Year (2004) after year (2005), we have had a tradition on Drupal.org to look back at the last year and make predictions for the year ahead. Year (2006) after year (2007) we are amazed at how wrong we were trying to predict the future and how right we are making our own great future. Year after year, and 2008 was no exception. Take a look at the predictions for 2008 to see who was wrong and who was right, and post a comment in this thread to predict what will happen in the Drupal community for 2009.

Back to the future: code, community, people

Let us take a look at what 2008 has brought us; what happened code-wise, what happened in the community and which people were in the spotlight.

2008, the Code

Code-wise, the biggest news was the release of Drupal 6, the award-winning version of Drupal that highly focuses on Internationalisation. And while Drupal version 6 had a slow start, Views2 and CCK 2 make a very strong foundation to deploy new Drupal sites on the best version of Drupal: 6! Most interesting work on modules is now done on this six version, and more and more bigger sites are migrating to this version. Also highly code related was the work the Drupal Association put into the Licensing FAQ, an excellent document describing the impact of the General Public License. A new version, made by more people than ever before, two important modules complete rewritten, hundreds of Drupal 6 modules and a good license FAQ -- 2008 was a very good year for the Drupal code.

2008, the Community

Even more than the codebase, the number of installs and the number of modules, the community grew, both in size and in maturity. Many people and organisations recognised this in 2008 and therefore our product won many prizes last year, including the Packt Publishing Best Open Source CMS award (again) and the Webware award. The prize money goes to the Drupal Association; the honour is for all of us!

2008 was also the year where a very good DrupalCon was organised in a small cosy town, Szeged, with more than 500 attendees! See the highlights at this slideshow and watch the infamous Drupal song performed during the closing keynote. The DrupalCon in Boston was the biggest ever with nearly 900 people attending. Apart from the DrupalCons, Drupal people met at the booming local DrupalCamps, in the lively Drupal Groups or for example at the Do It With Drupal conference; more people meeting in more ways to share ideas and code.

One of the biggest changes in the community, lead by the Drupal Association, is the redesign of the drupal.org website by Mark Boulton Design. Both the result and the road have set new standard in website design. 2008 was also the year where more and more time was spent on usability with academic research which will lead to a better product.

In 2008, more books on Drupal were published than in all the years before 2008! A list of some of the Drupal books published last year in random order:

The community never has been so strong before as in 2008. We are in good form for the future!

2008, the People

Code, community -- it does not exist without people. People making code and working together in the community. We treasure all of our smart people who work on our code, test our products, document Drupal, build websites or evangelise us. In 2008, a few people got some extra airtime. Earl Miles won the well-deserved award of Most Valuable Person of the year in 2008 and the incredible webchick became The best contributor at Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards and the Drupal 7 co-maintainer! And to top that, Dries, the lead and founder of the Drupal community, became a Top Innovator, chosen by Businessweek.

And then there was you, doing everything you could to make the future of Drupal as shiny as it can get, ahead of the rest. Thank you, thank you for making 2008 the best so far!

...the future!
So now, it is time for you to predict what will happen in 2009 for Drupal, as Dries already did. You are free to do this where you see fit, but we do welcome your comments here.

Comments

stephthegeek’s picture

Don't forget the awesome lynda.com Drupal training course/DVD!

And a little Drupal theme store launching ;)

2008 has been an amazing year for Drupal, as evident by growing acceptance and things like the Information Week cover.

I think Drupal will become something not only open source geeks have heard of in 2009. More designers will come to Drupal, and Acquia and other organizations will continue to push Drupal into mainstream corporate use.

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bertboerland’s picture

check the ahead link :-)
--
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bert boerland

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bert boerland

stephthegeek’s picture

Hah! Whoops, I missed that one :)

Fred125’s picture

2008 year was very good for drupal

LiquidWeb’s picture

- I think in 2009 with the growth of popularity we will see more localized Drupal support sites.
- Popularity will also increase the number of commercial theme providers for Drupal.

greggles’s picture

My predictions for 2009:

  • We'll see growth: more modules, more themes, more books, more service providers, more of everything.
  • We'll see consolidation: duplicate modules join forces, service providers merge (or get acquired)
  • The community will continue to generally prosper as if Drupal is a land of milk and honey

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quicksketch’s picture

Drupal 7 will be released with the following killer features:

Note: I have a 25% success rate with predictions, so don't take anything too seriously.

