We have a tradition since 2003 that at the beginning of each year we look back on what has happened and make some predictions for the year ahead. Lets start with looking at the past to see what people thought about 2010 in this posting .

One of the best things that happened to Drupal in 2010 was the fact that the redesign went live, as predicted. Thanks to the Drupal Association and the hard work of many volunteers. On the other hand, one of the things nobody thought would happen... didn't happen. Drupal 7 was not released in 2010, yet 1,000 people (and more) worked hard to make D7 the best release ever shipping with a stable release in the first days of 2011. WordPress won the Packt Publishing CMS award with—after a tie—one vote more than Drupal. This shows that WP has become a complete CMS, as was also predicted, despite their own words that We don't want WordPress to develop a reputation.

The last comment, Now I just hope that 2011 is better than 2010, is one that I totally agree with. Not because 2010 was bad, but because 2011 will be even better!

My own highlight for 2011 was DrupalCon Copenhagen, with a Kitten Killers classic and lots of freedom (as in speech and beer) spreading around.

The year ahead: growth in three directions

This year, let us look ahead and start focusing and predicting on how Drupal can grow. Let me explain in what directions Drupal can grow:

  • Traditionally growth means more and bigger sites. This is indeed an important aspect of growth. More installations will attract more eyeballs and this might result in better code. Bigger sites moving towards Drupal will create an even better ecosystem around Drupal. And that by itself can lead to more code being contributed and more the sharing of more experiences and best practices. However, more eyeballs also means a bigger community, more misunderstanding and more discussions. And more commercial influence in the project can—when not managed in a right way—be bad for an open source project as well. This kind of horizontal growth will not be enough if we want to make a real mark though is the first step needed. What are your thoughts on growing horizontally? How will the community handle this?
  • The second form of growth is what I would like to call vertical growth. This form is something we excel in and in combination with horizontal growth will lead to a stable pyramid base for the community. Vertical growth can be described as standing on the shoulders of giants to build better code, faster sites and embed more new technologies. What most people forget is that they are giants themselves and hence will not just be standing on others will carry some weight themselves. It is not just about getting better as a person, it is also self-sacrificing for the good of the community and help others grow. What are your predictions on how we can grow in 2011 and what are you willing to do to grow vertically? Share your predictions in the comments.
  • Most (proprietary) systems only think in horizontal growth. Many open source projects work horizontally and vertically. But for true growth, we need to grow in all directions, including diagonal. By diagonal growth, I mean reaching out to other open source projects. By helping and learning from how the people, processes and technologies work in other systems we can get better ourselves. So we stop thinking of WordPress, Joomla!, TYPO3 and others as competitors but as systems and communities we can learn from and help. But open source is -according to me- the combination of code, community and license. So even from open source projects outside the Web content management systems realm we can learn. Can we grow diagonally? Post your prediction in this thread.

So we need to grow horizontally (number of installs), and vertically (quality) but most of all, diagonal (learning from other projects). And you can help this year by doing more than predicting and helping in the issue queue, joining the Drupal Association, documenting and spreading the Drupal love.

Dries already posted his thoughts on his blog.
My prediction for 2011? Drupal 7 will make the term Web 2.0 redundant! Let's make that happen or share your better predictions. Try to think out of the box as much as you can.

As as my four-year old child said the other day: Why does it rain when there is a rainbow?

About the author: Bert Boerland is a long term member of the Drupal community and a former Drupal Association Permanent Member

Comments

Aniara.io’s picture

2011 will be a great year for Drupal and the community. :)

Tafkas’s picture

I think horizontal growth is unstoppable, vertical growth is needed and diagonal growth is unlimited. From my experience CRM integration is one of the diagonal ways to go.

Chris Gillis’s picture

I agree with tafkas. Drupal is great for public-facing websites, but a solid Drupal CRM would bring in a whole new market segment. Internal Business Processes. CRM, ERP, Inventory Management, Ecommerce, POS. These are some of the most expensive proprietary systems going currently, and the world is ready for freedom (speech and beer) in this segment. Drupal is the perfect platform.

vingborg’s picture

Drupal with integrate with Node.js in funny, interesting and down-right revolutionary ways. Already, a number of people have experimented with it, but I predict that 2011 will witness a handful of "poster boy" projects that will rock the boat in a major way.

