Predictions for 2004

I'll kick it off :-)

2003

• Ultra cool "Clean URLs" built into drupal makes drupal powered sites more easily and completely indexed by major search engines as well as more easily used by site visitors.
• A focus on innovation, core functionality, usability and improved documentation is revealed with the release of Drupal 4.3.
• The project module is greatly enhanced to facilitate communications and management of all feature requests and bug reports by the core developers as well as the authors of contributed modules.
• The democratic front runner in the US elections builds an early support base using drupal as its internet foundation.

2004

• Drupal 4.4 is released with fundamental improvements including an innovative, easy to use and full featured permissions system.
• Drupal becomes a capable asset management system. FileStore is moved into core and greatly enhanced.
• Drupal's success and utility is noted by major software development companies and the core developers are offered high-paying positions in a new community publishing systems group in Redmond.

Wishing you a wonderful new year!!
- Joe

• File handling is improved and used in new imaginative ways. We finally have a file api in core that can be used in many different type of modules. It isn't perfect yet, but it is a good start and 2004 will see a lot of modules taking advantage of it, and the natural evolution of the api that comes with widespread use.
• Further improvement of the Drupal project abilities. The project module changes in 2003 have made it possible to create a SourceForge like site. There is more work underway to make it even more usable, as well as integrating it with other tools--like CVS.
• Better ways of inter lining Drupal sites. In general there seems to be a trend blog/community world to find new ways to communicate. 2004 will see new ways to use RSS, TrackBack and other tools to provide a better experience. Atom might still take the online world by storm, but I think most of the neat tools will come from using existing standards in new ways.
• Drupal will find new areas of use. It already has a wide area of uses: blogs, portals, forums, political campaigns, communities, etc. There are always new areas and sites to try out.
• More and better themes of Drupal. With every release Drupal provides more control of the layout. Hopefully 2004 will be the year when we get more themes.
• Dries finally starts using Drupal for his own web site. It is about time!

Knowing my past track record I will be 50% correct, and the really cool things I didn't even think of.

There are many books being written now about the 2004 presidential race in the USA. they all are making parallels to 1962 (I might have this year wrong) when television first influenced the American election in a big way. 2004 is about the internet's influence. dean's campaign is featured in all of these writings. drupal will get a brief mention in these books, and maybe more than that.

i do think political campaigns will setup weblog communities as automatrically as they setup web sites today. I exopect this to be commonplace within 2 years. Most campaigns will probably "just do what dean did" which points to deanspace and drupal.

I keep coming back to the concept of a community publshing system versus a content management system. From my experience, content management systems focus on neglect community services like blogs, forums and user management and focus on workflow, templating, forms and asset management much more heavily. Drupal, on the other hand, puts much more focus on community services, like blogs, forums, approval queues, RSS aggregators.

Hosted weblog services, as Dries pointed out, are becoming mainstream. I think that if an applications focus is on weblogs they will miss out on the potential of community publishing. Consider the collaborative book, story submissions and the approval queue, very innovative and useful functionality that doesn't fit in with the standard definition of a blog. Does the new AOL blogging service offer any of these?

The deanspace implementation of drupal is simply a federation of communities and aligns well with the direction of the core drupal project.

Even the project module, is based on the notion of a community effort and represents the apparent values of the drupal team.

Possibly, the biggest differentiator between a standard content management system and a Community Publishing System is the organization. Content Management Systems typically cater to a structured, hierarchical organization, and a Community Publishing System supports both centralized, hierarchical organizations as well as decentralized, loosely managed organizations.

I believe this is an important and valuable differentiator, and hope that it remains part of the vision in 2004.

I hope it is acceptable to express these opinions as light-weight contributor to this fantastic project. Having watched the growth and maturaty of Drupal since 2001, I have the utmost confidence in this team and am sure the future will amazing.

- Joe

Ecommerce

Drupal will step up and offer another solution to the web site problem domain. An ecommerce module will be developed allowing users to sell products, services or receive donations via their web sites.

Taxonomy expansion

The concept of taxonomy in Drupal will be further expanded via an exposed API and preload hooks, allowing developers to tie actions to taxonomy metadata in unique and interesting ways.

Blogging standards

Drupal will help to shift the paradigm of "content organzied by date" to "content organized by categories" in the blogging world as more Drupal blogging sites are created and people realize the greater benefits of a categorical approach to content classification.

