Ever since node 4877 in 2003 we have a “prediction” post up on Drupal.org, where Drupal coders and users can share their vision on what will happen the year ahead with their beloved tool. Ever? Well, we skipped 2012, so we can not look back to the predictions you made last year on this site.

But that should not stop you from making some predictions for 2013. And you are welcome to do so in the comments below. Will parts of Drupal end up in another CMS or framework? Will "WSCCI first” be the slogan or will the consolidation in the CMS landscape and the trend to leave our small island make new bridges towards other PHP projects or even make a new Pangaea, beyond PHP and the web? Will Drupal be the answer in Jeopardy on the question “what is the best CMS?”. Time will tell.

Or you.. In the comments below

Comments

g089h515r806’s picture

There will be more Chinese Drupal developers contribute to drupal.org.

Chinese drupal tutorials Think in Drupal

bluesomewhere’s picture

I think 2013 is the year OSS PHP developers that aren't yet on Drupal start taking it much more seriously, and I think 2014 is the year that people will start calling themselves LAMPD developers.

ITMonkey’s picture

But I'm not sure that they'll want to be called DAMP developers either!

erin4b’s picture

AMPD!

TelFiRE’s picture

Or EMPD... ;p

eaton’s picture

D8 will mark the end of Drupal 6's supported lifespan. Given the huge number of sites that joined the Drupal world during that version's heyday, it will be the first large-scale test of the "end of life" policy. Sites planning to migrate from Drupal 6 to Drupal 8 will be facing significant API, database, and requirements changes. We'll inevitably lose a number of those sites to other frameworks and products, and a few sites will decide to simply stay with D6. Drupal will continue to grow, obviously, but it will be another step in the transition to a "mature" product upgrade cycle: users will consider migration to new versions based on their costs and merits, rather than automatically assuming that new versions make previous ones obsolete.

The sweeping under-the-hood architectural changes in D8 will make the transition for hobbyist developers a longer road than usual. While experienced PHP developers will benefit from the elimination of many "Drupalisms," greater standardization, and code-sharing with other projects, devs who've only worked with Drupal will be learning what's essentially a new codebase. There will be a long lag cycle as contrib modules are ported, replaced with new alternatives, and so on. The next generation of Drupal devs will find older D7 code as baffling as today's devs find Drupal 3 code. Old-timers will shake their canes, and request that kids "get off the lawn."

The inclusion of Views, Email fields, and Link fields and (likely) Entity Relationships and Date Fields in core will make Drupal one of the most flexible out-of-box content modeling tools in the OSS world. This, as well as the inclusion of basic RESTful content access APIs, will position Drupal very well over the coming several years, given the growing industry-wide emphasis on structured content and multichannel publishing.

The rise of mobile and the multi-platform shift will ratchet up the pressure on Drupal's long release cycles and monolithic storage/management/publishing design. Rapid changes in front-end-development best practices will be especially tricky. More sites will leverage D8's RESTful web service support to build lightweight client-side AJAX applications that pull data from Drupal, using it for storage and management of content but not final delivery. This will position Drupal well for industry-wide shifts towards more decoupled content management and delivery tools.

The CMI changes in D8 will change the nature of large-scale Drupal development and deployment in a huge way; modules that don't play well with CMI will be considered as broken as modules that bypass FormAPI today. Features will be reduced to a lightweight configuration bundling tool. Ewoks will dance.

--
Eaton — Partner at Autogram

roynilanjan’s picture

Here is the problem in drupal world! in each major-version release entire drupal almost is rewritten ....
good this is a loosely coupled system ... so the contribution is much more easier but what about the system
those are running in version 5 or 6...! huge problem to migrate data(as entire RDMS has also changed in 7 as well will be changed in 8) ..

Backward compatibility is the major steps in Software Life cycle & here drupal lacks & far behind to represent it self as an Enterprise product ... though have some thinking from 8-9 version...

Rene Bakx’s picture

If your site is running drupal 5 now, upgrading or better migrating to 8 is going to be your smallest concern. It most likely means your entire webstack is outdated as well. And while you are at it, might as well take a look at your design too. A lot of design trends have passed since your site launched. The web is a fast evolving entity, as soon as you launch a product you know it is out dated in a few years. Embrace that or learn to live with that fact that you will be a few steps behind in a few years.