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

KarenS’s picture

Profile module will not get ported to the new fields system(?)

Ah, but I think that one will happen for sure, you can already add fields to users with the code we created in the 'Fields in Core' sprint :)

SeanBannister’s picture

I heard about that :) very excited, but what about adding fields to comments?

KarenS’s picture

Not yet to comments. We did try to build the API in a way that it would be possible to add fields to comments, or to any other object that declares itself to be 'fieldable', but doing it for comments has not been built out or tested. Maybe someone will find a way to add that in for D7 :)

catch’s picture

If we make comments fieldable, then doing so properly would require comments being rendered properly (like nodes) - so that you can get all the benefit of display settings, weights, field visibility and the rest. As you can see, there's a cost to the flexibility of how nodes are rendered. node_load() has been completely refactored in D7, so database time between lots of nodes and lots of comments is the same in HEAD, in fact nodes would probably win if we compared with some hook_comment() modules, but they're still a lot slower sadly due to time spent in PHP.

So if we add fields to comments, then we're at a point where the extra work involved might level out the performance of comments and nodes - which means we might as well use nodes for comment storage with a small wrapper. That would mean that sites which don't need all this flexibility would get a performance penalty though - so there's a discussion about possible approaches to this just started at #355515: Create a small nonfieldable item API

quicksketch’s picture

If both comments and nodes have the same functionality, you might as well just make comments nodes... or such was the thinking in Node Comment module. Considering it runs on 80+ sites for SonyBMG, you could consider it a feasible alternative.

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

Nick Lewis’s picture

This is a pre-emptive STFU to anyone who thinks comments *really* need to be not nodes -- who knew that form fields *wanted* to be arrays prefixed by a the "#" sign?* Cheers mate.

*His name is Adrian, he lives in South Africa, and he would have done it differently had he gotten the chance :-D
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tema’s picture

Vocabularies in a similar way as nodetypes will have a custom set of fields for terms description. Terms will storing structured data seems like nodes.

Nodereference field for terms? Hehe :) But text, number and imagefield would help. Good for theming, especially with views support.

It will be tangible impact for performance :(

catch’s picture

This is very likely for Drupal 7, and it should have minimal performance impact - 1 extra query per page for each field in most cases, regardless of how many terms are loaded.

SeanBannister’s picture

I sure hope we get Form Builder in Core :) Form Builder rocks!!!!!

walkah’s picture

that whole better image support in core is a good idea. someone should make it happen ;-)
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quicksketch’s picture

I might have something in the works. ;)

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

Chris Johnson’s picture

If D7 is slower than D6, something will be seriously wrong.

I predict community tension. I predict better quality core (thanks to all who knocked themselves out on the writing unit tests and building the automated testing!).

SeanBannister’s picture

I was presuming it would be slower, I seem to remember comparisons on Drupal 5 to 6 and Drupal 6 was a bit slower so I presumed the same would happen in 7.

mikey_p’s picture

My predictions:

  1. In the same way that multi-lingual support of Drupal 6 brought unprecedented power to beginning web site builders, RDF support in Drupal 7 will revolutionize what is possible on the web.
  2. At least 1 other company will produce a Drupal distribution with a support network.
  3. Usability will take precedence over every other aspect of development for at least 6 months.
  4. A moderation system will be put in place for releasing new modules on drupal.org.
  5. More contrib modules will adopt a formal development process with multiple developers as their importance grows.
  6. In spite of 5, no major modules will be moved into core. Core will leverage features and APIs to support popular modules, but they will still exist in contrib.
  7. I'll review more patches. Really I will.
  8. Drupal will do the impossible: simultaneously become more powerful for developers, yet easier to use for beginners.
AjK’s picture

A moderation system will be put in place for releasing new modules on drupal.org

I doubt that, http://drupal.org/node/316973 made no progress.

