian association. The main reasons will be to increase charitable donations, get "non-profit" rates for catering and meeting space for DrupalCamps, and to write visa letters for DrupalCon2009. People will misinterpret the meanings of this incorporation and expect it to do more than this. It won't (that's a good thing).
  • Project* module will form the basis of another big "plugin" directory and issue tracker for an open source project (i.e. something other than Drupal.org and jQuery)
  • Installation profiles will continue to be useful but will not see explosive growth in 2008
  • In January 2009 we will still have a 'Predictions for 2009' thread but we will also have a Drupal specific play money prediction market which will help answer valuable-yet-tough questions like when the next version will be released and which features will be included

I think the last one would be the biggest news among these, but that's just my (biased) opinion ;)
--
Knaddisons Denver Life | mmm Chipotle Log

bpocanada’s picture

- Many of the Top Global Technology Consulting firms will plunge into Drupal and mostly exit the foray in 3 years
- Installation Profiles and Hosted Drupal Solution companies will take away the limelight and become extremely profitable companies
- Hourly rates will go down by at least 25% as large pool of developers from developing nations will try and compete in Global Markets
- Drupal will become one of the top three choice in new Enterprise Content Management Projects
- Drupal Certification announcement and plan may be released in 2008
- Drupal Specific Magazine may be released in 2008
- Many Universities will teach Drupal in their Curriculum
- DruBB module may get developed and released and help to strengthen Drupal Forums.

--
Roshan Shah
T : 604-630-4292
Vancouver, Canada
Skype/GoogleTalk/Yahoo : bpocanada

Michelle’s picture

"DruBB module may get developed and released and help to strengthen Drupal Forums."

DruBB isn't a module. It's a group with asperations of being an install profile. ;)

My prediction is that the core forum module in Drupal 7 will be strengthened so forums work better out of the box.

Michelle

--------------------------------------
See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.

sun’s picture

  • Coder and Devel modules will continue to enhance and have the most impact on clean and open code, so Drupal further improves its position being truly open source, modular, innovative, a developer-toolbox and "The linux of the web". Both modules will be considered for Drupal core, or at least will be the heart of a designated development install profile.
  • Drupal "distributions"/"packages"/"applications" will be made available as complete downloads, turning Drupal into a new generation of web application/content management framework that not only follows but supersedes the Linux-way.
  • Based on the steadily increasing amount of visitors on the showcase site, Drupal Administration Menu or something near it will be considered for inclusion in core for D7.
  • There will be one Wysiwyg module to rule them all.
  • Someone will re-factor API module, so Drupal API is able to provide documentation for all modules in contrib.
  • There will be a big battle about removing a lot of current core modules (book, blog, forum, profile) in favor of replacing them with CCK-/Views-based *templates*.
  • "Outline" or "Tree" module will be coded, providing a solid API for hierarchical objects, and will be integrated into menu, taxonomy, and book modules.
  • The amount of Drupal gals will double.

Daniel F. Kudwien
unleashed mind

Daniel 'sun' Kudwien
makers99

NonProfit’s picture

2008 will bring :

a) Others; spending too much time making kooky remixes of the Drupal Song
b) Me; spending too much time listening to them >sigh<.

-NP

BenStallings’s picture

I'm new to the community and may be way out on a limb here, but I predict that more sites (Drupal and otherwise) will point their AJAX/AHAH controls at public databases such as FreeBase rather than relying on their own internal taxonomies, resulting in a more consistent organization of topics among sites and more intelligent searchability by search engines. Such sites will be able to incorporate each others' content intelligently through MGT queries.