This is both very social and very technical.

The social part will consist of people becoming aware of the fact that Drupal (the software) is not merely a bunch of database tables and PHP scripts. Well, we already knew that, of course, but a lot of people seem to think that PHP must be used for all features. And that's not true.

The technical part will consist of tools and methods that crack the Drupal datamodel wide-open to foreign platforms, possibly bypassing the Drupal PHP stack completely.

For my part, the aforementioned Node.js integration is the most promising, but imagine a .Net-application, written in C#, trudging along the primary Drupal installation, doing funny Enterprise-integration thingies. Or maybe a Ruby gem? That would be a blast.

JohnAlbin’s picture

Drupal 7 is super powerful. But its PHP memory consumption has ballooned, making it impossible to run on many entry-level web hosting setups. :-(

So I predict one of 2 things to happen in 2011:

Either: As complaints about “I can't get Drupal to run on my web host” multiply, Drupal will earn a reputation as only being able to run on dedicated servers. (Whether this reputation is warranted is immaterial. The uncounted website owners that have their sites on entry-level web hosting solutions don't see a spectrum of hosting solutions; they see 1.) low-cost website solutions or 2.) really expensive solutions. Since there are many more entry-level website owners, their voices will define the "gestalt” of CMS reputations.

Or (this is my hope): Someone will develop a distribution for Drupal that will make setting up a usable (WYSIWYG, images, commenting, spam, etc.) blog easy _and_ will be able to run in 32MB (or less) of PHP memory. With the imminent availability of Drupal in Git, we'll have the opportunity to tweak core while still being able to easily keep it up-to-date with core.

  - John (JohnAlbin)

catch’s picture

I'm tracking memory improvements at http://drupal.org/project/issues/search/drupal?text=&assigned=&submitted...

None of these require a fork, and they will benefit hosts whether they're running APC or not.

Vayira’s picture

This seems an important issue to me.

Xano’s picture

Drupal products, such as Open Atrium, have been around for a while. I think that with Drupal 7 we will see more and more products based on Drupal, rather than implementations using it. However, as you can't depend on selling Drupal products for your income (GPL says your customers can simple give it away for free), this won't be an enormously big deal.

Let's see if 2011 proves me wrong.

mfer’s picture

2011 will see a bit of change in Drupal... some good and some not so good.

  • Performance will be a large topic of discussion. Performance has gotten worse with each Drupal release. While Drupal scales better than ever this doesn't help low end hosting installs which make up a majority of installs. Part of this will be disagreement on how to handle improving performance.
  • There will be more Drupal products than ever. Install Profiles in Drupal 7 are much better than 6. This will lead to more and better install profiles.
  • There will be more corporate influence in Drupal than ever. I don't mean corporate presence but corporate influence. As more big money goes into Drupal there will be expectations of Drupal working much better for them (which could run counter to my first point). We may see some points of conflict in the community over some of this.
  • The git migration will lead to increased Drupal development in both contrib and core.
  • Drupalers will struggle with the "not invented here" syndrome. This has been around for a long time but I wouldn't call it a struggle. We regularly re-invent the wheel. This year we will see some pain points around this in the community.
Azol’s picture

I have to agree with Performance part. I believe that resolving performance issues should be first priority (right after security ones), because performance hit is huge on lower-end systems (think shared hosting here) and it hurts even more than simple-to-fix design flaws, lowering usability of Drupal sites.

jensimmons’s picture

With the maturing of HTML5 and the resurgence of inventiveness by people who create the web, the web is about to radically change again. 2011 will be the year when we start to see a whole new kind of website emerge (which may or may not be called "website"). By the end of the year, forward-thinking clients will be asking for the next big thing. We saw such a shift a while back and labeled it Web 2.0. It's about to happen again. And afterwards, Web 2.0 sites will seem as antiquated as 1998 sites do now.

Drupal is really good at building web 2.0 websites. And 2011 will be a huge year for Drupal — we will see exponential growth with the release of D7, the drupal.org redesign, and the Git migration. But if Drupal is the wrong platform for creating this next thing, then we will start to see that growth taper off as the web switches to the new stuff.

Let's not let that happen.

