Predictions for 2006

My prediction concerns two organisations that push Drupal harder than any other; Bryght and CivicSpaceLabs. Both have their own "brand" of Drupal, be it as managed hosting or as a distribution, and both contribute massive amounts of code, mindshare, leadership and attention to our project. Both are underrated.

Bryght is underrated because people underestimate how beautiful life can be when someone else takes care of servers, upgrades, security and installation. Relatively few people recognize the business opportunity that arises for anyone who signs up for a Bryght reseller account. Somebody with deep pockets (and great vision) will recognize this, however, and partner with or outright buy Bryght. This will lead to them tripling in size overnight, Adrian moving to a big house in Canada, and lots of headlines. They might have to change their name to BrY!ght.

CivicSpace is underrated because people don't always understand that it is Drupal, all put together just the way you'd like it, plus CiviCRM (which most still haven't even realized exists). CivicSpace releases new versions very frequently, meaning you have a planned upgrade path that moves quicker than the Drupal point releases. What major event will occur for CivicSpace is hard to predict. Maybe it will be a large contract (the recent Greenpeace contract would have been an example... too bad). Maybe it will be a parnership. I just have the feeling that it will make us go "wow".

- Robert Douglass

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My sites: HornRoller.com, RobsHouse.net

1) More core developers employed full time on drupal. Including developers whose sole purpose it is to develop cool things for core.

2) The year of a thousand distributions. Core is moving in a direction that we will be able to easily ship different configurations of drupal
directly on drupal.org. The format for this distribution are also self documenting and can be unit tested.

3) Dump the current project module and rewrite it properly. The general relationship framework allows us to build a far more powerful and flexible project management framework than was possible before.

4) Move to subversion. The install system is going to necessitate us to re-think our code versioning system, and it is going to be far far far far simpler to build from scratch using a well documented set of hooks for subversion.

Also, there's the subversion module which will allow us to integrate repository browsing / administration directly into the new project framework (ie: be able to create new repositories for sub projects, and administrate the permissions to the repositories through the web interface).

5) Drupal becomes synonymous with the semantic web. With Tim Berners Lee using Drupal and the new relationship api, i think having RDF/OWL/FOAF etc. exports for anything and everything possible, by default, will move drupal into becoming one of the leading semantic publishing platforms on the internet. Even a simple aggregator site somewhere sits there and gives meaning to everything it aggregates.

6) Drupal themeing will become much much improved, including introducing powerful theme / layout switching into core that supercedes the frontpage and sections modules. One of
the caveats however, is that Drupal will also become far more flexible as a platform, which will probably make a 1 theme fits the entire site type setup more difficult to accomplish. Hence :

7) We will introduce a seperate admin theme / layout / section, to cut down the amount of work needed to create a new theme. Some of the older developers will be annoyed at this, but there will be great rejoicing among, you know, actual users.

8) Finally find a good use for drupal-world-domination.com. Since it will be very near to the truth.
--
The future is so Bryght, I have to wear shades.

Well, let's see....

1) Drupal will become the standard for orginizational web tools, projects and sites.
2) Site independant tools for futher aggregation and dispersial of data will develop as client programs focus more on the content than the wrapper the content is in.
3) Drupal will replace the broken Mambo community as a user friendly CMS.
4) 5 more large corporations will publicaly laud Drupal.
5) Drupal will face problems as it's maintainer decides he wants children :-)

Oh, BTW, I'm rarely wrong ;o)

Robin

1) 2006 will be an even more turbulent year. So predicting anything is near impossible. Too much new blood will join, too much new ideas will shake Drupal on its foundations. Drupal will be DUBAR (Developed Up Beyond Any Recognition) at the end of 06.

2) Drupal (the community) will first become highly unmanagable. Forums will flood with issues, support will go unanswered, due to the sheer volume of them. Bugs / features cannot be closed fast enough to keep up with the number of duplicates and wont-fixes. Then Drupal will either break apart into small (geographical) communities that act as filter for drupal.org. Or people will get payed for improving the code behind drupal.org (*grin*), so that we can implement newish community based workflows (think digg). Or both.

