Predictions
My Drupal predictions for 2008
My personal Drupal highlights for 2007 include the Drupal 5 release, bootstrapping the Drupal Association, the two Drupal conferences we organized, the Pro Drupal development book, and co-founding Acquia.
But more than anything else, I enjoyed being part of the Drupal community and helping it navigate through some of its growing pains. Thanks to you, 2007 was a blast.
In good tradition, here are my Drupal predictions for the next year.
Growth predictions for 2008
First, let's predict Drupal's growth in 2008. The short answer is that Drupal will continue to grow more, not less.
Much of Drupal's growth in 2008 will depend on the work we did in 2007. I'm extremely happy with the upcoming Drupal 6 release as it will be easier to use, it will run faster, and it will come with some great new features. Our work on Drupal 6 will pay off in 2008.
Many metrics can be used to predict Drupal's growth in 2008, so let's use a non-conventional one: to date, four books have been published on Drupal, but only one of these was published in 2007. In 2008, ten Drupal books will be published ...
What I care most about is not Drupal's growth, but that we will continue to democratize web publishing and web development in 2008. By growing Drupal and giving it away for free we accomplish two things: (i) we empower more individuals to publish online and (ii) we help grow a successful ecosystem that allows more people to make a living with web development. So not only will Drupal continue to grow in 2008, it will continue to make a positive change.
The more you give away, the more you get back, and because of this, working on Drupal will continue to be a labor of love in 2008.
Market predictions for 2008
We are still in a young market: there are hundreds of Open Source CMSes, there is no real competition amongst them ("We're all colleagues and friends!"), not to mention we all benefit from what seems unwieldy growth. (Note that I'm talking about the Open Source CMS market, not the proprietary CMS market.)
However, near the end of 2008, we'll see the first signs of consolidation in the Open Source CMS market. The Open Source CMS space will become less fragmented; the "big three" (i.e. Wordpress, Joomla! and Drupal) will continue to grow but the growth of many other systems (i.e. Plone, Typo3, Xoops, e107, ezPublish, dotNetNuke, etc) will slow down significantly.
The good news is that the Open Source CMS market becomes easier to shop in. The bad news is that there will be a competitive edge.
Unless we manage to put more effort into (i) marketing, (ii) support, (iii) documentation and (iv) drupal.org this might turn out to be a tough battle for Drupal. Drupal.org will be our biggest challenge in 2008, and much of that will determine whether we'll be one of the "big three" Open Source CMSes at the end of 2008.
End-user predictions for 2008
From an end-user's point of view, 2008 will be characterized by the fact that we'll continue to give our users what they want. There will be a big and concentrated effort to further improve Drupal's ease of use. As a result, Drupal 7 will ship with one or two install profiles, many UI improvements, more AJAX, a basic WYSIWYG editor (or better WYSIWYG support), some wizards, and improved image and file handling. Yes, that is a lot.
Developer predictions for 2008
While we listen to our users in 2008, most of the excitement will be developer-centric.
A significant portion (but not all) of the Content Construction Kit (CCK) will move to core and we'll pave the path for Views by extending Drupal 6's query builder. There are three important motivations for this: (i) the desire to write less and less code to improve developer productivity, (ii) the desire to reduce the risk of these modules falling behind in terms of support and updates and (iii) drupal.org becoming dependent on them.
Integration of the CCK and Views will trigger a strong focus on improving our internal data models and APIs. While unheard in Drupal circles right now, object-relational mapping (ORM) will be the buzzword du jour by the summer of 2008. This, in turn, will lead to better web service integration, RIA integration (specifically Flex), and improved import/export functionality in Drupal 7.
The desire to reduce risks, combined with drastic API changes and a growing code base, will lead us to adopt a test driven development methodology. Drupal 7 will ship with some first regression tests.
All in all, the net result is that Drupal 7 will be an even better web application development platform. Comments and users as nodes continues to be a pipe dream though.
My final prediction is that I will get all of this year's predictions right, but that you still want to get a second opinion.
Linux on the desktop
One day in the distinct future, the adoption of Linux on the desktop will not be driven by improvements in desktop applications, but by desktop applications moving to the web. The more conventional desktop applications we can eliminate, the faster end-users will be able to adopt Linux.
It is both logical and inevitable that web applications, and not desktop applications, will take Linux to the desktop.
Microsoft has to invest in rich internet applications and web application development so they can compete with Google and Adobe. But do they realize that by making rich internet applications a commodity, they will indirectly help drive Linux' adoption for the reason outlined above?
Make the desktop obsolete and the Linux kernel will shine.
This week's official introduction of Microsoft Silverlight will be remembered as a tipping point in the history of Free and Open Source software, and Linux in particular.
My Drupal predictions for 2007
Last night, I started writing down my predictions for 2007, but I have so many predictions it is no longer funny. It turned out to be impossible to capture them in a single coherent blog post, so I'll continue to share my predictions throughout the new year as I've been doing for a while now.
That said, here is one Drupal prediction to start the new year with:
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.