Jen Simmons
The Web Ahead
http://jensimmons.com
http://thewebahead.net

johnvsc’s picture

One of the biggest complaints about Drupal is that the number and quality of available themes suck.

This is largely do to two reasons :

  1. The CVS learning curve for those without a BS in Comp Sci is off the charts - really, didja think that designers are going to flock to CVS? With the addition of GITHUB to the picture - a more accessible way to contribute to the community is in place
  2. Drupal 7 theming -> the former Great Leap Forward (not the Armstrong version) from D5 to D6 was AWESOME. But now, D7 has added way more awesome and savory sauce to the mix -> by instituting Fields, ingesting CCK and focusing on pre-processing - Drupal has given designers way mad opportunities to wreak havoc - but in a good way.

In addition, more information is available for designers to jump in and play in the pool. So, I predict 2011 to be The Year of the Designer!

_sparrow_’s picture

Totally agree on this one. Drupal 7 needs more visual appeal. Drupalers have always prior D7 been non-designers, so to say… PHP developers, coders, but not designers. In a borad sense of this notion, of course.

Better UI is to some extend is also about appealing, sexy look. Just look at Wordpress.org, notice their growth since they began encouraging designers to create better themes. And, they started this aesthetics marathon first. Hopefully, redesign of Drupal.org will get things moving faster.

catch’s picture

Here goes:

1. HEAD will have better performance than Drupal 7 in key areas by the end of 2011.
2. If we're very lucky, #1 will be proved wrong due to backports from D8 to D7.
3. There will be more than two people able to commit to Drupal 8.
4. The number of 'major' issues against Drupal 7 will go up to 300+ before it starts to go down again.
5. The number of Drupal 7 sites will outnumber the number of Drupal 6 sites by the end of the year, and the total will be more than 500,000 by July 1st 2011 (as reported by http://drupal.org/project/usage)
6. There'll be lots of rows over conflicting priorities as the year progresses, hopefully this will at least lead to better discussions about what those priorities are.

arthurf’s picture

Drupal 7 has finally addressed some of the underlying issues that have troubled its file handling. This sets the stage for vastly improved site developer, admin, and end user experience in dealing with media files in Drupal. I hope that 2011 can:

* bring strong community focus to supporting modules like Media.
* standardize a default WYSIWYG which integrates seamlessly with Media.
* create dozens of contributed modules that allow for Media's end to end integration with third party services (Blip, ZenCoder, Archive.org, Encoding.com, etc.).
* encourage all contributed modules to utilize stream wrappers where ever possible.
* deploy transformation modules that allow for on-the-fly conversion of media files from one format to another- antiword for pdfs, ffmpeg for audio/video, etc. This is sort of a shameless plea for help to get Media Mover converted to D7.
* a plugable CDN framework that utilizes concepts from CDN, Media Mover, and other existing CDN solutions that are in the Drupal community.

The reality is that Drupal is far behind other CMS in its handling of media. We now have a platform that is robust enough to do something really amazing. I think we have many of the pieces in place- we just need to work as a community to hone a solution that is both easy to deploy for site developers and admins and dead simple for end users.

GiorgosK’s picture

WYSIWYG has got a good push in 2010 with the WYSIWYG module which is a great merging of all such modules ... I see great progress and more features on that module ...

------
GiorgosK
Web Development

GiorgosK’s picture

  • more and better distributions / more complete solutions out of the box
  • better packaging systems
  • features integrated into drupal 8 / more modules support it
  • more performance modules / merging of older ones makes of more complete performance solutions
  • more drupal shops forming / existing shops forming partnerships
  • more local drupal camps / more frequent meetings
  • the new commerce module attacts new users to drupal (coming from other CMSs or ecommerce platforms) with solutions for many different types of products
  • git becomes the default Version Control System and LOTS of newbie developers become ACTIVE with patches and NEW contrib modules doubles in size (16K) by the end of 2011
  • I release my first drupal.org hosted module

------
GiorgosK
Web Development

sdboyer’s picture

We're wrapping up "phase 2" (the somewhat confusing moniker for the initial switch) of migrating to Git now, and intend to launch before Drupalcon Chicago. When Git launches, the integration will be very functional, but still fairly rudimentary. Over the course of 2011, I'm hoping that some of the features we have relegated to "phase 3" will become a reality. Input filters that let us pull code right from our repositories and drop it into any d.o post...per-issue collaboration repositories that define a paradigm for code interaction that (AFAIK) simply does not yet exist. And other things.