3) We will get a few moments where spammers manage to flood drupal (not just a few posts, but automated) (re: point 2)

4) We will see the evolution of a few newish distro's. They might even be successfull.

5) Commens will still not be nodes.

6) Taxonomy will be removed. No, replaced, by a system with the same abilities but aimed at relations, rather then only tree-d categories. And yes, because a taxonomy is just a view of relations, tags, or cats will be nodes.

7) We will get a nice central and modular file system. One way or another.

8) New webdevelopment concepts will trickle down into Drupal. Drupal will use some of this, to become a better development platform.

---
Bèr Kessels
Professional www.webschuur.com
Personal bler.webschuur.com

He turned out to be right.

You say that like you're suprised.

;0)
silverwing

Drupal will march on, gradually becoming the Linux of the Web.
--
Read my developer blog on Drupal4hu. | The news is Now Public

There is one risky:
Comments will be nodes (at least i hope so!)

We will see notice a larger number of Websites using Drupal as a "Forum".

At least 3 new phptemplate themes will be added.

Marcel
http://www.macminiforums.com/forums/
http://pressrelease.cc - using Drupal

1. Support will continue to be an issue as the projects popularity continues to grow as the vast majority of users fail to contribute back in code work, forum support or documentation. This will continue to result in periodic attacks on the Drupal communities by angry neopythes and forum trolls who have failed to take the time to actually learn the product and work with the community on improving it or the documentation.

2. Documentation quality will continue to slowly improve, though still lag behind. Overwhelmed by the lack of contributors (150 people who have contributed to the handbook out of a community of 43,000 users)

3. People will still demand work on external forums integration rather then contribute to improving integrated forums (and fail to work on external forums integration themselves).

4. Despite a pesimistic #1, 2 and 3, we will continue to grow in active quality contributors as we are now but at a much slower rate in relation to our growth then we can hope to keep up.

5. The virtually invisible work that has been done underneath the hood for 4.7, will allow for an explosion of new nifty things, features and ideas.

6. The groundwork encouraging collaboration on base level api contrib modules which are then leveraged by purpose specific modules will finally start to pay off as people 'get it' and more begin to collaborate to share the workload.

7. The final system moves this year to the new infrastructure will help free up Dries and others to concentrate on more interesting things than only help Drupal as a whole.

-sp
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

seamless phpbb integration that allows existing phpbb communities to easily expand into content management using drupal

1. dries will receive an offer to host a game show involving contestants wearing bikinis. he'll turn it down in favor of a reality TV show about computer nerds.
2. chx will end up hosting the game show.
3. webchick will appear on the game show, and take second place for the day.
4. killes will say something good about Windows. anything. :)

...will be driven by several high-profile websites. The notoriety push will come from larger, more complex sites using CivicSpace and Drupal.

At some point, some big pundits will notice and praise the software. (I recall in the /. threads, many of the regulars had never even heard of Drupal. That will change.)

People will come sniffing, and because people are people, some opinionators will say, "What's so great about that?" At which point a little tempest of a debate will go on.

A major megabucks corporation will distrubute a proprietary CMS that will get attention (of course), and comparisons will get drawn between it and Drupal.

Adopting Drupal will become more of a political move, dovetailing into a growing Open Source movement fed at least in part by a growing dissatisfaction with and resentment of the contempt for customers that major corporations demonstrate on a daily basis.

Some sort of new meme or widget for interactivity will emerge, and Drupal, with its developed API and AJAX, will be an early path for its application.

