Dries Buytaert

Mollom 2011 retrospective

2011 was another excellent year for Mollom. We ended the year having blocked 630 million spam messages, up from 352 million spam messages blocked in 2010 -- and that doesn't even count some of our largest customers like Netlog and other large social networks. And, as in 2010, we ended 2011 with a spam classification efficiency of 99.95%, meaning that only 5 in 10,000 spam messages were not caught by Mollom.

The number of active sites protected by Mollom grew from 28,000 at the end of 2010 to almost 45,000 at the end of 2011. Revenues grew by more than 50% with virtually no sales or marketing efforts.

Almost the entire Mollom team in the Mollom office in Ghent: sun, Ben, Cedric, Thomas, Johan and Vicky. Missing in the picture are Keith and Dries.

All our revenue is invested back into the company. In 2011, we used those funds to grow our team and to fund development on an entirely new product, which may end up rebooting or repositioning Mollom altogether.

Specifically, we have been worked hard on what will be a "hosted comment moderation interface". That interface will provide an optimized moderation environment that will make it easier to moderate multiple websites, either as an individual or as part of a team of moderators. To do so we introduced a new backend with a REST-based API to replace our original XML-RPC API, we rewrote the Mollom module for Drupal, and started to change our website.

We also faced some new challenges in 2011 -- our support requests increased substantially, mostly due to the variety of sites that are now using Mollom. Based on many of these user requests, we tweaked our classifier performance, which resulted in a dramatic decrease in how often Mollom presents a CAPTCHA challenge, and in doing so, solved a number of real-world issues our clients were having with Mollom performance. Rolling out changes without impacting our up-time statistics was no small challenge -- every change we made on the backend has to be weighed against the impact it has on the effectiveness and responsiveness of Mollom on the client side.

2012 may also bring us some additional competition -- some of the world's best venture capitalists invested $8 million in a company called Impermium. Investments like this validate our belief that the social web needs good anti-spam filtering solutions. Impermium is still building its first product but will definitely be a company to watch.

Regardless of what happens in the social web spam market, we'll be busy in 2012. The first half of 2012, you'll notice some new things popping up on Mollom. Our primary goal for 2012 will be to make the "hosted comment moderation interface" available commercially and to refresh our website. Along with launching a new product, we plan to ramp up our sales and marketing efforts. It is time to do so now the Mollom technology has matured after years of intensive investment. We've also got additional work to do to continue to improve accuracy, maintain our high uptime statistics, and work with other open source developers on improvements to Mollom clients for non-Drupal systems.

In short, 2011 was a great year for Mollom. We're happy doing what we do, and we feel that we're helping to make the web a slightly better place. We wouldn't have made it this far without you -- our customers, users and friends. Without you, we wouldn't be a company at all. Thank you for 2011! We're looking forward to sharing a great 2012 with you.

Acquia retrospective 2011

It's that time of year again! In good tradition, here is my retrospective on Acquia's accomplishments for 2011. (You can also read my 2009 and 2010 retrospectives.)

While 2011 was only Acquia's third full year in business (i.e. revenue-bearing year), 2011 was absolutely jam-packed. Starting with executing on our product strategy and vision, to a trip to the Caribbean for the entire company, to being selected by Forbes magazine as one of America's 100 most promising companies, 2011 was full of amazing successes, both for Drupal and for Acquia.

In this post, I'll provide some more detail on what Acquia accomplished in 2011; I'll discuss our business as a whole, our products, our relation with the Drupal community and my role within the company. I have a separate blog post to reflect on how Drupal fared in 2011.

Acquia business retrospective

In 2011 we saw record bookings and continued momentum. We finished the year with 11 consecutive quarters of revenue growth and beating our plan.

Acquia, along with our partners, had more and more engagements with big and well-known organizations, like Paypal, Twitter, Al Jazeera, World Economic Forum, the U.S. House of Representatives, and many more.

Most importantly, customer satisfaction and renewals continued to climb, and are best in class compared to other companies in our industry. Rapid customer growth has resulted in surging ticket counts, now numbering in thousands each month. Sustaining high levels of satisfaction and servicing these tickets has proven to be challenging at times. As a result, we significantly evolved our customer on-boarding process, customer communication, and account management, and we've continued to invest in hiring many great people.