And...y'know, all the other stuff that people are saying :)

sime’s picture

Contact Relationship Management: With fieldable entities, particularly fieldable Users, Drupal will "make sense" as a platform for customisable light-weight CRM solutions. We'll see one or two CRM distributions that finally provide a viable alternative to existing proprietary and open source offerings.

Document Management System: We've barely begun to see what is possible with PHP Stream Wrappers combined with fields in core. Fieldable Files are one option for metadata. (I haven't even looked at the Media module for D7 yet.) The big challenge here is smooth filesystem integration, checking in, checking out of binary documents.

Tafkas’s picture

Personally I think there are enough great CRM systems (Salesforce, SugarCRM) and it's hard to compete with these apps in the cloud. They give huge functionality for a reasonable price. Just make sure Drupal provides good integration, don't build it yourself.
For document managament I see possibilities with Drupal Commons, but it needs a few more iterations. Any other suggestions?

sime’s picture

There are great standalone systems around, and I recommend that people use them when that is core to their business. But having Drupal, say, as your core marketing platform, and then being told that you should run a separate CRM to capture meta-data about your users? Small business can't sustain many systems and the business processes that are needed to tie them together.

In my opinion doing CRM for most customers won't require full blown distribution, but the prediction stands that we'll see a Drupal CRM distribution.

Chris Gillis’s picture

tafkas, with all respect I disagree. CRM functionality built as a native drupal module makes sense for a variety of reasons:
1) Extensibility. Usually CRM does not stand alone. It needs to be an ERP+CRM system, or a Tickets+CRM system, etc. When a drupal module makes use of the field API, drupal hooks, etc. it is far easier for a drupal developer to customise the software to the use case. Most developers would balk at customised integration of a third party application they are unfamiliar with.
2) Familiarity. See above. The more familiar the code base, the more likely adoption.
3) Manageability. Agencies that develop many websites for clients make use of tools like Aegir to ensure the sites (all modules, etc.) are up to date. The more third-party systems you add, the harder that becomes.
4) Modularity. As sime said, often you will only need a small portion of the CRM functionality available. In these cases, adding integration with a fully-featured third-party system would be overkill.
5) Opportunity. Finally, just because we can! Because Drupal is the perfect platform for this. Nothing wrong with third party systems, but let's create a Drupal solution and let devs choose. Drupal started as a blogging platform and look at it now! The further we push this platform, the greater innovation and adoption we will see.

phoenix’s picture

2011 will be the year of
- RDFa: There will be massive drupal 7 migration. If all these installs enable the RDFa module this will enable a big amount of data with RDFa tags. I'm curious what the effect will be.
- drupal 8 kickoff: discussion, dreaming & planning features to implement. The same way as Dries ever does when starting a new cycle.
- the biggest drupalcons ever. I think Chicago will set a record for the American Drupalcon & London will probably be able to break the Kopenhagen record.
- bigger drupal projects. We are working on enterprise level and what I see now is that big drupal projects are coming our way. Bigger than ever before.
- HTML5 & CSS 3 adoption
- the contributor. With git in place I think contributing will become easier as a lot of developers are already using git.
- the 2 millionth node on drupal.org

I think 2011 has a lot in store and will again be a great drupal year !

joomlerrostov’s picture

First of all i would like to see more professional looking themes for Drupal 7 in 2011. This was a problem (and still are) for drupal 6, but in 2010 several major theme providers like Rockettheme and Joomlart started support of Drupal 6. Hope we will see more providers in 2011, including hight-quality free themes - this will bring more newcomers to community because they will be able to setup unique site (instead now - all newcomers use Bartik theme for D7 or a lot of terrible themes from community, its bad).
Second big moving is to CRM/ERP, i think its time to begin a battle with enterprise solutions like Sharepoint, Liferay (java based) and so on. Especially all we now that drupal will be more cost effective.