Two guys will get the idea of producing a cheesecake "Girls of Drupal" calendar. There will be controversy. One of the guys will up and quit the project, declaring that he's fallen in love and will get married on 14 January 2007. The other guy will withdraw the calendar, but then "bootleg" copies will appear on Ebay. Then one of the models will sue, and it will turn out that the guys never got signed model releases, and the calendar will become an electronic curiosity passed around via pdf, and the whole thing will be laughed at at DrupalCons to come ... until, in 2009, someone will try again, and get all the signed releases, but this time the models will be nude, tattooed ... and male. Hollywood will buy the rights to make a movie, but a video game, "Drupal Dudes," will be made first, in Hi-Def 3D and feature hyper-buff dudes with great buttocks waging sorcery battles using software code, which will become a big hit for the education market, especially for young women, and bring $37 million of royalties in, which all but $19,478 will be donated to the Drupal Foundation (the rest going to buy the calendar creator a hot new megamicrocomputer skull implant), and then, with paid development, Drupal takes over the world and becomes The Matrix.

Or maybe not.

Laura
===
pingVision • rare pattern • scattered sunshine

• Dries will abandon his effort to port Drupal to Java, and will do it in Ruby instead.
• Ruby on Rails stock price take a tumble as a result.
• Dries gets hired by Microsoft to work on Sharepoint.
• CivicSpace does and IPO, then they get bought by AOL.
• themes.drupal.org finally points to the proper DNS.
• In the tech arena, Slashdot switches to Drupal, Digg quickly follows that move.
• BBC News switches to Drupal, shortly after MSNBC does so.
• Drupal finally gets a non-profit foundation.
• Rumor has it that a certain development team member was seen smiling.
• Khalid's predictions are known to never be wrong ...

And here is the smiley ... :-)
--
Drupal development and customization: 2bits.com
Personal: Baheyeldin.com

My predictions:

• Drupal.org will have a new livelier theme.
• Drupal search will improve significantly.
• Online theme editor becomes available.
• Themeing system gets a revamp and becomes more flexible.
• Drupal.org foundation will become a reality.
• Many more blogs will be powered by Drupal.
• drupal.css will become less bloated and more of the styling (or all) will be done by the theme and/or modules.

Those are all I can think of right now. Will add more when they occur to me. It will be interesting to reread this post same time next year.

My Drupal-powered Blog: ThoughtfulChaos

Number of Drupal+PostgreSQL users will double (triple? ;))

--
Polska strona o Drupalu: http://drupal.cvbge.org

My whishes / predictions are the following:

• many i18n improvement
• good search capabilities, acting like mini-google
• a full-featured relation module with additional plugins
• documentation improvements, especially good tutorials in various subjects (like action module, the new forms api, etc.)

--
Fehér János aka Aries
http://aries.mindworks.hu

Is this a prediction or just wishful thinking?

1) Anyone who suggests on a forum that most sites are mono-lingual and that there is "no interest" in multi-lingual sites will be met with waves of hysterical online laughter.

2) As a result, i18n will at last make it into core, or at least core will make it possible to install i18n module without applying patches

• The tension between 'Drupal the end-user product' and 'Drupal the development framework' will stretch Drupal.org's manpower resources to the breaking point.
• Drupal 4.9 will ship near year's end with a greatly reduced list of modules, but those that are there will be generic tools like CCK and Views.
• Several VERY popular VERY high traffic sites will spring up focusing exclusively on a handful of application-specific Drupal distributions.
• This will be a good, good thing.

--
Jeff Eaton | I heart Drupal.

1. Many core drupal developers will get paid proper wages/salaries to do work on the core part-time, perhaps by employers who have drupal sites and want a developer to work a few days a week doing custom proprietory modules, the rest of the week working on core.

2. Usability will be a major focus. Core contributors will realise just how un-userfriendly drupal currently is for site admin, how some things just don't make sense, how menus, primary/secondary links etc are a mess, and a major effort will be made to make things better, possibly even with paid usability studies

3. Core will include the ability to run across a master-slave mysql configuration, as drupal.org itself gets to the stage where this becomes useful

4. Efforts to get Drupal to work with non-MySQL databases will face serious problems as efforts are made to make Drupal better optimized for MySQL.