merlinofchaos’s picture

  • Views in core will finally look like a realistic possibility, and work will be underway by the end of the year, but probably won't be completed until 2009.
  • Combinations of new techniques focusing on UI, including the new core drag & drop, Panels 2 will greatly affect the perception of how sites are built. This will cause some people to rethink old paradigms. This will be the beginning of Drupal finally losing the "by developers for developers" mystique; but it will be hard to shed because perception is often more important than reality.
  • Joomla will make enough major advances to really concern Drupal adopters, and true competition will actually begin. (Right now it's more like a friendly rivalry).
  • Acquia will be basically quiet for its first year, and most of what is seen from Acquia will be contributions directly to core. Having key developers paid to work full time on core will improve the workflow, and more business-style management practices will be bandied about as being necessary to deal with Drupal's continued growth.
  • The transition from small but exciting open-source project to a truly important opensource project will leave even more contributors behind as they are unable to adjust to the new environment. Some survivors will mourn this lost and yearn for "the good old days".
  • The sorts of challenges that have been made to the existing Drupal power structure in the last month will continue to be made; it will be revealed that some significant source of these challenges have an agenda which turns out not to actually be for the community at all.

-- Merlin

[Point the finger: Assign Blame!]
[Read my writing: ehalseymiles.com]
[Read my Coding blog: Angry Donuts]

-- Merlin

[Read my writing: ehalseymiles.com]
[Read my Coding blog: Angry Donuts]

mdroste’s picture

More popular German sites, like www.ehrensenf.de, will be powered by Drupal. And at least one big site will have a Flash frontend powered by a Drupal backend.

md - http://drupalcenter.de
--
http://mdwp.de

--
mdwp*

phayes’s picture

Predictions:

1) Drupal's handling of spatial data will finally "grow up" in 2008. People looking to do interactive mapping on the web will flock to drupal.
2) We will begin to see some inkling of a database level API for drupal - driven by the need of companies that have huge internal databases and want to open some of it up to the world using drupal.

infojunkie’s picture

In 2007, a (large?) portion of the Drupal community realized that our beloved system goes way beyond being a mere CMS, but that it can be considered a full-fledged Web application framework, of a new kind. Radically different from the bottom-up Java, RoR and other Cake frameworks, Drupal supplies out of the box (well, with at least CCK and Views added) a running application construction kit that requires thinking in Lego logic rather than boring old procedural programming. Modules act as tiny logic units that not only hook into the core, but also connect third-party modules together to achieve new functionality with minimal coding.

This simple but radical shift in thinking has far-reaching consequences that haven't been fully realized yet. Here's what I predict for the near future:

  • People will use Drupal to emulate - i.e., rewrite - other systems at much lower cost and much better maintainability. Sharepoint, SugarCRM, dotProject, eGroupware, all these systems are special cases of Drupal.
  • Software product companies will embed Drupal in their own systems. The trend that started with CivicCRM and AstBill will take hold in 2008.
  • We will witness an explosion of modules that integrate all kinds of technologies into Drupal. I know, it's not much of a prediction since there are so many already, but the number of such modules will just go through the roof. In a sense, Drupal will assimilate all these technologies.

This inflationary growth will lead to structural reworks. Here's what I think will happen:

  • People will consider rewriting Drupal in Java. I don't know if anyone will have the guts to do it.
  • Drupal-specific optimizers will be written to normalize the insane number of tables and modules being used in applications.
  • Networks of Drupal installations will be used to search and query information, P2P-style.
  • The node system will be rewritten as a Virtual Node File System.
  • All major IDEs, UML editors and code generation tools will include support for Drupal architectures.

At that point, Google will bid for Drupal, as the centerpiece for its own Total Information Management system. Beyond this singularity, I cannot see :-)

farald’s picture

... the old habit of looking back and forward regarding all things Drupal is here again! It is time to see what we predicted right, where we where not really on the spot and where we failed to see what was going on.

Wow.. kind of nostalgic to read about the ultracool clean urls of the year 2003 (thread well worth reading).. :D

vydy’s picture

Technology opened the future and this is good!
I hope next year realized forecasts. And this growth will continue in subsequent years.
Бытовки

Designers.pro’s picture

We've already seen a lot positive from Drupal this year. Many thing turn out the be better than prediction.

www.designers.pro
"Design Professionals Community"