Yes, the end of the year is just around the corner so the old habit of looking back and forward regarding all things Drupal is here again! It is time to see what we predicted right, where we where not really on the spot and where we failed to see what was going on. And of course to make our new predictions for 2008! Take a look at last years predictions.
The Right's
This year must be the year where we made our own predicated future since so many predictions where right. Let us take a look at some of them:
- Steven was right about many:
- "Drupal wins a major open-source award for all the effort put in to make Drupal more usable, without compromising its flexibility." And so we did by claiming the Packt Publishing CMS award!
- "2007 sees the inclusion of some form of drag-and-drop blocks to the admin. Possibly reordering book pages and menu items." Code has been written to make this happen, weights in an ultralight form.
- And then there was: "Dries starts a company." Dries is indeed making a new a splash in the Drupal community.
- More good predictions: "There will NOT be a huge explosion in Drupal installation profiles." Not many indeed, but more then I expected. And "Drupal will 'arrive' and no longer be seen as the hot newcomer." Since many RFP explicitly ask for Drupal and we are on the radar of all big technology research firms, I will not say we are "there" yet but Drupal sure is no newcomer any more, not even in the boardroom.
- And then people suggested Dries to work on other stuff than Drupal: "Must be time for Dries to produce something other than Drupal releases." And he did resulting in Axl and (any time now) in "Dr. Dre".
- Another one: "Oh and a few (more than 2) US presidential campaigns will use Drupal to power their site.". I know of at least one.
- "AJAX and JS effects will become a major part of Drupal but a core value of always-degrade-gracefully will persist, but this will come under fire from both sides.". True, Drupal now with 8% yummy.
- "Views and CCK — will be incredibly versatile / extensible / themable / swiss-army-like, and will instantly make another 5 existing core modules redundant.". Controversial, yet not far off.
- "Drupal will be in the 2007 EContent 100 List". Yes, they did recognize us.
The Wrong's
Not everyone and everything was right. Here are some of the wrong's.
- "And this extra one is for the developers, cvs will switch to subversion (svn)." No, we still use CVS.
- According to Google trends, Drupal will be more relevant than Joomla.. Not even near, if we want to be there in the first place.
- An old request: "The downloads section of drupal.org will be redesigned again, with a lot of goodies like community rating of contributions." and prominently featured install profiles." That did not happen in 2007.
The Unforeseen's
Nobody saw the new core committer Gábor Hojtsy that has done tremendous work to bring i18n in Drupal 6. Nobody mentioned the Best DrupalCon ever in Barcelona with 430 people attending. Neither did anyone predicted that Drupal would lead the GoPHP5 movement or saw the impact of OpenID on Drupal. And last but not least, no mentioning of the song everybody loves, or at least loves to hate.
... and more
My own predictions? "Drupal will be mainly used by Big Companies as a "site"kick for their corporate site. So example.com will get a smaller blog.example.com or debate.example.com.". That happened, a lot. In the Netherlands and in Germany newspapers started using Drupal next to their proprietary main site. But the NY Observer even went for their main site over to Drupal
Only Dries can answer his own prediction:
There are many million websites out there. But by the end of 2007, if you take 1,000 random websites, at least 3 of them will run Drupal. Spam sites and pornographic websites must be excluded from any such experiment.
Maybe he will here?
And for 2008?
For 2008 you can make your predictions here. Make them unpredictable, funny and say what will and will not happen. And most of all, work on making sure your predictions become reality during 2008 so next year you will be "The Grand Winner of 2008".
Comments
More Web Services
Drupal becomes even more of a web service platform, offering more and more ways of interaction between third party applications and websites. This includes having parts of Services in core.
+1
I second this.
+1
Oh yeah ... that would be nice!
Drupal to attract "open source", "standards compliant" coders
I predict Drupal will build a big reputation amongst web developers for being truly "open source" and "standards compliant", and attract said developers for said reasons. This will be the biggest drive to set Drupal apart from other CMSes, and drive Drupal growth.