5. A large effort will be made to make forums more akin to phpBB and vBulletin, thus greatly increasing the the number of forum sites moving to Drupal. At least one leading phpBB/vBulletin developer will defect to Drupal, bringing their talents and experience with them.

6. Similar effort will occur in regards to wiki. A *real* wiki module will be launched with many features of mediawiki rather than just input filters

7. As a result of the above two points, people no longer have to resort to using drupal + mediawiki + phpbb etc for large sites. A massive number of users thus switch to Drupal.

8. The default template shipped with Drupal will use tableless CSS and come with fantastic documentation on how to use and modify it.

9. A WYSIWYG module - probably a basic one - will make core, although it will be a disabled module by default. It will include image uploading/browsing features.

As it'll be the year of the ferret next year, and Venus will be in alignment with Druplicon (and wearing a t-shirt to prove it!), this is what the horoscope predicts for 2006...

1. A large 'bricks & mortar' company will use Drupal to power their website and intranet, and this will open the enterprise floodgates for Drupal.

2. We are going to go from a theme famine to a theme feast, with more themes being released per week than were released all of last year.

3. Several web applications built with Drupal will hit the ground running, becoming immediately profitable by providing services that people actually need, and surviving the Web 2.0 bubble bursting when VC money burns out in 2008.

Drupal will become an indipendent OS, DrupalOS! :D

To be serious, it will be implemented the best search engine (Drupal 4.7 perhaps)

Katapekkia inFo_360°

The Drupal community will cheer and cry as a core Drupal developer gets hired by Google.

- Robert Douglass

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My sites: HornRoller.com, RobsHouse.net

-The voting API and google maps module's API will be totally prolific. Geocontent and various incarnations user moderation will become pretty important in Drupal.
-A separate admin interface as (á la the Civicspace theme) will become more prominent, and possibly the norm by 2007.
-CCK will be huuuuge news.
-Someone will releas a fairly obnoxious theme which allows users to move every single block of content via AJAX.
-Drupal will become more widely-known than phpnuke was during its heyday.

-Building social networking sites with Drupal will become very easy and very common.

My personal highlights for 2005 include the Drupal 4.6 release, the three Drupal conferences I helped organize, the Drupal books that are being written, the fund raise, the new infrastructure (including the support from Sun Microsystems and the OSL), and the unexpected exponential growth of the community. 2005 was a blast. Not only for Drupal, but for many Free and Open Source content management systems.

What is in it for 2006?

In terms of code we'll see forum improvements, image and/or document improvements, some basic install profiles, more AJAX, incremental theme system improvements, significant node system changes, and various improvements to the administration pages.

The exciting trend in 2006 will be the many new media services on the web; people want to publish more content. Most of this will be social media published by individuals or online communities. Not just more content and pictures, but also a lot more video. Information overload, a direct result of this, will drive the adoption of RSS, Atom, aggregators and news readers. Lots of people will figure out that, to stay productive and up-to-date, content aggregation and content filtering is a must. By the end of 2006, people will not only want to aggregate all interesting or relevant content, they'll also want to consolidate the functionality of the various web services. In short: more content, the need for aggregation and filtering, and ultimately, consolidation of functionality. Clearly, Drupal is in a proper spot to benefit from these trends.

The less exciting trend of 2006, but probably the more important one in terms of growth and revenue, is the increased adoption of content management systems for small, basic websites. Millions of small websites will start using content management systems. The biggest mistake we'll make in 2006 is that many of us will be neglecting small website owners. This is where more traditional systems like Mambo, Joomla! and even Wordpress will shine, and because of that, they'll grow faster than Drupal. Fortunately, Drupal 4.7.0 will be a great release for many of the small website owners. Much of the work we did in 2005, will have its impact in 2006. We'll continue to grow, but the growth will be linear rather than exponential.

Furthermore, by the end of 2006, most other systems will provide role based access control, localization, clean URLs, some sort of node system, etc. Functionality-wise there will be less differentiation amongst the available content management systems, and as a result, more emphasis is put on ease of use, out of the box experience, the (support) community and performance. Some of the more obscure functionality like the aggregator, the taxonomy system, and the throttle system will be subtle but important differentatiors. It's been a long, well-run race so far, but unless we manage to make Drupal more accessible to new users and to get back to the basics, we'll find the ground shifting beneath our feet.