Because things went so well, we decided to accelerate sales and marketing and raised more money mid-2011. We raised $15 million in a fourth round of funding. Our previous investors affirmed their confidence by participating in this round, and they were joined by Tenaya Capital.

In January 2011, we also launched Acquia Europe and overachieved our goals there. We now have about 20 people in Europe.

We ended up growing the company from 80 full-time employees to 175, and growing our bookings by 230%. Mid-way through 2011, our existing office space simply couldn't contain us any longer, so we burst out at the end of August and moved to a bigger 35,000 square feet (3,250 square meter) office where we have had a lot of fun.

Despite our success in growing our staff, the availability of quality candidates continues to be the number one challenge for our continued growth. We're trying to help change that. Together with our partners, we delivered 200 training classes worldwide and we've launched an internal training program called Acquia U, to provide immersive training to a select group of new entry level employees (recent college graduates and career changers).

We've also grown Acquia through the acquisition of companies started by talented people within the Drupal community. This year, Acquia acquired two Drupal companies: security specialist Growing Venture Solutions and migration expert Cyrve. We wanted to do these acquisitions because they create a win-win-win situation for the Drupal community, our partners, and our customers.

Acquia product retrospective

On the product side, Acquia achieved everything in line with the product strategy and vision that I outlined in early 2011. If you're not already familiar with Acquia's products, it's worth reading that post first for context.

We rebooted the Acquia Network. We added two of our own services to the Acquia Network with the new Insight and SEO Grader tools, which provides active site testing for security, performance, and search engine optimization best practices for all of your sites.

In addition to adding our own services, we also added complimentary services and tools from our partners, including New Relic (performance monitoring), Drupalize.me (over 200 hours of Drupal video training from Lullabot), Blitz.io (load testing), Utest (crowd sourced manual testing), and Mobify (mobile delivery of Drupal sites). Lastly we re-built the Acquia Library, our knowledge base on everything Drupal and Acquia. Everything combined, we made massive improvements to the Acquia Network.

We also launched Dev Cloud, a single-server version of Managed Cloud. We now deliver over 4 billion page views a month and 70 terrabytes of data from our Drupal-tuned cloud platform. Our operations team now manages over 2,500 servers through Amazon EC2, up from 500 servers in 2011 and 100 at the end of 2010.

A major low-light was the famous Amazon outage in April 2011. Even though only two enterprise customers were affected, out of a couple hundred at that time, we made fairly significant changes to our roadmap to limit future outages. We've since added features to Acquia Cloud like multi-datacenter failover (both multi-region and multi-availability zone across continents) to increase the service level agreement (SLA) we provide to levels beyond what Amazon provides directly.

2011 was also the year that we commercially launched Drupal Gardens at DrupalCon Chicago after spending considerable design and engineering time on the new Views 3 user interface. Since then, Drupal Gardens has added many requested features and now is hosting over 75,000 Drupal 7 sites including some really large enterprise customers, though we can't talk about them quite yet.

We also did a lot of other things; from relaunching Acquia.com on Drupal 7, to adding support for Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 to Acquia Dev Desktop, to improving both Acquia Commons and COD.

All in all, 2011 was a very productive year for our engineers and product managers.

Community and Acquia

In everything we do, we try to raise the tide for the Drupal community at large. In 2011, we continued our long track record of giving back to the larger Drupal community.

Roughly 30% of our engineering time flows back to the Drupal community and resulted in numerous improvements, including core bug fixes, contributed module porting, and usability improvements to modules such as Date, Media, and Views. We participated in the University of Minnesota usability testing, in addition to performing more than 20 internal usability tests on Drupal and Drupal Gardens whose results have been fed into the community.

We participated in and organized many sprints, including the Drupal 7 media sprint, the Drush Code Sprint, and Multilingual Drupal Code Code Sprint.

In total, Acquia sponsored over 58 community events in the last 3 months of 2011 alone, and covered travel and accommodation costs for dozens of Acquians to contribute in person to the success of these events around the world. We also took the lead in organizing and running several of them.