Michelle’s picture

I thought you were the moderation system, Ajk? ;)

Michelle

--------------------------------------
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AjK’s picture

While it's true I manage the CVS applications approval process, once you have a CVS account you are free to create a project without any moderation or approval.

Michelle’s picture

I was just teasing. :)

Michelle

--------------------------------------
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timmillwood’s picture

Yes, but please make it's moderation and not approval.

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mikey_p’s picture

Yes, all I would support is a quick moderation to see that new projects aren't direct forks with only small amounts of code (2-5% say) changed.

New projects that duplicate functionality? Totally! New projects that duplicate code? Lets discourage that.

I think this would also cover releasing 'lite' versions of other projects. If you project is just another project with 50% of the code/features removed and you are calling it '$original_name Lite', then I think we should strongly discourage if not outright prohibit this.

JohnForsythe’s picture

More sites dedicated to specific aspects of Drupal will launch. Some of them will be mine :)

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g089h515r806’s picture

Drupal will become more popular in China, which is a great market in the world ^_^
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jpetso’s picture

  • drupal.org will be upgraded to D6, and will switch from cvs.module to Version Control API within 2 months of the relaunch.
  • The import/export problem will be largely solved by contrib modules while RDF stays promising but will not yet deliver in that area. Consolidation of import/export modules will not happen in 2009 though, most use cases will be covered by modules with a relatively narrow scope.
  • Seconding quicksketch's predictions, Fields in Core (well duh), jQuery UI in Core and Zen in Core will go into Drupal 7. ImageAPI, mmmh, yeah, probably, too.
  • Questioning quicksketch's predictions, Form Builder in Core and Token in Core still won't happen. Imagecache presets, mmmh, no, probably not, neither.
  • Filefield will be obsoleted by Drupal 7, with upload.module being the replacement that will have been ported to Fields in Core. Imagefield will stay as relevant as ever.
  • Drupal 7 will be released, but no D8 maintainer (apart from Dries) will be named this year yet. (When he announces the D8 maintainer in 2010, it again won't be chx or Eaton. Me neither. My bet is on catch. But hey... that's 2010 stuff.)
  • After Drupal 7 is released, the majority of modules will be ported to the new version in a ridiculously short time compared to the D5 → D6 transition.
  • I'll finish my studies and take on a full-time Drupal job.
quicksketch’s picture

You must have a crystal ball to go along with your crazy Drupal skills.

Sounds like we're both confident about things that we're involved with. If you can make FileField in core happen, I can promise you ImageAPI. Sound like a deal? :D

Form Builder? Well... there has to be SOME UI if profile.module does indeed use the new Fields in Core.

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

jpetso’s picture

I'm not involved (anymore) with FileField at the moment, upload.module going Fields was just a guess that seems like the next logical step to go. Perhaps I'll get around to try this... if we don't mind upload.module to lack a few FileField features (hm... can I even think of any?) then it should be more an issue of update functions than making upload.module fieldable per se.

Alex UA’s picture

My prediction is that we will get vastly improved file handling in D7 Core. Hook_file has already been committed and file.module is on the way.

While I'm making easy predictions, I also predict that a whole suite of UI/Addon modules will be working perfectly with hook_file before D7 has a full release. (see the media code sprint and all that)

--
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Future Majority: Blogging Progressive Youth Politics

Dries’s picture

My predictions are at http://buytaert.net/predictions-2009 ... :-)

redndahead’s picture

D7 will not be released in 2009. It will be decided that we need to eat our own dogfood and a push to move d.o to d7 before d7 is released will be made.
d.o won't get officially released in a d6 version. It will be a beta site until the port from d6 to d7 is made.

Pasqualle’s picture

I don't like your prediction, but the "move d.o to D7 this year" seems like an unreachable target. So I agree, there might be some issues with the D7 release..

redndahead’s picture

I didn't think anyone would like it. :) Really my wish is that we will eat our own dog food and put out d.o on the same version as we release. I'm hoping that people working on the upgrade from d5 to d6 don't get burned out after they are done. I think if the momentum pushing the modules to d6 it may be an opportune time to put d.o. onto d7.

bilgehan’s picture

There are so many similar modules for terms and for nodes and many others for terms in order to give them some sort of funcionality of nodes. So, why not use nodes as terms?