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If it is all about me, we are in for a crappy ride - So if I can help someone else, I will.
US presidential campaigns using Drupal
Here is another Drupal-powered campaign site, advised by John VanDyk:
http://www.dailypaul.com/taxonomy/term/426
Just need one more....
I was the one that made this
I was the one that made this prediction. Candidates using Drupal for their official site:
Chris Dodd
Mike Gravel
That's two that I know of. Not the biggest names, but they 're using Drupal for their official sites. Also there's Mike Bloomberg if he decides to run. Also there's the Ron Paul site mentioned above although it's not the official site. Does anyone know of any more?
There are also non official supporter sites, like Hillary's that Dries pointed out as well as one for Obama.
I was wrong with my other prediction though. I said that there would be more than 300,000 drupal.org users, but we are just about 220,000 users now.
Libertarian Candidates use Drupal
George Phillies uses Drupal: http://phillies2008.org (I formerly webmastered it)
Steve Kubby uses Drupal: http://kubby2008.com
Unity08 was using Drupal, but they shut down recently: http://unity08.com
And I suspect if you look you'll see more 3rd party candidates who use Drupal for their sites...
Another site (unofficial)
Another site (unofficial) asking Mike Bloomberg to run: http://draftmichaelbloomberg.com/
Guesses on things I'm involved in
Personally, I hope to be involved in these things somehow which I think will come to pass:
Nathan Haug
creative graphic design w: quicksketch.org
& software development e: nate@quicksketch.org
More of a battleplan...
More of a battleplan than a prediction, but I am with Nate on predicting modal dialogs as a core Drupal tool. They are just too useful to ignore. Of course, there will probably by a couple dozen contrib modules all with there own version of popup modals until we settle on one.
My entry into the ring is at: http://drupal.org/project/popups
Other predictions:
The Axajification for Drupal administration with get more and more exciting.
The OOP wars will heat up to a boil.
D7 will absorb CCK entirely and some of Views.
Drupalcon Boston will sell out.
jQuery UI will not get included in D7 enmass, but a couple pieces of it might.
Some major campus-wide infrastructure at UC Berkeley will move over to Drupal.
I predict..
DrupalModules.com launches and becomes the preferred reference for module information. :)
--
John Forsythe
Need reliable Drupal hosting?
Cheater
You need to predict before 2008 :P
Michelle
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See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.
I edited my post to fix the link
I edited my post to fix the link. It's actually from 2007, hence why the post above and below are both from December 31, 2007. ;P
Oh!
LOL! I didn't look that close. It just showed up as a new comment. :)
Michelle
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See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.
Drupal version rotation
I will get at least 1 :P
Second Edition
I predict a second edition of Pro Drupal Development in late spring, documenting the ins and outs of Drupal 6.
Growth & Development Predictions
Growth Predictions
Development Predictions
Finally, Acquia will turn a profit in 2008.
Agree with you, especially
Agree with you, especially on this one:
themeartists.com
Lots more languages start working
I am hoping to see many more languages become available with Drupal 6. Here in MN there is some interest among the local dev community (which meets near my house) to work on bringing Hmong, Somali and Ethiopian support in. Once the interface strings are in, it can be grafted onto any site, right?
And then there could be Drupal Somalia. How badass would that be? This could also help Drupal corner certain languages as a CMS, if we're first on the scene!
I'd really love to have more
I'd really love to have more languages available.
I think with the release of
I think with the release of D6, we'll see a lot more use of Drupal in the non-English speaking world with some pretty big non-English websites popping up in Drupal. How about a major Chinese media site?
I also predict that we'll see the redesign of drupal.org in production.
More
Drupal will repeat as the Packt Open source CMS winner.
We will see greater contributions from software companies such as Adobe, especially with the advance of the Services framework that Rob mentioned.
My predictions
The obvious:
The not-so-obvious:
The obscure:
project management with Drupal
1. The project* module with new user interface and usability improvements will be the biggest hit on drupal.org in 2008.
2. There will be an eclipse mylyn connector for project* module, which will be the first significant step for Drupal to become the no1 bug tracking and project management system.