I suck at accurate predictions, so don't expect any:

With the growing popularity of RSS, syndication will take on a more central role in the blogging world (and elsewhere). Drupal's selective feeds (only a certain taxonomy term) are a good example of this, and tech like feedster.com is just plain wicked.
For this to happen, syndication needs to mature: discussions about RSS sucking up tons of bandwidth due to clients not supporting/using 304's and such show that this is a growing problem. Atom will ride this wave of syndication and establish itself as an important format, though its acceptance will depend on how good it can profile itself, and how many Mac clients with fancy icons (and a lowercase 'i' in their name) will support it.
Advanced syndication will do away with useless blog posts that just contain a link, a quote from another blog and an author's own opinion: all that won't be necessary as unique pieces of content are established once and promoted with a distributed popularity or ranking system instead.

Drupal's forum will be expanded, mainly to be more user-friendly: the goal will not however be to rival with popular software like phpBB or vBulletin, but to provide a flexible, community forum Drupal-style.

Drupal's permissions will be improved in the way that most people have been asking. The result will be an elegant, powerful but simple solution that solves 90% of the demands. The other 10% will enjoy the solid foundation and expand on it for their own needs.

To improve Drupal's search procedure, a magic gnome will pop-up who is an expert in this area and has fallen in love with Drupal. After a patch being rejected time after time due to imperfections (while still keeping on returning due to some weird sense of masochism), Drupal's search enters a new plane of existance which integrates seamlessly with all aspects (taxonomy, nodes, context, ...). The result will not rival the big boys like Google, but will still be the preferred method of searching a Drupal site due to increased relevancy.

And finally, after several considerable improvements and a generally high niftyness factor in CVS, Drupal will go up a major version 5, though only after 4.4.x is released.

Since the world is ready for an open and extensible social-networking tool equivalent to Friendster/Ryze/Linkedin/Tribe/etc, a suite of modules for this purpose will be developed for Drupal.

Adam Rice

My predictions are yust as un-sciency as anyone elses here. Just some thoughts i had.

I think drupal sites will grow much fancier/better looking AND havier this year. In fact i predict that total diskspace used by a normal drupal site will grow 500-800%. This all due to the new fileapi of course.

On top of that, i foresee better/bigger use of XML syndication. Searchmodule could return syndicated content (to extend drupal-network-searching). More modules will get url-called api's that return XML. /search/xml/keys=blah will return items for blah in an xml form. Other drupal sites can re-use drupal information. Not that especially search.module will do this, but just modules in general. Search is but an example.

Due to the fileapi more configuration will take place by uploading files. EG CVS files, or xml files.

Drupal will become better/wider known, due to its google-popularity. searching for CMS will at some time next year get drupal on #one at google. Druplicon will then grow legs and arms, and conquer the world.

I wiil ues teh speelchceker mroe otfen :)

Nostradamus aka exclude @ Mediarevolution.org :: het platform voor online muziek

Predictions can be just guesses about what will happen. Or they can be forecasts what will happen if a course of action is taken. We can better predict what will happen with Drupal if we articulate and visualize where we want it to go.

There's a lot of talk about the growth of blogs and it going mainstream. I think that's history. When Google bought Pyra (blogger) a year ago, it was clear that it was already mainstream.

I also think the blog space is pretty saturated. There are a jillion blog services and applications out there.

So while providing blog tools is an important part of Drupal, I don't think Drupal should focus on that space. For a parallel reason, I also don't think Drupal should focus on the pure content/asset management space with its formal workflow, revision history, tight control, etc. either.

That is not to say there should be no improvements in those two areas. In fact, one core area that needs improvement for a variety of applications is finer-grained access control, particularly for content. We have a variety of permissions for admin functions, but only one for content: a role either has access to all content or it does not. At a minimum it should be selectable by node type and page location.

I see Drupal becoming a robust framework for larger, more specialized web applications. Contributed modules will influence more what Drupal can do after a simple installation of the core and selected modules. The core itself will better allow developers to create modules and other connected software in a clean, easy, well-architected fashion which will help retain the efficient nature Drupal is known for.

Thus, Drupal could be fantastic blogging tool -- when a few highly creative and motivated developers take Drupal as the base and add some great ideas, creating new modules which provide exciting new features to people in the blog space.

Or Drupal could be a great CMS -- when interested developers plug in their asset management and work flow modules.

Or Drupal will be a very successful topic-specific service portal -- with the addition of a half a dozen modules developed for that specific service.

These and more can all happen if the core remains flexible, some necessary supporting functionality is added, and if the APIs and convetions are well-described and documented.