Our marketing team contributed great sales and marketing collateral to the Drupal Association (creative commons-licensed), to help others in the community to promote and grow Drupal.

In addition, we also had some struggles …

Acquia is obviously interested in helping to make Drupal the best it can possibly be and we're proud of major contributions we make to the Drupal project. For example, due to concerns about the lack of Drupal marketing, we launched the Drupal Showcase site as a resource to enable the community to help market Drupal. And since the adoption and growth of Drupal is vitally important, I, supported by the rest of the Acquia leadership team, made a decision to fund a major usability initiative during Drupal 7's development.

However, some of these community investment decisions have backfired on us, and caused community backlash and criticism. Sometimes over smaller things that are easily corrected, as in the case of the Drupal Showcase (moving it from an acquia.com sub-domain and adding a field for attribution), and other times because of questions and concerns about Acquia's influence, as in the case of Drupal 7 usability.

Acquia is in a position where not only can we give back, we want to give back. And furthermore, I feel that corporate sponsorship (not just from Acquia) is important to Drupal's continued growth and success. But when major investments into Drupal like these backfire, it definitely gives us pause in continuing to make these kinds of large investments. Nevertheless, I'd love to contribute more and bigger changes to Drupal, particularly Drupal core, in a constructive and healthy way. As Acquia, we'll continue to refine how we work with the community to find the right balance. As a community, we need to figure out how to better embrace corporate sponsorship. Something to brainstorm about together in this new year.

Drupal 2011 retrospective and 2012 predictions

2011 was a tremendous year of major growth for Drupal, and also a year that kept me very, very busy.

Drupal 7

At the beginning of the year, thanks to the efforts of nearly 1,000 contributors, we released Drupal 7, celebrating the event together as a community with over 250 parties in over 90 countries. An incredible achievement for all of us.

A map of all the Drupal 7 release parties around the world: over 250 parties in more than 90 countries.

With a new release comes a fresh round of evangelism. I traveled 412,000 km (or 256,000 miles) in 2011, up from 300,000 km (190,000 miles) in 2010 and about 100,000 km (62,000 miles) in 2009. Given that the world is about 40,000 km (or 25,400 miles), I flew around the world approximately 10 times, or roughly once a month. Or put differently, I traveled an average of 1100 km a day (or 680 miles a day). Needless to say, that is a lot of evangelizing! And although it may not be visible, I believe this evangelizing to be very effective in promoting Drupal and creating local communities around the globe.

Three of the places I visited that I'm most excited about were Brazil, India, and Singapore. There is a large and growing Drupal following in these places with a lot of opportunity for Drupal.

Today, Drupal 7 is a roaring success. Drupal 7 is being adopted at least twice as fast as Drupal 6 has. Expect to see Drupal's adoption to grow throughout 2012 thanks to Drupal 7.

Drupal 8

Drupal also turned 10 years old in 2011, and we had a big birthday bash at DrupalCon Chicago, where we also kicked off development of Drupal 8, and started work on major core initiatives, to help ensure that Drupal stays relevant in the ever-changing web. At DrupalCon London, I presented the results of a community-wide survey with over 3,000 participants, which both reinforced the strategic importance of the existing initiatives, plus added a few more, which I hope to announce in 2012.

These initiatives are being led by Greg Dunlap (Configuration Management), Larry Garfield (Web Services), Gábor Hojtsy (Multilingual), Jacine Luisi (HTML5), Jeff Burnz (Design), and John Albin (Mobile), and are happening in conjunction with other great community initiatives for Drupal 8. A huge thanks to everyone who's been working hard on improving Drupal 8!

In addition to celebrating our future, we also tried to learn from our past. We held a development process retrospective discussion on Drupal 7's 3-year release cycle and the lessons learned: what went well, what didn't, and what we should hook_process_alter() in Drupal 8. As a result, we implemented numerous core development process tweaks (a hard cap on the number of critical and major issues, worked with the various Drupal core team leads to develop "gates" that document how to review patches for accessibility, performance, usability, testing, and documentation). We also made a number of improvements to the collaboration tools on Drupal.org (e.g. issue summaries, image uploads, and subscriptions).