Can we vote for predictions? ;-)
benjamin, Agaric Design Collective
benjamin, Agaric
My predictions for 2008
I've posted my predictions at http://buytaert.net/drupal-predictions-for-2008.
Thanks for the amazing year 2007. :)
Here goes...
Growth
Drupal 7
Also:
Panels 2 will become as ubiquitous as CCK and Views
AdvForum will decrease the frequency of posts with the words "drupal's forum sucks" in them by at least 60%.
The most powerful user management system
Drupal is certainly one of the most powerful content management system nowadays.
Drupal will also become one of the most powerful user management system on the web in the two coming years.
Drupal will serve for most web applications whenever we built it fully with drupal or using drupal combined with other framework like phpcake http://drupal.org/project/drake, any javascript frameworks or any other third party modules http://drupal.org/project/Modules/category/52
Even if we made our applications also available on facebook or other social web sites. With drupal we will be able to keep the control on our users base.
Drupal will bring us the power to build any web applications with the ease of a fully integrated user management system behind which repect privacy laws, which is already compatible with openid, which is already ready to allow our users to invite their friends and promote our site etc...
My prediction is that drupal will be a required brick for more and more different type of web application by empowering them with a fully integrated user management system.
Drupal is the absolute best CMS out there Bar None
I am bit biased here in that Drupal is the best and most powerful Web content management system out there - bar none.
I just hope all the modules (like ecommerce) get ported to Drupal 6 and 7, as fast as the new releases of Drupal keep coming out in 2008!
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Joe Matthew | Free Drupal CMS training videos
Mobile Platforms
I predict that there will be a great buzz and effort in optimizing Drupal for "mobile platforms".
>>With the introduction of the iPhone, the Olpc device and other web-enabled gears/portable devices, I'm sensing that Drupal will have a good fortune of being primed to run on these cute little inventions.
>>Market & availability: I visualize that more themers and creative people will harness and wow us with what they can do with Drupal. I also see developers get younger by age and by heart.
>>Local forecast: I predict that Drupal will be more popular here in Asia. I also feel that there will be significant event(s) that will make Drupal shine in our region.
*Not so good forecast (read at your own risk)*
: I feel that the community will miss a special opportunity (one that will serve a very good leverage if taken) --I won't give a hint :p
: Something other than AJAX will be a better hit
: Some people will switch due to several stressful surprises
haha
LOL. You refering to me in the age thing? ;)
smiles
I'm young and child-at-heart too. ;D
I wish there's a Drupal camp for Drupal kids this 2008.
it's going to be a stressful but productive year
1) The tension between those with a community-centric perspective and those with a corporate-centric perspective will explode into a lively and productive debate.
2) The "comments should be nodes" debate will continue but comments will remain comments
3) Drupal 6 will be the only major release of the year.
The pace of drupal development will finally slow as more developers start to feel the pain related to the current pace, giving a voice to the perennial main complaint from non-techie users.
4) A hundred drupalSOMETHING.com domains will be registered by well-meaning folks and this year the majority of members of the community will realize that building separate islands is a counter-productive proposal, All of those domains will end up unused and eventually owned by domain speculators. The domain name renewal fees will instead be donated to the Drupal Association.
5) There will be new X.drupal.org domains to create a community focus and shared infrastructure for various things such as drupal camps, conferences, training materials, etc..
6) Attracted by the rapid growth of drupal, a number of companies will start up as drupal-specific shops and fail. As well, a number of companies will adopt drupal as part of a broad-based use of Free Software tools and succeed.
7) People in the non-profit world will start to discuss the dangers of the "Drupal Monoculture" and turn their focus to enhancing the interoperability of Drupal with other existing Free Software tools instead of trying to make every problem a nail for their Drupal-hammers.
8) Due to the above mentioned struggles and debates -- combined with the developer-centric and community-focused nature of Drupal -- both Drupal as a community and Drupal as a tool will continue to grow and attract talented techies and users.