Dries’s picture

"Taxonomy terms will be fields" sounds more likely. :-)

archard’s picture

How about taxonomy terms will have fields? ;)

tema’s picture

modulist’s picture

... but less so for new adopters coming from other fields. With Drupal 6 and Views 2, the learning curve for Drupal has become significantly steeper.

There will be a little growth for Drupal among ad agencies and creatives, but these sectors will grow far less than Drupal's sweet spot among programmers. Marquee projects by boutiques like PingVision and Development Seed will become crucial for Drupal to gain credibility.

Design patterns, installation profiles, management interfaces, and best practices overall will gain importance, a projects get more and more complex and further from default Drupal installation. Let's hope that the Drupal community can come up with a way to standardize them and make them part of the redesigned Drupal.org.

Workflow for complex sites and major publishers will continue to be a limiting factor for Drupal's otherwise meteoric rise. Let's see what Acquia and D7 bring us in this area.

As Drupal's explosive growth begins to mature towards year's end, basics like usability, workflow, and outreach will become core issues in the Drupal community.

modulist

modulist

flickerfly’s picture

The mobile market, especially in connection with the China prediction, will become of greater interest to the drupal community. We'll begin to see module that will assist in catering to smaller screens without losing function. This will be a distinguishing point between Drupal and other CMS options making newspapers

Core will not absorb any of these features until at least D8 so not this year. :-) However contrib modules will include the following features:
* set a mobile theme
* set a mobile stylesheet
* detect small browsers and OS's
* apply theme's according to type of handheld
* set what stylesheets to provide according to handheld
* pushing ads specifically to handhelds

Maybe in 2010 these modules will begin to come together into a smaller number, but first they'll grow and explore on their own, then begin to interact and reduce duplication.

Someone will write a book called "drupal in the handheld world" or "creating mobile websites with Drupal" or some other wordy title. :-)

I'll absolutely revel in the new usability improvements of D7 even though I didn't realize I wanted them in D6. This will encourage me to dive deeper and I'll write my first simple drupal module that will actually accomplish something, but won't contrib it because I can't figure out anything cool that it does that isn't entirely custom to my own site. Instead, I'll give back by reviewing more patches and maybe even writing a few simple ones myself. :-)

The Drupal communities Google skills will wane slightly as the Drupal.org site becomes more functional requiring less use of these skills.

mradcliffe’s picture

This sounds fun. Putting in some far out predictions :)

  • Drupal 7 will undergo major changes / new features before it's released in 4th quarter after the next round of usability tests is published and analyzed with the others (don't ask me those changes, I like drupal how it is).
  • D.o and community will push emphasis away from module development and more towards recipes and installation profiles to help non-commercial and small web site maintainers easily setup sites (after d.o design goes live in 2nd quarter).
  • Drupal will continue to win awards throughout the year with the Open Source CMS and a new award.
  • Wysywig api won't be released in 2009, but work well under way.
vkr11’s picture

I hope to see more social media integration. Also a better way to upgrade modules and core (like drush but more automated and user friendly).

- Victor
Search Drupal.org | Lamingo | Tax India | Drupal Jobs | FPGA

Dries’s picture

Here is a crazier one: in 2009, someone will get a Drupal tattoo (but it won't be me). :)

bertboerland’s picture

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groets
bert boerland

drumm’s picture

I know someone who knows someone who will do a Drupal or other open source tattoo for free. Won't be me either.

snufkin’s picture

I think 2009 will bring us a technologically well built core with a strong developer community growing up around it. It will be all about stable code (testing), a very good developer experience, and as a result a huge number of contributed code released on drupal.org. Many sites will convert to Drupal as soon as the contrib is up for Drupal 7.

metalforever’s picture

A better way to upgrade versions. Upgrade process in drupal (core) is a HASSLE.

Admin area overhaul. Once modules build up (and they will), It becomes hard to find anything.

A new drupal.org site.