Due to our community's initial focus during the release cycle on stabilization and bug fixes, Drupal 8 development really only recently came into bloom, around the time of DrupalCon London. However, since then, a number of exciting improvements have gone in, including patches to convert Drupal 8 to HTML5 and clean up Drupal's multilingual system, a new object-oriented entity API and cache system, and numerous documentation and API clean-ups. Additionally, there is some promising prototyping going on for the web services and configuration management initiatives.

Drupal Association

Another aspect of Drupal that took a front seat for me in 2011 was the "rebooting" of the Drupal Association: moving to a US-based 501c3 organization, changing the structure of the organization to one of a policy-making board with supporting committees, and electing a new board of directors.

Understanding the importance of these changes requires some familiarity with the Drupal Association's history, as well as the background of the changes. But the key goals are:

1. Move the board away from essentially unpaid "staff" positions (infrastructure manager, event manager, etc.) to a policy-making board. This allows the Drupal Association's activities to scale with the exponential growth of the community and not be hamstrung by what 7-9 individuals are capable of doing.
2. Increase the diversity and effectiveness of the board through targeted outreach of new members via a dedicated Nominating Committee.
3. Increase direct community representation in board decisions through the inclusion of community-elected, "at-large" board members.
4. Empower the community to get directly involved with the Drupal Association's activities through participation in focused committees, such as an Infrastructure Committee and Events Committee.
5. Move operations to the US, where most of our income comes from (which can now be tax-deductible donations), and where most of our staff is located, in order to help increase the efficiency of running the organization.

While these changes took a lot of time to implement, and a few are still ongoing, I believe they will set a very strong foundation for the future of the organization.

In fact, the Drupal Association 2012 planning has already kicked off. Our primary goals for 2012 are to make Drupal.org awesome, and to help address Drupal's talent shortage issue.

Despite the growth and opportunity, finding Drupal talent still remains really, really hard. It continues to be Drupal's most important challenge in my opinion. I'm really glad we decided to focus on it with the Drupal Association.

Community

It certainly hasn't all been rosy, though; 2011 was also a year with challenges, particularly within the core development team. We've certainly struggled with morale issues following nearly two years without a development phase in Drupal core, misunderstandings about the relationship between "official" initiatives and community initiatives, concerns about the balance between adding new features and cleaning up existing technical debt, as well as even more existential questions like "Is Drupal a product or framework? Should Drupal be a page generator or a REST server?".

Much of the growing pains are normal. We're now one of the largest Open Source projects in terms of active contributors -- if not the largest. That growth requires us to evolve how we work. We've grown from a 100% volunteer driven model to a model where there is increasingly more corporate participation and influence. This model is not new to the world. There comes a time when a volunteer-based project needs to foster commercial involvement to help the project advance and compete. Linux is our best example. Without Red Hat, IBM and Dell, Linux would not be what it is today. One of our biggest challenges for 2012, is to figure out how we can get more commercial organizations to get involved with Drupal development in a bigger way while respecting the needs and desires of our community.

Although I also want to do a lot of evangelizing in 2012, I feel like the pendulum has to swing back. I want to re-balance how my time is spent and focus more on Drupal 8 and the Drupal community, in order to spend focused time and energy on overcoming these growing pains.

As a community, we shouldn't forget about the evangelizing though, and this is something a lot of people can help with. It sometimes frustrates me that we spent 3 years working on Drupal 7 with almost a thousand people, but don't properly tell the world about all the great things we've done. Especially because over the years, Drupal has built up a reputation of being hard to use compared to some alternatives. A lot of that is changed with Drupal 7, but it isn't necessarily reflected in how people think and talk about Drupal. To change that, we need to continue to educate people about all the great improvements we made to Drupal 7 and encourage those that gave up on Drupal previously, to give Drupal another try. Drupal 7 is a giant step forward compared to Drupal 6.

Overall, I'm confident that we can overcome these challenges. I really believe in the people that make up our community and the core development team, and our ability to collaborate together to get through tough problems. Drupal will be much better in the end, as a result. We'll have different challenges at the end of 2012.