I praise the day that the core dev switched from not invented here to proudly found elsewhere. It makes selling drupal to my co-devs a lot easier. It is 2013, and for a mature product like drupal being PSR compatible it a must have feature to survive in the long run. Drupal has a good momentum at this time, let us all use that to make a good living, share code and ideas and embrace meetings like frontend united. Drupal is way more then a nerd toolkit, we need to get the rainbow'n'unicorn people involved way more. They give color and looks to our solutions :)

As for my personal prediction, it is more of a cry for help or shout out. Please let the current way of getting a sandbox into a full blown module die a quick dead and replace it with a more community driven process. Take a look at the way symfony2 bundles are done. Developers share their bundles using git under normal names and are self responsible for their code. The lousy ones automatically sink to the bottom, and the good ones are promoted by the community. Having git on d.o. is a good thing, but i'am not sure if it will be sustainable in the future as it rapidly is loosing feature wise against github in the way pull requests, forks etc are handled.

For community driven development having a x-factor alike jury system to get a chance for your code to make it as a full project simply is not working anymore. Drupal got to be big for that, just breathe and let the community figure out if the code is usable or not. Just determine a set of playground rules for projects and maintain those rules even as it will imply that a 'household' name in the community will have to swallow some pride if a project get's killed because of the rules.

odoritour’s picture

Interesting input
apparently from someone who knew all about drupal
regards respect for roynilanjan

Ayesh’s picture

AmyStephen’s picture

"Ewoks will dance."

With respect, I think you are overstating. ! Other than that, interesting perspectives, Jeff. Love how you write.

Asaphjay’s picture

I agree with you in many ways Eaton. Am a Drupal newbie, having now completed only bout 6 or so sites. But am loving the rapid deployment features of D7.

I would love to see how Mobile First schemes play out in D8, vis a vis the heavy dependency of content-driven websites.

Ayesh’s picture

Well I think 2013 is the year that Drupal gets to play with other frameworks and become more OOP code. Personally I like the hooks better but it seems like I'm in the little boat and more people want to get into OOP pattern.
Whatever that is, love you Drupal!

valthebald’s picture

Release of Drupal 8, and related retirement of the first massively popular Drupal release - Drupal 6, will lead to the new breed of Drupal shops, specializing in Drupal to Drupal migration.
Or (shameless plug - I have started sandbox project ) we as community will come up with solution that will allow older code to run under fresh-n-shiny D8.
Happy New 2013, everyone!

JCL324’s picture

Love to see your site but looks like your DB is down.

I wholeheartedly agree that there will be a ton of work out there to update all the D6 sites out there and hope to become somewhat of an "expert" in this area with best/repeatable practices.

JCL

valthebald’s picture

It was, indeed.
Thanks for pointing out, fixed

tgeller’s picture

Here's a prediction that meshes with what @eaton and @valthebald said.

After Drupal 8 comes out, Dries will post something on his blog (http://buytaert.net) that considers implementing some kind of limited backward compatibility in Drupal 9. That will start a discussion of increasing loudness, with support growing as webmasters scramble to figure out what to do with their (newly unsupported) Drupal 6 sites.

For the record, I haven't heard Dries suggest anything like this, and he'll probably be as surprised to read it as anyone. :)

@vladthebald predicted a growing practice in Drupal-to-Drupal migrations. I predict that, parallel to that will be a new market to support those Drupal 6 sites that would be difficult (or impossible) to immediately migrate to Drupal 8. It will largely comprise patches and custom modules as a stepping stone to Drupal 8 -- or Drupal 9 (with improved compatibility promised).

---
Tom Geller * tomgeller.com * Oberlin, Ohio
See my lynda.com videos about Drupal

Adagio’s picture

He has brought it up atleast in http://denver2012.drupal.org/content/directions-drupal-core. Citing Python as an example, Eclipse IDE also does now. One problem he mentions is more work put on the strained core developers. Major win is shorter release cycles.

rsbecker’s picture

I hope 2013 will bring a change of mindset about upgrading. Converting a D6 DB to D7 may appear easy but repeated attempts to upgrade the same DB often produces different results and different malfunctions. This may occur because adding, upgrading and uninstalling modules often left garbage in the old DB that fooled the converter.