SeanBannister’s picture

I agree, upgrading sucks, how about an automated upgrade process it's already happening on a per module basis and there's nice screen shots here. How about the same thing for upgrading to a new version of Drupal :) One click and your upgraded, there's a scary thought.

icekin’s picture

With thousands of modules offering ways to extend the features of Drupal more than ever before, I see Drupal as becoming a framework for most web 2.0 services to reach their end users. This will save them time over writing their own code entirely from scratch.

And I hope that 2009 will see someone launch a free drupal hosting service, much like wordpress.com for wordpress

dshaw’s picture

Not quite what you're talking about. But you can get free drupal hosting at Dreamhost (http://blog.dreamhost.com/2009/01/09/free-hosting-from-dreamhost-is-here/). I think you're fairly limited in what modules are available thought.

roshan_shah’s picture

1) D7 will not roll out in 2009
2) Ubercart will get the most attention in 2009 and many eCommerce sites will come up
3) Drupal Consulting rates will come down sharply as more developers from India, China become available in market
4) RDF Support in D7 will give Drupal a lot of attention from Developer community.
5) End users will be lot more confused with the amount of modules out there. Many maintainers will drop the support of the modules they have been supporting for years.
6) There will be at least 2 more companies offering "Instant Drupal" solutions like Galaminds
7) Drupal Certification likely to see light this year.
8) You will see at least 2 popular Drupal sites moving to Django or Ruby on Rails.
9) There will be few Mergers, Acquisitions amongst Top Tier Drupal Shops
10) We will start seeing financial transparency in Drupal Camps. (i.e source of funds/use of funds)
11) Many large customers will still not have moved to Drupal 6

-
Roshan Shah

timmillwood’s picture

I am really looking forward to finding out what is going to happen in 2009, both from a personal point of view as well as a Drupal point of view.

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cgdigitaltreats’s picture

Drupal 7 hopefully will have some better image integration.

I just want to be able to grab a few images drag them into the body field, and a pop up might ask me,
are the images for this local node, or Upload as image.

You check local node, and the images sit in that node, but is accessible if you want, in later nodes.
Or if unchecked the image is uploaded as an image node. (sort of like the way image assist module works.)

Just overall image integration I think really needs to be added.

Antonio

Heine’s picture

  • As more developers move in to make a quick buck off of Drupal, average quality of sites drops significantly.
  • A Drupal certificate provider will be outed as not being able to create SQL injection-free sites itself.
  • The "Tinker until it works" approach will reach new heights.
  • There will be increased friction between parts of the Drupal community which will lead to a some fallout.
  • A module/theme will be created, that doesn't do much apart from inserting hidden and "not so hidden" links into your website
  • More attention will be payed to CRUD APIs for Drupal 7.
  • A painful solution to the XSS problems that plague Drupal and modules will be proposed.
  • D7 will get much better, views based, configurable admin screens
  • Dries will father a second child.

--
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Dries’s picture

I'm not sure I understand The "Tinker until it works" approach will reach new heights..

Dries will father a second child. -- well, yes, see my blog. Quid novi sub sole? :-)

bertboerland’s picture

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

--
groets
bert boerland

--
groets
bert boerland

Heine’s picture

Dries will father a second child. -- well, yes, see my blog.

I was either out of the loop or suffered major retrograde amnesia when I fell during iceskating. Congratulations!

The "Tinker until it works" refers to a method of module building where the author tries N approaches to a problem until one approach sticks without understanding Drupal, or its API.

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killes@www.drop.org’s picture

  • D7 will roll out early as Views integration is postponed to D8.
  • Some ecommerce sites will get hacked due to the incompetence of the implementor.
  • After that, premium rates will be paid for Drupal Security Consulting.
  • While developers marvel at RDF, clients still will demand to remove RSS feeds.
  • End user confusion will be minimized by great new Drupal books appearing. Modules hosted at drupal.org will be promoted and supported more visibly by the drupal.org redesign.
  • Instant Drupal solutions will continue to suck and be vulnerable due to not being updated in time.
  • Drupal Certification will be revealed as the hot air that it is.
  • Several popular sites will migrate to Drupal.
  • The number of reputable Drupal shops will continue to grow.
  • Everybody will continue to not worry about transparency of funding for DrupalCamps.
  • Migration from Drupal 4 to Drupal 5 or 6 will be completed. Many sites will skip Drupal 6 and upgrade to Drupal 7.
  • I'll finally get a blog where I can rant about certain members of the Drupal community.