9) The modules page will be reorganized to provide more useful information and a separation between alpha/in-development modules and modules that are really ready for use.
10) The Drupalicon will become recognized outside the drupal community and will be the new balloon in the 2008 Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York.
3 right already
1) The tension between those with a community-centric perspective and those with a corporate-centric perspective will explode into a lively and productive debate.
Right on the spot. Yes, there is and will be more tension between "money" and "community"
4) A hundred drupalSOMETHING.com domains will be registered
Funny, I wanted to do a blog posting about this. 1260 so far. Not the trademark Dries owns and the association protects.
5) There will be new X.drupal.org domains to create a community focus
Right on, more about that later.
--
groets
bert boerland
--
groets
bert boerland
4) A hundred
So what does it signify for the 1260 domain owners if the Drupal TM is owned and protected? (Just curious, I'm not an owner of one of those domains.)
IANAL
1) the association doenst have a (sub)license document yet
2) there are some legit domain names dr. uval hostital dot com for example
3) trademarks dont translate to domainnames 1 on 1
4) we -dries/the association- will never go after all of them (as long as I have a small say in this), just the ones that are abusing drupals name
5) if you start a drupal business, dont describe the business name (drupal-shop.com) but be more creative (krimson.be for example)
--
groets
bert boerland
--
groets
bert boerland
(Drupal : websites) == (Linux : webservers)
Cross-link; I blogged this on Drupal.geek.nz
Bevan/
brazilian growth
1) Growth of drupal community in the South Hemisphere
2) Releasing of the first brazilian drupal company
Distributed Version Controll
cvs and svn are death. mercurial or git for the win.
Now go switch! :)
.02$
I call and raise you with
I call and raise you with another .02 ;) If drupal.org doesn't make that move, someone else will..
morphir.com
not until they are simple
The Drupal community can only move to something that is as easy or easier than CVS.
Any project that uses a more complex RCS for a tool like Drupal is guaranteed to have a very small developer base.
--
Knaddisons Denver Life | mmm Chipotle Log
--
Morris Animal Foundation
Predictions for 2008
Well, since I did not got the svn cvs last year ;) this wont stop me from predicting more unpredictable predictions for 2008 :)
What will happen...
-With the new way to install drupal, more flavor out of the box will be available. (not all on drupal.org)
-Drupal 6 will be a success for mostly big corporations who can put a lot of time on building a website.
What wont happen...
-Drupal will still lac in the themes area compare to the others big two.
-No Drupal 7 yet. No betas, no RC.
-Within the first year of the foundation, nothing will happen much differently. We will have to wait for year two.
In this day, witch I am really sic, this is what I can do ;)
Alexandre Racine
www.alexandreracine.com - mon site perso
www.salsamontreal.com La référence salsa à Montréal
New Spearmint Flavored Drupal!
I think Drupal will follow Linux and end up as many different flavors (pre-rolled packages) maintained by Drupal users or entrepreneurs.
I expect to see DrupalEd and other custom Drupal distros (not installation profiles) become more polished and take an identity for themselves.
Many useful modules available for Drupal 5 will either be forced to merge together, or forked/merged substitutes will appear as people become tired of dang diddly modularinos (sorry Ned Flanders).
So to summarize my tea leaves ... more Drupal distributions, less Modules to assemble ... faster TTL for Drupal newbies who pick an appropriate distribution.
I expect to see DrupalEd and
Let's hope you are wrong about this one!
Sebastian
hope for Distros?
What is your hope for distros, then? Or is it just DrupalEd that you have concerns about?
I think having them become highly polished helps bring people to Drupal. Ubercart is a great example of this phenomenon - people looking for "free ecommerce" find Ubercart on page 2 of google. Having external polished distributions helps bring new people/developers/themers/etc. to the project.
There is of course concern about them forking, but given that Drupal is so modular there is little reason for these projects to fork and plenty of value for them in not forking.