More predictions for 2012

Here are some more prediction in addition to the predictions and plans above:

1. As Drupal gains in popularity, the number of developers/shops getting involved will increase, and the Drupal ecosystem on the whole will expand greatly. However, there could be a danger that individual companies who don't invest in marketing may actually see fewer clients as a result. Marketing will be a much larger focus of the business community in 2012.
2. I hope 2012 will be the year of the Drupal entrepreneur. Drupal companies who specialize in one particular aspect, such as Pantheon, Drupal Commerce, and Tag1 Consulting have seen a lot of success or promise in 2011 (specialization is a form of marketing, after all), but there are many more niches to fill, and many niches that have plenty of room for multiple companies -- something we sometimes seem to forget. I'd love to see more entrepreneurial spirit within the Drupal community.
3. Another thing I'd love to see is more young people engaging with Drupal in 2012, and have this be a measure of Drupal's success. Some of us old farts are busy raising kids these days. ;-) New, vibrant energy in the community from young people is a hallmark of a great community.
4. I predict more distributions will be created than ever before. We still haven't fully cracked the code on business models for distributions though. That is important because they are expensive to build and maintain. We're seeing early traction with the support business model around distributions, but in 2012, I think we'll see people experiment with more of a client/server model. That is, people will use distributions as a way to sell different kinds of hosted services.
5. Usability is still the number one reason people choose competing solutions to Drupal. Not because the existing features are hard to use — usability of Drupal was vastly improved in Drupal 7 — but because of lack of out-of-the-box features, such as content workflow and content staging tools, accurate content previews, WYSIWYG, media handling, and scheduling. However, I predict that very little significant work will happen on many of these fronts without multiple companies investing a lot of resources into it. In any case, we will need to make Drupal core bigger, as we try and make it smaller.
6. We're going from a pure web world, to a world where there are increasingly more mobile applications. A more diverse world with web sites and web applications. Current website developers will be forced to adapt. Fortunately, Drupal will be well-poised to handle this, both in contrib in Drupal 7 and in core in Drupal 8. I also predict that a number of Drupal shops will re-position themselves to be strong players in the mobile-Drupal world.
7. Someone will fly a Druplicon shaped hot air balloon.

To finish things off, I want to end with a sincere, heart-felt "Thank you!" to the many members of our community who work so hard and passionately to make Drupal the great success and fun project that it is. So, let me just say from me to you, for making Drupal what it is today, and for working with me to make it better day by day, you ROCK! Here's to 2012!

Drupal 2010 retrospective and 2011 predictions

This is my first blog post in 2011, so first things first: happy New Year to all of you!

As I do each year, I want to stop for a moment and reflect on the past, before jumping head-first into the new year.

Last year was another year of growth for Drupal: the number of active committers grew; the number of visitors to drupal.org grew; the number of Drupal sites grew; and the number of Drupal events and meet-ups grew. Drupal grew by almost every discernible metric.

Overall, we became a better and more well-rounded team in 2010. We've always had many kick-ass engineers in the Drupal community. However, 2010 was the year in which we achieved noticeably better usability, design, accessibility and marketing. These are important developments, as these new skills will help prepare us for even more success in the long run.

On a personal level, 2010 was a very busy Drupal year for me. I committed 1,683 patches -- that's up from 1,567 patches in 2009 and 1,031 patches in 2008. I accepted many more speaking engagements to evangelize our work. While in 2009 I flew about 100,000 km (62,000 miles), in 2010 I flew over 300,000 km (190,000 miles). That's a lot of evangelizing. I was more 'outward facing' in 2010 than ever before, which seems to be a trend. Although I enjoy meeting Drupal users, I'm glad to stay closely involved with the day to day development of Drupal core. Being able to combine these two essential elements is both important and healthy. I hope and predict that 2011 will bring more of the same.

My two personal Drupal highlights for 2010 include DrupalCon San Francisco with more than 3,000 attendees (and $72,000 USD alone spent on coffee), as well as the launch of the drupal.org redesign.