Summ up: i think there is no matter to worry about wordpress's win as best CMS, because of it occupy its own niche (blogs and light sites) and never can beat drupal. As for Joomla 1.6 (released 10 January 2011) - i have evaluated new features since 1.5 version (http://www.joomla.org/16/), watched several videoreviews on youtube. I have to say i have had experience building sites on joomla 1.5 - and now i see only cosmetic changes, more intuitive interface, better admin, better support templating etc. Impressions, that joomla developers dont know such words like scalability, flexibility. All these new features are already in D6, and no major core enhancements (except of ACL and categorisation - drupal 6 both have better) like Drupal 7's entity approach, no analogs for Views and Features, and bad for CCK, Panels. Bad upgrade path for modules from 1.5 to 1.6.
So Drupal 7 will grow fast!

laura s’s picture

Echoing what @jensimmons said above, 2011 is a year where what we see in the browser really starts to shift towards much more app-like experiences. The "Web 2.0" marketing phrase provided a label for people to hang onto on-site-managed-websites. I don't know if O'Reilly will brand a new Web 3.0 for us all, or a Web 2.0-2.0, but we should be ready for sudden leaps in this area.

And HTML5 will be the engine. If you look at the tech blogs, apps are all the rage. But what are most apps doing? Providing more robust user interfaces for internet-provided data. Why? Because so far browser-rendered apps have been limited by browser technology, (x)html and CSS 2.1. But with CSS3 and HTML5 happening, more robust browser-rendered web apps that can provide more robust web app user experiences that so far have been limited to handheld and desktop apps will start to happen very quickly.

Drupal is well positioned to take advantage of this shift in web technology. But Drupal needs HTML5 support to be a part of this change without major hindrance.

This year will be a turning point for Drupal, whichever way Drupal goes re HTML5.

_____ ____ ___ __ _ _
Laura Scott :: design » blog » tweet

geerlingguy’s picture

Git will enable a lot more aggressive feature development, and open up the community to more programmers and designers who have been scared of using CVS. It will also enable us to do more experimental work and forks of projects that translates into more innovative features. I know it's helped me immensely in my own workflow.

Drupal 7 theming will enable a lot more variety in how a Drupal themer lays out simpler websites and themes. In Drupal 6, it was difficult to do many small things like move parts of the $content around or restyle certain elements of a page. In Drupal 7, a lot of small headaches are removed. I hope many more themes will be contributed to drupal.org as well, but we'll see how that plays out.

(On a side note: I will start theming exclusively with HTML5 markup, often using Boron as a parent theme—as I did with my MM theme).

__________________
Personal site: www.jeffgeerling.com

eaton’s picture

A lot of predictions for the future are really commentary on the now. Looking ahead to the next year is a tradition in Drupal, in part because it's as close to we get to a group post-mortem on each new release or year's developments.

  • Drupal 7's dev cycle was 200% longer than Drupal 6's, its file size is 150% larger than Drupal 6's, and the number of active core contributors is... 30% larger than Drupal 6. In addition, the "clumping" effect is strong: more and more code is being written by a cluster of highly active developers, while the long tail of participation grows slowly.
  • For the first time in its history, Drupal is building up a marketing machine. Not an ad in a Linux magazine or a bunch of excited blog posts, but actual marketing directed at large businesses and technology decision-makers. The tension between "Drupal as a product that can be pitched to clients", "Drupal as a framework for developer customization," and "Drupal as a community of like-minded people" will grow more pronounced.
  • A huge number of large, high-profile sites have adopted Drupal 6 and increased the platform's visibility. However, Drupal 7's long gestation period also ensured that Drupal 6 was more mature at its peak than any other previous version of Drupal. Most of the high profile sites that adopted Drupal during the 6.x cycle have never attempted a major version upgrade.
  • Quite a bit of additional abstraction was introduced in Drupal 7 -- more layers of wrapping in tpl files, deeper levels of metadata based rendering, APIs that hide SQL from developers when interacting with nodes and their fields, etc. Some sites are benefitting from the abstraction while others are still learning what the implications are. In the coming year or so we'll learn whether the payoff is worth the extra complexity.
  • Commercial investment in Drupal's codebase is at an all-time high. A vast majority of the highly active core developers are either professional Drupal developers whose participation in core is funded by or encouraged by their employer; or independent consultants whose participation in core is a highly visible Drupal Resume. Development tensions will become more pronounced between people who make their living building many sites for small clients, people who maintain a single site on their own, and people who are part of a team building a large site for the long haul. Their needs are not the same.
  • As Drupal's penetration grew, more sites started migrating away from Drupal, as well. This is basic statistics -- as the base of installed sites grows, the odds of some site moving away grows, too -- The Onion, one of Drupal's highest profile conversions during the 4.x days, switched to Django and others will follow in 2011. We're still learning, as a community, how to recognize the difference between "A site's needs changing" and "Drupal failing a site's needs."
  • More modules were written for Drupal 6 than for all previous versions of Drupal combined. The #D7CX project helped boost excitement among mange contrib developers, but the long road of migrating complete solutions from D6 to D7 is still ahead of the community.
  • Pervasive automated tests have made Drupal 7.0 much more stable than previous x.0 releases. However, a large percentage of that code growth is in the form of unit tests. In the D8 cycle, we'll see how that impacts major refactoring work. Automated tests are code, too, and they must be maintained lest they become a liability. The design debt that's been present in many past releases of Drupal has, in many ways, been set in stone by many of the automated tests. To change how Drupal solves certain problems in the future, the code will have to be rewritten along with the tests that accompany them.