It's time to create a better way to migrate content into a new, clean DB, and better documentation about creating fields and content types to hold the migrted content. Migrate d2d is a start, but I hope this side of Drupal development will get more attention in 2013.

Asaphjay’s picture

I would be greatly interested in such DB migration schemes. I have client sites running some custom 'mash-up' CMS and I sooo want to migrate them to D7 / D8. Is there a way to do it, even now?
Site needing migration - http://niayangu.com

AmyStephen’s picture

2013 will bring more of the same from Drupal and it's developer community. Nothing new, we will see the same forward leaning stance, same leadership in interproject partnerships and reaching out, same growth in community collaboration, and a continued growth in Drupal envy. More. Of. The. Same. Year, after year, after year.

Dries’s picture

I take "more of the same" as a good thing! :-)

luco’s picture

"Drupal envy" as in "they see us rollin', they hatin'"? LOL.

seriously though, I think 2013 will be the year to promote Drupal's recent usability changes. the ugly duckling is becoming quite the swan, and as ReneB pointed out, "we need to get the rainbow'n'unicorn people involved way more".

I'm sure landmark sites like the whitehouse.gov being built using Drupal is great PR, but our attitude towards beginners and outsiders alike will shape the way Drupal is received by those who (sadly) still don't profit from this great platform and comunity.

it's not about supporting it like a sports team - though the passion sometimes makes me think of it this way.

it's about showing more maturity towards the open source community in general, more helping those struggling with the steep learning curve, and less mingling in flame wars over which CMS is the absolute coolest one the whole galaxy has ever seen.

(though I'm fairly sure I know the answer to that.)

anyway. to me, 2013 is the year to shake hands, not fists. that's my prediction. and I'll help it come true.

_________________________

"There is no off position on the genius switch."
- David Letterman

OneWeb’s picture

Good to see that fine point acknowledged …

2020 use case gold mine harvest regard

2013 UI style fond reminisce era unwitting developer stamp process / data model upon stakeholder

Reverse thinking apply , people natural thought process premium value grant , feature rich stakeholder customizable interface / ecosystem drive

Trending towards perfect software solution , business real life natural information flow adapt , magnitude order simplify . Stakeholder productivity real time statistic assess , step / downtime / error minimize

Use case = data = gold

simplicity = ergonomics = productivity = happy

Arb

PS : 2020 punctuation / grammar style kept for reference

shamio’s picture

If drupal 8 releases this year, many new good things should happen and drupal will see much more users than other CMS platforms in my opinion and other CMS platforms should add many new features to their tools to be able to compete drupal. Drupal is going to be the best CMS IMO after releasing new major version (8).

luco’s picture

it should be launched in August 4. that would be the single greatest birthday gift I ever got since the SNES, twenty years back. ;)

_________________________

"There is no off position on the genius switch."
- David Letterman

socceronly’s picture

Not a prediction but a hope....

Given the self destruction of vBulletin, Drupal could with improvements to the forum take hold of a massive community, and a massive developer community too.... Not sure what the scope that those improvements might need to be.

Fingers crossed. I wish I had the resources or skills to contribute, but that kind of development is outside my 1+1 skills.

Media Crumb’s picture

How has the vBulletin community self destructed? Seem more then fine to me.

Chicago Dev and Designer. Owner of 2old2play.com and GameStooge video game communities.

socceronly’s picture

Sorry, that was a bit over dramatic. It's actually a really good helpful community including the staff, I meant IB's vB5 release which is probably more than a year away from being useable. It is also, according to development people who are looking at the code, terribly written. vB4... ugghgghgh :(

Given the vast number of businesses built around it, I wonder what it would take to lure them over. You think this might be of interest to the likes of Aquia, Pantheon ect... I have read some of the posts by Michelle about the technical differences, but I don't understand what they mean or what it might take to implement. It's clearly not trivial though.

It's not just vB. Every forum on the planet is struggling with a CMS. That's a lot of sites.

Sorry this is the 2013 prediction thread... so!