My personal low for Drupal in 2010 is the fact that we didn't release Drupal 7. It is a consolation, however, it has been delayed for good reasons and we didn't compromise on quality. One thing is a given though: 2011 will be the year of Drupal 7. It will be a nicer-looking, more powerful, and more scalable Drupal that will be easier to use. If you've overlooked Drupal previously in favor of some other system, it's time to revisit it again.

My biggest wish for 2011 is that our community remains strong. We are our biggest asset. We make Drupal both vibrant and innovative. It has been an honor to be a part of the Drupal project, and it remains so today. I have no reason to believe that that will change in 2011.

After working on Drupal 7 for three years, I'm looking forward to start working on Drupal 8. One of the things that I like most is figuring out the future, and leading the community in the right direction.

I'm utterly convinced that user experience remains the single most important thing that is holding back Drupal adoption. I want to spend time listening and talking to each of Drupal's users and learn more about their experiences. That includes content creators, site builders, developers, designers, system administrators, owners of small Drupal sites, owners of large Drupal sites and more. I also want to learn more about other systems and learn from them. There is only so much we can do in one release, especially if we want shorter release schedules. So I want to have a very clear picture of how we can improve the user experience of each of Drupal's target audiences.

Based on the 300,000 km of listening I did last year, I predict that the following three items will make it in the top five new features of Drupal 8: general usability improvements for content creators and site builders; performance improvements for single machine installations; life cycle and release management (e.g., development-staging-production, configuration management, testability).

It's clear that the mobile web will become mainstream in a big way in 2011. On top of that, the iPad is changing our world. We should think long and hard about how we can make Drupal the go-to-platform for building web applications in a world of tablets and mobile handheld devices. One of my objectives is to write a small iPhone or Android application that connects with Drupal. I want to learn more about it so I'm going to try and make it one of my weekend projects.

I also predict that in 2011, we'll see the first Drupal website that serves a billion page views per month, and that Drupal.org will be upgraded to Drupal 7 before the end of 2011.

I've spent a lot of time time thinking about Drupal distributions in 2010. While we made a lot of progress in making distributions feasible from a technical point of view, we have yet to figure out the business model around Drupal distributions. Unless we make it commercially interesting or at least commercially viable for organizations to build and maintain high quality distributions, distributions might not be as popular as we'd like. I think 2011 might be the year where many of us test how important Drupal distributions are really going to be for us.

Looking back at 2010, I'm happy with the way the Drupal Association evolved. We did some unusual things this year. We hired two full-time employees; Megan Sanicki (sponsor wrangler) and Neil Kent (events manager), and paid for the drupal.org redesign to be completed. We're also paying for the migration from CVS to Git. It isn't always easy to mix paid staff into a volunteer-driven open source project, but without that, two of my 2010 highlights would not have happened.

Relative to the bigger market, 2010 was also the year where I felt core development of Joomla! slowed down a bit. As part of that, I noticed that the Joomla community started to expand to Drupal. WordPress, on the other hand, seems to be accelerating. Slowly but certainly, it's growing from a blogging platform into a content management system. Kudos to Matt Mullenweg and Automattic for their progress. While WordPress has a long way to go to compete with Drupal on the high-end, I expect that we will see it compete more and more in the low-end of the market. I won't let them take the low-end of the market -- it has been too important for Drupal's growth and adoption. I'm very passionate about making small sites successful, and I wish they were better represented in the Drupal.org issue queues. It is going to be interesting to see how these things play out. Either way, the real competition is not other Open Source projects, but proprietary software vendors and the many static HTML websites. There is so much room for growth that we shouldn't worry too much about Open Source competition.

2011 is also the year that Drupal turns 10 years old. We're starting off the year with our biggest release ever, followed by our biggest party ever. We'll have lots of things to talk about, lots of planning to do, and lots of initiatives to kick off. Expect 2011 to get very busy.

No blog post of this type would be complete if I didn't end with a sincere, heart-felt "Thank you!" to the many members of our community. Without your contributions, Drupal wouldn't exist, and my past years and future years to come would be devoid of something I love dearly. So, from me to you, for making Drupal what it is today, and for working with me to make it better day by day, let me say, simply, thank you.

Drupal 2009 retrospective and 2010 predictions

It's that time again. Time to look back at 2009, and to look forward to 2010.