--
Knaddisons Denver Life | mmm Chipotle Log
--
Morris Animal Foundation
Yes forking is my only
Yes forking is my only concern and I have to admid that I partly missunderstood matt_harrold (or didn't read his words exactly).
I guess I'll have to take a closer second look at Ubercart as well as DrupalED.
No forking!
Yes, I suppose I should have elaborated ... neither Ubercart or DrupalEd, or any other SANE package would be a fork, just a "compilation" of modules, data, and Drupal .. tailored for a specific usage pattern.
I tend to agree that forking would be an awful outcome, and probably a failure for anyone who tried.
The UberInstaller project for Ubercart has an interesting way of helping new Drupal users obtain and install all the modules required to get an online cart up and running ... this is the kind of "distribution" I expect to see more of.
People see importance of automatic installation of dependencies
I don't think that will happen, and if it does I think it will be a bad thing.
I do think people will see the importance of letting newbieuser (or expertuser for that matter) pick module W and have X, Y, and Z installed automatically.
This won't be solved in 2008 I'm afraid, but I hope we'll be on our way to a solution by 2009. Ideally Update status module could download the code from Drupal.org for you. Professional hosters would use a different approach but the potential security risk of the web server writing to sites/all/modules is a lot smaller than the out of date Drupal, I think.
Imagine selecting and installing modules from within your Drupal site! Then Drupal will be like Linux ;-)
Alternatively (and suboptimally) Drupal.org could package all required dependencies with modules and user-admins are expected to open their tarball first in sites/all/files (may not exist) or something where a helper module could zap duplicates, before the user-admins moves the module files into sites/all/modules or wherever they like.
I agree many dependencies for Drupal modules will be a problem, but bigger, less-modular modules will be a bad solution.
benjamin, Agaric Design Collective
benjamin, Agaric
There's seems to be a good
There's seems to be a good chance we'll see packaging of install profiles on Drupal.org this year. I think a step further than that, would be "runtime distributions" - so you can install drupal core, then grab one or more distributions (without core) which give you additional modules and presets in one big chunk. That won't happen in 2008, but it'd be one way for complex modules with lots of dependencies to get around this issue.
Also drush seems to be getting very close to "apt for drupal", so that might be an option for some of us.
Lots of little modules that interlink are what makes Drupal such a flexible system to work with, no-one wants to go back to monolithic all-in-one modules that can't do anything else do they? In the end - you end up using more modules that way if you have anything other than very basic requirements- and more importantly a lot more duplicate and buggy code - since everything has to implement it's own features internally rather than sharing them with others.
Schooling
Higher-level Education will have a greater focus on open-source, not to mention Drupal as the Website Creator. Hard to measure, but I believe the focus within college classes on open-source will be perceptively much higher.
With the free access to the software and the community that comes along with drupal, this will allow education to be less expensive and more productive in web development specific courses.
-Craig Jackson
-Web Developer
So here we go. My
So here we go. My predictions.
Drupal distributions will
Drupal distributions will flourish this year, both thematic (like drupaled) and linguistic (language distributions).
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Robert Garrigos
Professional site: robert.garrigos.cat
Catalan Drupal Users Group: drupal.cat
My stab at it...
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Lullabot! | Eaton's blog | VotingAPI discussion
--
Eaton — Partner at Autogram
The tea leaves say....
Many experienced Drupal developers will team up to form consultancies
Drupal integrates with SOA middleware to be part of massively scalable, high redundancy systems
Unified and coherent system for handling media and files
Mainstream press articles. Drupal will also be featured on TV tech reports, mainly as part of stories on Open Source
Collectable Drupal developer action figures become available (OK, I'm joking, but I would seriously buy them if they existed)
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Drupal Specialists: Consulting, Development & Training
Robert Castelo, CTO
Code Positive
London, United Kingdom
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...