I predict all development in 2013 will speed up tremendously now that we know the world didn't end.

luco’s picture

@socceronly you can climb the dev ladder if you want. I'm babystepping on it and I have big plans. you can do it!

_________________________

"There is no off position on the genius switch."
- David Letterman

omega.OFN’s picture

Since Drupal 7 more flexibility has been added in order to customize appplications rather than bare content management systems. This is leveraged by strongly established contributed modules like 'Views', 'Flags', 'Rules', 'Organic Groups' and many more to be mentioned... This will increases the usage of Drupal tremendously and hence will become more and more important for a multitude of economies utilizing Drupal for web platforms/applications with higher complexities than seen before.

alexandreracine’s picture

With all those usability tests, the next Drupal will be easier than wordpress for a normal user!

droplet’s picture

It will never happen.

TelFiRE’s picture

Guess you haven't seen drupalize.me

It's much, much easier than WordPress and it's not done yet.

KingSalibah’s picture

My prediction for 2013 includes
- a theme module that works similar to drupalplanet's theme module.
- a lot of the same in terms of module development, however, I feel Drupal is limited by insufficient corporate responsibility. I believe Acquia will continue to take on a larger responsibility for standards, development and direction. This is an area that I feel is lacking and will make the difference in terms of gaining a larger share of the web enterprise market. I believe a lot will stem from this, i.e., marketing, better planning, fixing up obvious holes in key modules, greater enterprise recognition, larger ability to create and focus resources, etc.
- I believe the Acquia Drupal stack will gain significant popularity with Drupal 8, particularly with new comers.

codesidekick’s picture

2013
More demand for Drupal developers as all those websites we've built for people over the years are due for upgrades, updates and new features.

Sidenote
I really hope that students are being taught how to learn and adapt to existing frameworks/systems (as well as being taught how to code from scratch) - we need more developers on board!

......................................................................................................
Marton Bodonyi
http://www.codesidekick.com
.........................................................

drupalshrek’s picture

In February, Dries announces Feature Completion Phase extended by 2 months from February 18th 2013 to April 18th stating "Wow, it's all so really whizz bang we really can't just let it go to waste", and Code Freeze therefore extended from July 1st to September 1st.

April 1st, Dries announces an additional "Loof Lirpa" 3-month phase.

April 2nd, Dries admits that this was just "April Fool" backwards and that Code Freeze will start as planned on September 1st.

August 31st, Dries announces an extra "Feature complete but we just want to do a bit more stuff before Code Freeze" phase lasting 3 months. Code Freeze now moved to November 1st.

November 1st, Dries announces Code Freeze extended by 2 months until December 31st stating, "We can't stop quite yet, it's all so good, and we're nearly there".

End of 2013 predictions.

drupalshrek

Sylvain Lecoy’s picture

I see PHP Unit system as the new standard for Drupal testing infrastructure :-)

lotyrin’s picture

I'd like to see SimpleTest die the painful death it deserves, and while a horizontal migration of our tests over to PHPUnit would be the quickest way to get that satisfaction, I'd also like to see us move towards a combination of SpecBDD and StoryBDD rather than (or in addition to?) xUnit.

Site builders are already very interested in these tools, and embracing them in core means solving their problems. I also just genuinely prefer the BDD philosophy (focus on specification and value) over that of xUnit (focus on existing implementation details).

Yucom’s picture

... will be the year, when people will realise, that function and code is not everything, and that design and theming is important just as good code and modules. People will realise, that there're people out there, who have to use drupal, and not all of them are pros or coder. 2013 will be the year, where coder will realise, that spamming modules and code with classes and ids is not what makes good design and theme-support, and that it is not enough to have just functionality.

2013 will be there year, where there are not only coding guidelines, but also guidelines for theming and design, which all coder and designer have to respect.

As a designer, this is what I hope for. Maybe just a dream, but maybe a dream coming true! Some day... :)

TheodorosPloumis’s picture

I totally agree with you and hope to have more "good designs" in the 2013!

TheodorosPloumis.com - Drupal developer @ eworx.gr.