None of the issues facing Drupal over the next several years are unique, or catastrophic. We're learning to adapt to the needs of the people who are outside the "Drupal Developer" community, and that's a great thing. But as a project and as a community, we're definitely grappling with larger challenges than we ever have in the past. How we approach them and how we decide on our course for the future will determine whether Drupal plateaus or continues to rise.

--
Eaton — Partner at Autogram

manuelBS’s picture

I hope drupal will grow larger with new modules for e-commerce systems. With the module drupal commerce drupal will have a good base to get more popular as an e-commerce framework. I hope there will be less difficulties to set up e-commerce systems for european and especially for german online shops. The growing section of social commerce sites will need a flexible and stable framework like drupal is. Drupal and ubercart / drupal commmerce will be a good place to start with building a social commerce site.
I have experienced drupal as a very good framework for building backends for mobile apps. Using views and the services module in combination with titanium for example we have a very good tool to easily create views for mobile native apps, too. So drupal will grow with the need of apps and the need of backends for these apps.
Another use case for drupal is the way creating crm and intranet systems for collaborative work. Open Atrium is a first product for building collaborative plattforms. Even for none native apps, drupal and the mobile tools do a good job for mobile websites.
We can see, drupal will be a framework for many new growing parts of our daily live, especially in building mobile apps and webbased software and e-commerce systems

Dr.Katte’s picture

As you pointed out, it was my prediction http://drupal.org/node/671566#comment-2426090 that came true.

The growth of drupal, with respect to the number of installations, will happen in 2011 ONLY IF drupal developers care for an average user's demand. For the first time in my life, my account got suspended for CPU overusage. I never had this problem in D6.

I have been using Drupal since its 6.3 days, and it took me 2 days to integrate CKEditor successfully (http://drupal.org/node/1019394) in D7. For all the claims of user-friendlyness of D7, WYSIWYG is a problem in D7. Administrative navigation is also a problem in D7 IMHO. I could reach an administrative page with fewer mouse clicks in D6 compared to D7. (However I like the FTP support in D7).

Well, hopefully Drupal developers understand my point in 2011 and move in following direction.

1. Development of D8 begins
2. D8 will involve (overcoming the resistance of developers) a WYSIWYG editor in the core (to compete against Wordpress).
3. D8 will include an optional (turn-key) wiki module (for all the debates about wikipedia vs drupal), mainly to overcome the competition from all-in-one solution- TikiWiki- COS Groupware!
(hence core download size will increase)
4. Mollom will be a core feature of D8 for non-commercial use.
Finally
5. D8 will move towards optimizing the resources - bulk of users are on shared hosting! Any volume growth should address these users!
6. Drupal will be Wordpressized during 2011 to remain in the competition. What I mean is user-friendlyness will be the mantra for the developers.
All the best for D8, and looking forward for the day of upgradation from D7 to D8 (to my sites)!

bertboerland’s picture

my own predictions:

  1. Drupal will more and more become a backend tool, not just as a webserver or even a webservice but for example like a Home Service Bus with butler
  2. PHP will move from a scripting language towards a compiled language with tools like HipHop and Drupal will lead this movement
  3. There will be a book / academic research dedicated to the culture of the community of Drupal, not the product itself
  4. On the next DrupalCon in EU, there will be a EU Songfestival featuring DrupalSongs. Despite nodeone's grunt entry of the powerbalad, a Balkan state will win
  5. There will be at least 4 SaaS webhosting solutions featuring an easy interface like Gardens or something like sweaver based on Drupal
  6. There will be a Drupal EU foundation combining the power of all local Drupal foundations, Asia follows
  7. There will be a big commercial conference on Drupal competing with DrupalCon
  8. The centre of the commercial Drupal ecoshere will move from North America towards South Asia
  9. There will be an actual court case about the use of Drupal and GPL. It will be settled
  10. Drupal will adapt a shorter release cycle, Drupal 8 will be released in Q4 2011. Drupal 9 development will start in 2011
  11. There will be a "Drupal Legacy" project started to support Drupal 6 for a longer period of time, not unlike Fedora legacy project. Due to more companies using Drupal and shorter release cycles, Drupal will change it's policy and support three current versions. Ergo, Drupal Legacy .org will stop.
  12. There will be much discussion on who will follow up Dries' position not unlike other companies / projects with a well known leader
  13. Many developers from phyton/RoR projects will join the Drupal community and hate PHP

Ooooh, and so many more...

--
groets
bert boerland

sime’s picture

Like

Bèr Kessels’s picture

13. hmm. Make that:
14. We will start seeing an outflux of (some of the) early adopters and shops. Leaving Drupal and moving (back) to (actual) frameworks and custom work. Like the Onion. Dries/Drupal has voiced (finally!) that it is for end-users, not for developers; which could be interpreted as «Drupal is not a framework, but a CMS».
15. Some frameworks might come with Drupal-adaptors: use-your-legacy Drupal DB in Django; port your Drupalnodes into node.js. Wrap around Drupal modules as Symphony plugins. Stuff like that.
16. At least one high-profile Drupal-ecoculture site (planet, modulefinders, blogs, drupal-ad-networks, helpdesk-site, stuff like that) will emerge, and found not being written in Drupal, but on some closed-source, custom platform.
17. The influx of Drupal contributions will first slow down, due to the new D7 release and efforts with developers in migrating. The it will pick up and before the end of 2011 it will match the amount of D5 releases. After the moe to git, it will slow down again for some months.
18. The amount of influential Drupalmodules on Github will become so large that Github.com will be considered just as important a Drupal-repository as Drupal.org itself.

nirmal_george’s picture

2011 will be a great year for Drupal 7 ..

TimelessDomain’s picture

Will 2011 be the year we say goodbye to "Subscribe" to comments?
I hope so. Why doesn't drupal.org just install the flag module already & allow users to flag issues (nodes) that they want to subscribe to.

Even more - what if they allowed sorting by the # of "Subscribe To Flags" on issue queues

This would greatly simplify the issue queues & provide enhanced support for determining our opportunity cost (or where efforts should be put 1st, 2nd, & so on.).

freedom isn't free

dddbbb’s picture

...and would clean up a lot of needless mess.

I'm off to go and find the poper thread for this issue and subscribe to it ...doh!

jn2’s picture

This one may be pretty obvious, but we'll see how IPv6 will affect the Web in general and Drupal in particular. I know that the cURL library installed on my machine does not support it, and it's the most recent version of cURL.

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Senior Tech

_gramur’s picture

My predictions would be:

  • Themes for Drupal 7 will have HTML5 and CSS3 code out of the box.
  • RDFa - Probably one of the areas of Drupal 7 that I have a keen interest in. More sites will be using RDFa in their code.
  • Performance issues will be a big discussion there may be an increase in modules to try and solve this problem
  • Views in Drupal 8 core!
  • More designers in the Drupal community
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    Founder
    Sivius.ca

    effulgentsia’s picture

    I predict we'll see a lot of focus, and therefore, progress, in:

    • UX within Drupal 7 contrib modules.
    • HTML5 within themes.
    • Simplicity within Drupal 8 core.
    • Business models for Drupal distributions.
    • Effectiveness of our collaboration tools and processes.