"Unified and coherent system for handling media and files"
Oh, man, I sure hope so. I consider myself pretty good with the contribs but media handling makes me dizzy with all the choices. LOL
Michelle
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See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.
my predictions - better predictions in 2009
I think the last one would be the biggest news among these, but that's just my (biased) opinion ;)
--
Knaddisons Denver Life | mmm Chipotle Log
--
Morris Animal Foundation
My Predictions for 2008
- Many of the Top Global Technology Consulting firms will plunge into Drupal and mostly exit the foray in 3 years
- Installation Profiles and Hosted Drupal Solution companies will take away the limelight and become extremely profitable companies
- Hourly rates will go down by at least 25% as large pool of developers from developing nations will try and compete in Global Markets
- Drupal will become one of the top three choice in new Enterprise Content Management Projects
- Drupal Certification announcement and plan may be released in 2008
- Drupal Specific Magazine may be released in 2008
- Many Universities will teach Drupal in their Curriculum
- DruBB module may get developed and released and help to strengthen Drupal Forums.
--
Roshan Shah
T : 604-630-4292
Vancouver, Canada
Skype/GoogleTalk/Yahoo : bpocanada
DruBB
"DruBB module may get developed and released and help to strengthen Drupal Forums."
DruBB isn't a module. It's a group with asperations of being an install profile. ;)
My prediction is that the core forum module in Drupal 7 will be strengthened so forums work better out of the box.
Michelle
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See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.
Dr8pal.
Daniel F. Kudwien
unleashed mind
Daniel 'sun' Kudwien
makers99
2008 predictions
2008 will bring :
a) Others; spending too much time making kooky remixes of the Drupal Song
b) Me; spending too much time listening to them >sigh<.
-NP
Freebase
I'm new to the community and may be way out on a limb here, but I predict that more sites (Drupal and otherwise) will point their AJAX/AHAH controls at public databases such as FreeBase rather than relying on their own internal taxonomies, resulting in a more consistent organization of topics among sites and more intelligent searchability by search engines. Such sites will be able to incorporate each others' content intelligently through MGT queries.
2008
-- Merlin
[Point the finger: Assign Blame!]
[Read my writing: ehalseymiles.com]
[Read my Coding blog: Angry Donuts]
-- Merlin
[Read my writing: ehalseymiles.com]
[Read my Coding blog: Angry Donuts]
German sites
More popular German sites, like www.ehrensenf.de, will be powered by Drupal. And at least one big site will have a Flash frontend powered by a Drupal backend.
md - http://drupalcenter.de
--
http://mdwp.de
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mdwp*
Geo and database API predictions
Predictions:
1) Drupal's handling of spatial data will finally "grow up" in 2008. People looking to do interactive mapping on the web will flock to drupal.
2) We will begin to see some inkling of a database level API for drupal - driven by the need of companies that have huge internal databases and want to open some of it up to the world using drupal.
Emulation, embedding, integration, and the cherry on top
In 2007, a (large?) portion of the Drupal community realized that our beloved system goes way beyond being a mere CMS, but that it can be considered a full-fledged Web application framework, of a new kind. Radically different from the bottom-up Java, RoR and other Cake frameworks, Drupal supplies out of the box (well, with at least CCK and Views added) a running application construction kit that requires thinking in Lego logic rather than boring old procedural programming. Modules act as tiny logic units that not only hook into the core, but also connect third-party modules together to achieve new functionality with minimal coding.
This simple but radical shift in thinking has far-reaching consequences that haven't been fully realized yet. Here's what I predict for the near future:
This inflationary growth will lead to structural reworks. Here's what I think will happen:
At that point, Google will bid for Drupal, as the centerpiece for its own Total Information Management system. Beyond this singularity, I cannot see :-)
... the old habit of looking
Wow.. kind of nostalgic to read about the ultracool clean urls of the year 2003 (thread well worth reading).. :D
is good!
Technology opened the future and this is good!
I hope next year realized forecasts. And this growth will continue in subsequent years.
Бытовки
Look good.
We've already seen a lot positive from Drupal this year. Many thing turn out the be better than prediction.
www.designers.pro
"Design Professionals Community"