TelFiRE’s picture

While it'd be really, really cool if Drupal was cleaner and had nicer themes that suffered from less "div-itus" and used proper coding standards, I find it somewhat unlikely. Developers have always scoffed at designers overall. Most of them believe it is our job to work with messy code, not theirs to write clean code.

joomlerrostov’s picture

2013 - Theme Designers Year! Drupal are able to grow significantly only if we involve more newcomers to it's ecosystem. This will bring a better and bigger cash-flow resulting more paid orders.

How do we achieve this? - Providing high-quality drupal themes.
Please, undestand a simple thing:
Newcomers first look at the beaty of the Drupal and only then on it's flexibility.
Take a look at the Drupal.org theme directory - almost 90% of these themes are starter themes (that looks ugly) and simple personal themes (that looks ugly) too.
Then go to Themeforest.net and take a look at the Drupal themes there. They are way better! (But obviously not so good as Wordpress's by the way). We need to beat Wordpress in this field!

In 2011-2012 some commercial theme providers appeared, but sadly compared to Themeforest designs they are not hiqh-quality providers (i know only 2 that I like).

How to make themes for Drupal better? (end-user view):

  1. Responsive
  2. HTML5 + CSS3
  3. Quicktabs theming
  4. Fieldgroup theming
  5. Views theming: html list, grid, tables with sorting etc, - i.e. theming plugins
  6. Taxonomy theming
  7. Theme settings: setup webfonts, width, columns etc.

Thats what i call "cool drupal theme" and what lacks 99% of available themes.
Our motto: «Bring fashion to Drupal themes.» We all must shift this.

TelFiRE’s picture

I work for a company that highly values the front-end aspects of a website (and also interface on back-end). We don't really do public Drupal themes, but I wonder if there is any way we can help in this regard to showcase what is possible? I have seen a lot of CSS galleries in the past that focused on beautiful website, do you know if there is one similar for Drupal? I've seen Drupal showcases but none focused on the design/theme aspects.

In fact maybe making such a site (or working on popularity and googlability of an existing one, if there is one) is part of the process you're describing. I can tell you for sure, inability to find a really good showcase of solid Drupal sites is part of what took me so long to finally join the platform.

crea’s picture

Please...
Predictions, not wishes.

monteatherton’s picture

You'll click "Update Core" and move from Drupal 7 to 8? Or each time there's a patch release, click, updated! It'll be just that easy!

TelFiRE’s picture

That will never happen with major releases, but minor perhaps.

ergophobe’s picture

Hey, that ability is here already and you don't even need to push a button. Just set up a cron job with drush. Add this to your crontab

0 * * * * drush -y --root=/path/to/drupal/root up

This will update core and modules automatically every hour. Might be more than a little dangerous though ;-)

sinasalek’s picture

My predictions for 2013
- Drupal 8 adaption rate will be much faster for small to medium size websites specially if we have a - working upgrade path - comparing to Drupal 7 and slower for large sites to due the architectural changes. However almost all new small to medium size websites will use Drupal 8 no long after it's release
- The number of contributed modules for Drupal 8 won't increase much due to the complexity of the new api for less experience developers but we will see a great improvement in quality
- The number of Drupal based distributions will start increasing considerably a year after Drupal 8 release

That's it :)

sina.salek.ws, Software Manager & Lead developer
Feel freedom with open source softwares

1980majka’s picture

surely our team will be bigger, smarter and more interesting.

Topcheese’s picture

Here is my observation in which someone might be able to make use of in making their prediction. The one thing I hear about Drupal is that it is all about the developers. The one thing I hear about the number one solution is that it is all about the users. Well, who is it that constructs that experience for those users? I think that Drupal has a promising look and that it is well worth investment. It all kind of hinges on that user experience, and to be quite frank unless you batten down the hatches with more of a standard ... I'm not so sure that's going to be a good thing for the user experience to have such a disconnect that currently exist with Drupal's flexible personality.