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alexandreracine’s picture

# I'll finally get a blog where I can rant about certain members of the Drupal community.

Need help with that? I could be the first on the list! :) (http://drupal.org/node/259479#comment-848576)

# Migration from Drupal 4 to Drupal 5 or 6 will be completed. Many sites will skip Drupal 6 and upgrade to Drupal 7.

I actually skipped 5 from 4.x to 6 :)

Alexandre Racine

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

lut4rp’s picture

Countries popular for notorious reasons, rather than more positive ones (eg: India) will contribute even more awesomely, both to the community and as a service-provider.

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alexandreracine’s picture

Well. Going back to my last year predictions http://drupal.org/node/204454#comment-676215 , I am getter better and better :)

Nevertheless, this wont stop me from predicting more unpredictable predictions for 2009 :) After all, it's a game.

One little thing about one of my prediction of last year :
"-Drupal will still lac in the themes area compare to the others big two."

One new entry was the pixture REloaded theme. It's a great theme and I use it on my second website below.

2009 serious

-Drupal.org will finally be on D6! :) With a new theme :) (ok, that's not a secret)
-The financial crisis will help drupal. More people will be looking for cheaper alternatives and this will help getting more multiple little contributions.
-Witch will of course overload maintainers, supporters, and the servers.

2009 hopefully
-With modules like action, workflow and all automation processes, more energy will be put in saving time. This will be a trend for the following years.
-One or two more servers will be added to the drupal infrastructure :)

Alexandre Racine

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

jinlong’s picture

happy new year! new year ,new hope !

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EclipseGc’s picture

In Core D7:
Fields (duh)
Form Builder (because we need a UI of some sort for fields)
Views
Token
Pathauto
ImageApi (maybe cache)

Personal Goals:
Make building image galleries in Drupal a snap
Ensure the addition of css framework based theme to core7 (960.gs) and contrib to D6
Finally contribute back an Open Laszlo based flash uploader

Thoughts on other's predictions:
I'm a little curious as to why we'd eliminate filefield in favor of upload when more and more is being built on TOP of file field these days (imagefield, probably an audio/video contribution shortly too if I guess properly). I'd see it as being more likely that we lose upload in favor of filefield, but w/e, I've not dealt in this area at all, and it's just an outsiders position.

Eclipse
The Worx Company
http://www.worxco.com

Eclipse

SeanBannister’s picture

Yes! Form Builder in core :)

Michelle’s picture

My prediction for 2009 is that people will finally start realizing they don't have to use a bridge to get decent forums on their Drupal sites. :)

Michelle

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

pkej’s picture

Drupal 7 released to a wasteland of modules. It will be almost two years until key modules are updated and stable for the new core.
Drupal 7 even slower than Drupal 6.
i18n even more slower than on Drupal 6
More people will think "why is wordpress more ready out of the box than Drupal".
Finally a major module for image inserting will support image fields.
Image module will still use its own method for images.
128M will become the unofficial minimum memory_limit (96M is mentioned for some image handling modules today...)

I just upgraded a 5.x siste to 6.x, and I noticed how snappy it was in responses, even with caching & stuff turned off. I love drupal, cck and views especially, but sometimes I get a bit tired of all the basic functionality which are modules.

Paul K Egell-Johnsen

Paul K Egell-Johnsen

luckysmack’s picture

-Panels will be completed for D6. In the process many will use it heavily and realize its power (yet again). And as such the project will get more support and help from the community and get a few addon contribs for 2x. Merlin will work his magic (yet again) and get Panels 3 ready for a D7 release.

-In the last year ive been here ive seen the media related modules move around a lot, so there will be module maintainers that will join forces and merge their modules or offer support for each other as more streamlined ways to get media on your site will available.

-D7 wont be fully released in '09 as bugs are still getting worked out and there will be a mojor change between now and summer that will change the release date, though for the better in the end.