Evaluating my Drupal predictions for 2006
It is almost 2007 now so let's look back at how I did last year:
- I predicted that by the end of 2006, there was going to be more content, the need for aggregation and filtering, and ultimately, consolidation of functionality.
SharePoint 2007 introduces blogs, wikis and RSS. FatWire announced that FatWire 7, to be expected in early 2007, will add blogs, tagging, polls, surveys, etc. Oracle's Stellent announced that they are adding blogs and wikis but also RSS.
- In terms of Drupal, I predicted that we'll see forum improvements, image and/or document improvements, some basic install profiles, more AJAX, incremental theme system improvements, significant node system changes, and various improvements to the administration pages.
Except for the forum improvements and the image and/or document improvements, I was right. We're introducing install profiles in Drupal 5, we became jQuery addicts (jQuery is a Javascript library), we added a new core theme, we started integrating custom content types, and we reworked the Drupal administration pages.
- I predicted: The exciting trend in 2006 will be the many new media services on the web; people want to publish more content. Most of this will be social media published by individuals or online communities. Not just more content and pictures, but also a lot more video.
With websites like Digg, MySpace and YouTube, user-generated content was certainly a buzzword in 2006. If anything, 2006 was the year of YouTube, which was purchased by Google for 1.65 billion USD in stock. Social video websites weren't popular yet at the end of 2005 when I predicted them, but it turned out that flash transcoding would become a big deal in 2006.
- I also predicted that traditional systems like Mambo, Joomla! and even Wordpress would grow faster than Drupal. They did.
- Despite the slightly worrisome tone of this message, 2006 promises to be an exciting year. Drupal will make more inroads on companies, governments, public institutions like school and universities, open source projects, and -- most of all -- non-professionals. Just like in 2005, we'll make substantial progress.
No need to argue about this: three Drupal books have been published in 2006, IBM started writing about Drupal, Google invested 70,000 USD, the size of our community grew by more than 230%, MTV started using Drupal, we organized two international Drupal conferences, etc. Thanks to the enthusiasm, the passion and the determination of the Drupal communiy, 2006 has been a pretty crazy ride.
When things come true, it is easy to say 'nothing great, nothing excited', but surely, these were predictions at that time. Call me arrogant, but I think I did a good job predicting 2006. Time to start working on my predictions for 2007 ...
SharePoint 2007
Bert Boerland predicts: Within 3 years the acronym "CMS" won't mean "Content Management System" anymore but will be redefined to "Community Management System".
Markets are more likely to fragment than to consolidate so I think both will co-exist and inevitably overlap. That said, I agree with the notion that community software will continue to emerge and that content isn't king. And to contribute to the disorderly jumble that is the CMS acronym, may I suggest a third term: Collaboration Management System. It might be a better match.
Especially the introduction of SharePoint 2007 might have significant impact on this particular market. SharePoint 2007 adds features like forums, blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, news aggregation, surveys, issue tracking ... but also install profiles and custom content types. Clearly, Microsoft decided to play catch up. And rumor has it that the improved integration with Microsoft Office and Microsoft Outlook is jaw-dropping.
Then what is the leading open source alternative for SharePoint 2007? Because of its strong document management functionality, Alfresco comes closest, I think. (It makes them an interesting acquisition target. By RedHat? It could complement JBoss.)
Drupal's document management functionality and integration with tools like Microsoft Office and OpenOffice is severely lacking. As it stands, Drupal is not a good SharePoint alternative, yet there is quite a bit of overlap in terms of functionality. It sure makes for an interesting situation.
I wonder what impact the introduction of SharePoint 2007 will have. What was once an important Drupal differentiator (i.e. bundling a wide variety of functionality into a single platform) will finally become commodity in 2007. Instead, seamless integration with other applications might become essential to compete? Interesting times!
Mass Drupal hosting
Taken from this press release at News Yahoo!:
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said on Monday his for-profit company, Wikia Inc., is ready to give away -- for free -- all the software, computing, storage and network access that website builders need to create community collaboration sites.
The press release mentions that Wikia considers including support for Drupal. I have since talked briefly to Jimmy Wales, and they would like to reach out to the Drupal community and Drupal experts to help figure out how they can make that happen ...
As web content management systems and blogging tools become commodity, mass hosting and deployment services (i.e. installation, configuration, upgrading, patching, cloning, import and export, backup and restore, customization, compliance tracking, etc) will become increasingly important.
Smart as we are, we already started taking Drupal into that direction, and much of that will be rolled out with Drupal 5. ;-) There is a tremendous amount of experience to be gained, but also a significant amount of Drupal work left to be done. I'm looking forward to help work on this more and I hope other people do too. Hot stuff!
Community in the 21st century
Eben Moglen (Professor of Law and General Counsel for the Free Software Foundation) delivered an incredibly interesting keynote at the Plone conference.
Eben explained the Plone community why he thinks that managing content is not important, and why managing community is. He believes that community-driven development will become increasingly popular and vastly superior compared to software developed by a single commercial entity. Hence the need for software and infrastructure that allow organizations to build large communities for a certain period of time.
We are moving to a world in which in the 21st century the most important activities that produce, occur not in factories, and not by individual initiative, but in communities, held together by software.