I really don't have enough key information to make such a prediction for Drupal, but I will say that the entire Drupal world is chock full of key information and it is just a matter of time before I do have enough. I think I just found my prediction what do you know.

luo8’s picture

Hello,
I like to Drupal, it’s really complex CMS with really good features, but as everything Drupal has own disadvantages as well.
Pls. check below links, these are just some reasons why Drupal should work firstly on Backwards compatibility!
Even though Drupal is perfect, because changing version is too short, Drupal has lost many website developers…

http://www.rockettheme.com/drupal-club-details?theme=modulus

Famous Template builder Rockettheme.com was stopped Template creation for Drupal, due to Backwards compatibility!
(IMPORTANT: RocketTheme Drupal Club is NOW CLOSED
As of January 1st 2013, the Drupal Theme Club has been reitred. These pages are here for reference only and are no longer maintained. There are no new Drupal themes being developed, and the existing themes are no longer supported.)

http://www.freelock.com/blog/john-locke/2011-10/top-6-reasons-drupal-rea...

Website developer are described some disadvantages of Drupal, one of them is Backwards compatibility (see section 4.Version wars)!

TelFiRE’s picture

RocketTheme mass produces terrible templates with absolutely horrible code and overprices them. I'm not worried that they do not develop for Drupal. It would be very much like a lazy themer such as RocketTheme to refuse to keep up with the changing times.

I would list this as a positive, not a negative, for Drupal. The other CMS are bogged down by trying to be compatible with 10-year-old websites. It's absurd, really. That's just not how the Internet works. If you want a solid high-quality website, you redevelop once every few years, once a year if you have the resources.

luo8’s picture

Could you imagine that you are the web developer with fully support for you customer, you made aprox. 100 website's with lot of different modules during last 4years...and now you have to moved all of them for your own cost into new version of Drupal, because of security risk?

What about in case that you will need some modules which will not be available in new version?
Drupal 6 will not be supported in some time anyway the thousands site's currently use it...what these web developers could do? Do you think that right step is no update?

I like Drupal for its robust, complexity, community and possibilities, but I think that sometimes good flexibility could be destructive..nobody take care for that?

Priyanka Shetty’s picture

  • Drupal 8 is going to concentrate more on Performance and caching!! Yay!!
  • There are bound to be more Drupal mobile websites and Apps.

I've come to love Drupal and love to see it improve with every release. Sure, migrating from Drupal 5 to Drupal 8 would be some heavy work!! But the best part about the new releases are-

  • New Features
  • Major Bug Fixes
  • More Drupal developers employed (for migration ;)
  • Change is good!!

On the whole every new release gets me excited!!

JohnWoltman’s picture

PHP based systems will succumb to better frameworks based on better languages like Python, Ruby, and C#.

snufft’s picture

You think that's going to happen in one year? Like as though D8 is going to be abandoned and suddenly we'll have a Python/Ruby version by the end of the year?

joomlerrostov’s picture

If Drupal functionality will be repeated by them - in this case maybe.
Drupal now wins all frameworks (Django, Ruby) in order of much cheaper and faster building the same web-project because of it's LEGO-like modules functionality.
In other clean frameworks you need to build admin interface, admin views of content, code workflow, add libraries manually, you always need to repeat Views, Rules, Features, Context, Panels, ImageCache, Localization update, Internationalization, Content Access functionality yourself with custom coding. So, such manual code cannot be better or more secure than that community modules.
Add here a number of modules available - all this for free, server with translations etc. You will see in the near future none of the other frameworks can beat Drupal.

peterx’s picture

After 60 years of development, Fortran is still the fastest high level language and it would let us run a site on a Cray XK7 Titan. 17.59 petaFLOPS might be enough to display the admin permissions list at a decent speed.

mattwmc’s picture

My two cents:

I have no intention of updating to Drupal 7 let alone Drupal 8.

When it comes to Drupal, my moniker is: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Because everytime I "fix it" drupal goes haywire (meaning an updated module or version doesn't work).

Perhaps my prediction (or hope) is that there will be a better testing process for modules before they are greenlit to be used.

JohnWoltman’s picture

Prediction: you will not get what you want.

crea’s picture

The sad truth of free opensource software is that users are testers.

TelFiRE’s picture

Welcome to the Internet.

oddz’s picture

2013 will be the year Drupal developers *begin respecting 1NF.

peterx’s picture

Taxonomy made 2NF easy but Fields, and now entities, makes all NF difficult.

simeonabiola’s picture

I think in 2013, some modules will not be ported to D8. Also since there will be lot of changes in the core, and the interface, the learning curve will get more steeper for users. D8 might not be released around September 2013, possibly around December 2013 or January 2014

green monkey’s picture

Drupal has tipped the scales.... there's no stopping Drupal now.