Even with many good or exciting things happening in 2006 (make no mistake, they will happen), we'll find ourselves at the base of a new mountain. Just like in 2005, there will be growing pains, yet they'll be bigger. A community with 40.000 members has many voices, and each such voice demands slightly different things. Some people will be unhappy, disorientated and impatient for things to improve. At times, they'll be highly articulate about this. It is going to be a long and complicated climb. Growing is learning to climb bigger mountains, learning to deal with bigger growing pains. Fortunately, you've been the best community I know, and the best I have ever had the privilege of working with. You have the enthusiasm, the passion and the determination of the world to climb that mountain.

Despite the slightly worrisome tone of this message, 2006 promises to be an exciting year. Drupal will make more inroads on companies, governments, public institutions like school and universities, open source projects, and -- most of all -- non-professionals. Just like in 2005, we'll make substantial progress. 2006 will be one hell of a ride ... Make sure to hang on tight.

(I'm going to extend/refine my predictions in the next few days. Too busy right now, but I just wanted to post my initial thoughts.)

[echoing jakeg]:
Far more effort will be put into improving the user interface. Drupal will be made far more intuitive for 'casual' content contributors.

A new events system will be produced. A system that allows recurring events with different descriptions for each, *and* missing repeating events are allowed (plus any repeated instance can be deleted without deleting all of them).

Drupal will have search engine friendly URLs by default. So instead of http://drupal.org/node/41966 this item would be http://drupal.org/forum/gen/predictions-for-2006
Not only will Google like it, but it's a lot easier to identify what's on the page. And of course, the editor can override it :-)

Again, linking to items such as other pages will become easy enough for 'casual' users. If your father can do it, the system's easy enough. If your mother can do it, you've succeeded better than anyone could expect ;-)

A proper gallery system (n:m category relationships etc) that allows easy (as above) insertion of images into other pages of the site will be created, without the need to wrap gallery2 (uugh) into the system.

I have moved this comment to a node of it's own, as it was incredibly long and not really in the right place.

It is in relation to some of the comments on this thread regarding open documents etc.

My predictions, for what they're worth:

1. The number of posts asking 'how to change the size of a font' will surpass the number of posts asking 'Is Drupal right for me?'.

2. I will lose my job because my Microsoft-centric consulting company will get tired of me proposing and actually using Drupal for every solution in 2006. The only reason this didn't happen in 2005 is because I am the only one that can support the previous installations. This of course will spell the real beginning of Drupal's world domination.

3. Someone will actually create a weblinks module that has usable functions that people want. Drupal will finally cease to be the only CMS/Publishing system without a categorized url/site database with a presentation feature.

4. Users will finally understand taxonomies. This will create a worldwide effort to change the taxonomy module's menu entry back to taxonomy.

5. The politically conservative in the world will catch on to Drupal and become the number one users of the product. This of course will spell the worldwide demise of all poor people and socialists. Not to worry, the loss of all those users will be replaced by government users and grants as well as corporate sponsorships and most importantly, it will be the only software sanctioned by the US Republican Party.

This change in user base will mean the need for usable modules like:

a. Asset Tracking
b. Tax Sheltering
c. Global Warming Creation Module - this module will actually exist to accelerate global warming!

That is all for now.

gtoddv

I predict Flickr will ditch its code and start to use Drupal image.module code

Will make drupal the hippist CMS for media publishing and syndication.

On a serious note, this is the only predicition that MUST reach fruition before the end of 2006....

Automated installation frontend (wizard, setup program, whatever). And the end of the upgrade dropdown with 100 choices on where to upgrade from.

This is a must for this year. All the fancy and beautifully executed code don't mean sh*t if the average user can't get it installed.

Nostradrupalus has spoken.