-D.O will move to SVN

-The ability to update your modules and your core install will be much easier through modules like drush and drush ui and drush module manager

-also in turn more sites will be implemented via cvs or svn security updates will happen much more quickly and easily making drupal sites much more secure overall

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chx’s picture

Before someone restarts the version control debate, http://drupal.org/node/289117
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Summit’s picture

Hi,

D7 is hopefully only D6+ extra's in core, so all hard work to port modules from D47 and D5 to D6 doesn't need to be done again when moving to D7!!
D7 core will be D6 core + contributed modules and architectual changes that NOT interfere with D6 contributed modules.
Downwards compatibility for D7 modules which doesn't need the extra features is arranged.
So most modules are D6 AND D7 usable!

Hopefully this prediction comes out :)

Greetings,
Martijn
www.trekking-world.com

Michelle’s picture

I'd be very surprise if any non trivial modules can be used as is in both branches. And that's fine. Let's just hope the upgrading isn't so traumatic that it results in a long contrib delay.

Michelle

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greggles’s picture

I'm pretty sure the API is already broken at least in a few places (DBTNG?).

Once you know the drop is always moving you either love it or learn to live with it or...

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killes@www.drop.org’s picture

And you probably want a pony, too. :D

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Pasqualle’s picture

the backward compatibility between D7 and D6 is extremely broken already. Please try to think about this as: do things right and make Drupal better.. I really like how Drupal is designed and developed..

timmillwood’s picture

Override Node Options (http://drupal.org/project/override_node_options) will not be part of core, but a better solution will be though off which will be submitted as a patch for Drupal 8.

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SeanBannister’s picture

Just had a look at your module, seems very useful, you should submit a patch for Drupal 7

timmillwood’s picture

The problem is that it adds 6 permissions for each content type.

A site I am developing has 12 content types. That's 72 new permissions on the permission form.

I am thinking maybe to create override node option profiles. There is then one permission per profile. It would then be upto the site maintainer to setup these profiles by role, or content type etc.

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dkeays’s picture

I trust new-years predictions less than I trust a weather forecast beyond 3 days. So instead of predictions, how about some sobering thoughts?

  • The proliferation of spyware-like techniques in AJAX will create more solutions to counter it like NoScript in FireFox. D7 will help hurry the demise of one of the biggest niceties and the biggest irritations on the Internet today.
  • The proliferation of OOPS will make short mid term programming easier but will result in more fragile code and will make testing more difficult. The quality of Drupal sites will go into the long term basement. Didn't java go through something similar? [http://www.itworldcanada.com/a/ComputerWorld/9d7e6954-2021-4249-864d-457...
    http://tinyurl.com/7u6h57
  • Releasing D7 and killing support for D5 before the migration to D6 is complete will cause a panic A feeding-frenzy for Drupal work will result in the short run, but a decrease in the long run. A weak comparison is how reliance on credit was beneficial at one point but helped summon the current economic landslide.

I hope these thoughts are off base and Drupal doesn't disappoint me in the future as Linux on the desktop and soccer/football in the US has in the past.

Alex UA’s picture

The Google Summer of Code will happen. It will miss Angie a lot, but will still kick serious ass.
You, yes YOU, will help out with the GSoC, and you'll love it!
We will get at least three great modules that utilize the new FileAPI.
We'll have a vastly improved, hierarchical, rights system in Drupal 7.
Drupal 7 will kick so much serious ass it will start to be known as the "Bruce Lee" or "Mohammad Ali" or maybe even the "Bruhammad AliLee" of CMS'.
Drupal will power your toaster and make the best damned toast you've ever eaten.
Rickroll.module will make it into core.

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dkeays’s picture

Rickroll?

[sarcasm]
That is almost as absurd as the 'talk like a pirate' filter.
[/sarcasm]

I'm sure it will be popular.

Maybe the suggested module will show some sophistication and show Astley staring into a web cam.
http://xkcd.com/524/

3lite’s picture

I predict that Drupal will become a WordPress alternative. ;]

timmillwood’s picture

It already is, and more.

I always suggest if you want a plain old blog go for Wordpress, anything more, go for Drupal.

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