The Themers are bringing some really great stuff to us.

This of course will bring more newbies and with that more of a support load.

But, we grew out of diapers a few years ago.

The Doc team has done a great job, I mean really great.

And everyday there are more and more training videos.

More people are using the related Module support forum, rather than the main Drupal forum (post-now what).

The Reflection comes to Modules.

Drupal is moving so fast now - the modules are falling behind. Some of the Module sections are beginning to remind me of D4.5/5 days. If you needed a working version, you were pulling code from the forums and patching yourself. In many cases, the best working version is the DEV version and even that is dated over 3 months since last update. I'm not poking at developers or maintainers, just stating what I see.

Maintainers only have so much time available ---- with jobs, family and trying to have a life with no free time. Other Maintainers have stepped up to fill any major hole or adopted some poor module left alone and orphaned on the curbside. Perhaps over stepped up, out of loyalty to Drupal and the crew.

If Drupal grows faster than the modules, its going to look like D4/5 days, with a much larger crowd limping and gripping.

Not only has Drupal become a open source super star, but also a proud leader and inspiring example of people working together as a common goal community together for the good of all. (who ever thought working remotely from home in your underwear was the path to bliss - lol)

Drupal might be a small world, but everyone here makes me proud and gives me hope that someday the world can be a better place.

deanflory’s picture

I predict D8 will be released and all module developers will basically stop 98% development on D7 versions of modules on day 1, the same that happened during the D6-D7 transition. That will then leave sites with security holes and incompatible functionality with D7 modules that keep up-to-date and expand their feature set. This will make many HAVE to update to D8 and spend months trying to figure out how to do the same thing in the new version to keep their clients happy. They'll find out that D8 modules are bug-ridden and likely won't be production-ready for 2+ YEARS, thereby leaving them with no viable option unless they are a Drupal coder and can hand code everything and fix the bugs themselves.

Then a year into D8, Drupal will start touting D9 and again, focus will swing to fixing bugs in the D9 versions while D8 versions lag behind by 6+ months, again, living in the future with no solid past or present footing for functionality without bugs. Ultimately I think too much focus is put on future releases than getting issues cleared on current releases. I predict this will not change until Drupal extends it's major release cycle to add another year or two, forcing developers to have a solid MAYBE 1 year of bug-free modules/core. I love Drupal but am quickly becoming jaded with it's cycles, just a constant evolution requiring constant maintenance and reconfiguration which very few likely have time and client budget to mess with unless 1 site/company is your full time job.

I predict Drupal will not add anyone that can help out full-time on issues in community modules, thus making the learning curve and development time pretty much impossible for the development of large, complex sites with less than a year deadline by one designer/developer. Adding some oversight by official Drupal coders would help with some big-picture items like integration of Image Styles/Display Suite view modes and consistent lightbox/bug-free overlay functionality to make it easier for starters to get their content into the page like they want it.

I predict that "CMS" will be considered by many newcomer designers as a graceful GUI that will speed up development whereas module developers will continue considering it as a framework and retort "fix it yourself/contribute your own code", expecting those that want drag'n'drop to learn yet another coding language that simply won't happen.

I predict a bunch of coders will slam me for my predictions because they run the show. Thanks for everyone's contributions!

TelFiRE’s picture

You do realize, Drupal 6 is still supported... right? And very few modules completely abandoned support for Drupal 6, although they do exist. Still, if you built the site in 6 and it is working fine, there's no reason you need to upgrade to Drupal 7 and even after D8 comes out it will be fine to stay on D6 for quite a while.

The release cycle of Drupal is such that any given major version of Drupal has a support lifespan that is much longer than any halfway-decent website. If you're not updating your site that often, you don't value your web presence. That's your problem (or your client's), not Drupal's, and no matter what platform you pick, in 5 years if you do not update your site, it's going to be security vulnerabilities.

I hear what you're saying, but I don't see a solution without giving up exactly the things that make Drupal a great platform.

tgeller’s picture

@TelFIRE writes:

Still, if you built the site in 6 and it is working fine, there's no reason you need to upgrade to Drupal 7 and even after D8 comes out it will be fine to stay on D6 for quite a while.

I disagree. There will no longer be official security updates to D6 after D8 comes out. So while the site will keep running, it'll be susceptible to new exploits.

---
Tom Geller * tomgeller.com * Oberlin, Ohio
See my lynda.com videos about Drupal

udy’s picture

I think Drupal should fix its existing critical bugs before going any further.

tgeller’s picture

@udy, I think what you're asking for is impossible. New issues will continue to be discovered, no matter what we do. For example, a new exploit could uncover a security issue that didn't exist before: The issue to fix this would be "critical".

It's like life. We can't correct every ache and pain in our bodies before heading to work. :)

---
Tom Geller * tomgeller.com * Oberlin, Ohio
See my lynda.com videos about Drupal

deanflory’s picture

But if the aches and pains are bad enough, you should stay home from work and get well.

udy’s picture

Yes. Most of the people who selected Drupal now suffer in a lot of aches and pain :) The problem is, most of them cannot move to another technology because they are costly. The only reason people select Drupal because it is free. But in the long run, for a business, it will be less costly to select something other than Drupal even it is costly at the beginning.

killes@www.drop.org’s picture

Joomla! is also free. Please go and use Joomla! Or wordpress, it is also free. This project could gain a lot from losing you.

tgeller’s picture

@killes, I disagree. The Drupal project gains from its thoughtful critics.

@udy, I hope you continue to take part in good faith, and don't take his sharp words to heart. I predict your dissatisfaction could lead to great things. :)

---
Tom Geller * tomgeller.com * Oberlin, Ohio
See my lynda.com videos about Drupal

WorldFallz’s picture

There's backstory here-- trolls are never a benefit.

udy’s picture

What makes you think I'm using Drupal :D

orbistertius’s picture

Someone compared Drupal with Lego. You can build what you want and even strange pieces exists to build strange solutions.
There is a lot to explain to people building multilingual sites with responsive design.
I hope to talk about the way to use blocks, fields and extra fields.
- Is it nice to build views-blocks to display fields outside main content? Make blocks to fields to manage all areas with the content display is a workarround? Wouldn't it be nice to join blocks and extra fields forever and build the UI to manage displays the easy way?
- Have you tried to use views in a multilingual side and run into alot of configuration to make it work?
- What about taxonomy and comments in a time where entity reference jumps high?
We build a big thing but for the spirit of liberty, we need a cleanup to make things easy again.
I am looking forward to see more contributions made by the drupal developers to show their way of thinking and understand where drupal core needs to move to.

emma_johnson’s picture

Responsive website design would be the biggest trend in 2013. And Drupal developers need to take care of this.

Niek_Kloots’s picture

I think that before we predict the future Drupal should fix it's own present.
This post I started node/1876792 is still not fixed.
We are talking about the Drupal site itself. If this can't be fixed then Drupal should not try responsive website design that's even more difficult to get right.

drupalshrek’s picture

I understand your frustration that drupal.org has annoying bugs like that, and nobody seems to care much about what you've posted. I've posted a proposed fix which I hope helps it gets fixed. I suppose one of the problems with open source is that there are more people who want to code new things than fix old things, and because it's open source you can't order people what to work on.

drupalshrek

Chris Charlton’s picture

Someone's website will get hacked.

Chris Charlton
Manager
LA Drupal
Drupal Author
Published since 2007
espirates’s picture

Drupal will lose more users to Wordpress lol

WorldFallz’s picture

TelFiRE’s picture

Doubtful considering that WordPress pretty clearly hit a plateau some time ago, and Drupal is barely starting its initial growth.

dbeall’s picture

lol, a normal user. let me think about that.

tunbola’s picture

Drupal will eventually become the best CMS! I love Drupal

kRanked’s picture

Proprietary CMSs are going to go down the toilet as a valid option for web platforms for SMEs and get replaced by Open Source. Hip-Hooray for Drupal! Small businesses are becoming more net savvy. Once they discover that the advertised glitz and glamour of an overpriced proprietary system is really just an albatross around their necks they will switch to open source in droves.
I'm looking forward to playing with Drupal much more in the near future.