In my 2009 predictions for Drupal, I was pretty much spot on -- except for the Drupal 7 release date. I predicted that the two most exciting features in Drupal 7 core would be custom content types and radical improvements in usability, that a number of important contributed modules would move into core, and that core would embrace the semantic web. I hoped that our community remained strong, and it did. Our community is our biggest asset and Drupal 7 wll be our best release yet, and I'm very proud of both. We accomplished much by working together in 2009, and I'm very confident of what we can -- and will -- do in 2010.

On a personal level, 2009 was a very busy Drupal year. I posted 3,269 comments on drupal.org (up from 1758 comments in 2008), and committed 1,567 patches (up from 1,031 patches in 2008). I accepted many more speaking engagements that evangelize our work, wrote more blog posts (215 blog post in 2009, up from 183 in 2008), and more.

My two personal Drupal highlights for 2009 include Whitehouse.gov switching to Drupal and the automated testing that we deployed on drupal.org. In fact, having now experienced its benefits, I'm not sure how we ever developed without automated testing in the past. The current Drupal 7 development snapshot feels more stable than the initial Drupal 6.0 release (minus obvious exceptions like no working upgrade path). Automated testing improved our development velocity as we committed many more core patches than any previous year. Other highlights include the many Drupal books that were published, and of course, the first Drupal tattoo -- both strong proof that Drupal is here to stay (or, at least, that tattoo is ;-)).

© Rob Cottingham

My personal low for Drupal in 2009 is that we didn't get the Drupal.org redesign implemented -- fortunately, we have that back on the fast lane.

2009 was also the year that Drupal started to get noticed by CIOs as illustrated by the fact that Gartner put Drupal in the visionaries quadrant and the number of Fortune 500 companies that started using Drupal. While Drupal grew in all dimensions, it probably saw the most relative growth within the enterprise. I think this is part of a bigger trend, because it feels like Open Source became almost generally accepted in 2009. Many more businesses realized that Open Source is a viable alternative, and as a result, I don't recall many Open Source "battles" in 2009 like those of the past. It is a little sad because I enjoyed fighting the good fight, and because it provided a healthy competitive edge. Reality is that, for the most part, we have won the Open Source battle. Open Source matters more every day and is changing the software industry -- already Microsoft is working on an Open Source blogging platform. These industry changes will also likely reflect, and even change, the Drupal ecosystem. In the years to come, expect competing software vendors to adopt our Open Source techniques and licenses, and expect large consulting organizations to have their own Drupal teams.

While we didn't see a major Drupal release in 2009, it was a great year nonetheless. We've used 2009 to position ourselves for continued success in 2010 and beyond. In 2010, I predict a number of stars will align: (i) the release of Drupal 7, (ii) the launch of the new Drupal.org redesign, (iii) at least a dozen of specialized Drupal distributions gaining momentum, (iv) test-driven development for contributed modules and (v) Acquia's Drupal Gardens and Buzzr (but only if they have a free tier) that will positively impact Drupal adoption. All of these initiatives are in different stages of development, but I believe there's a big chance that their combination will translate into breakout growth by the end of 2010. It also implies that 2010 will see some big changes, which is never easy.

Going forward, it is important we keep up with the larger market, which is evolving faster and faster with dozens of cool new services and APIs being launched almost every day. As a large Open Source community, we are better positioned to keep up than any proprietary vendor. We have many more people contributing to Drupal than proprietary vendors would ever be able to hire. However, proprietary vendors excel at focus and execution. There is nothing we can't do, but it is important that we're focused on the right things, and that we continue to be execution-driven. Let's remember our oldest mantra: "Talk is silver, code is gold".

As people start to build more products on top of Drupal, it is important that Drupal doesn't get in the way, and that it provides the flexibility and ease of customization that Drupal site builders demand. The winning platform will be the easiest platform to build on, not necessarily the platform that has the most flexibility. Over-generalization hurts both discoverability and adoption. Drupal's power vs. flexibility vs. ease of use is a tough balance to manage, but in general, our success in this balance has created Drupal's success. Our ability to maintain that balance is key, however, I hope and predict that for Drupal 8, we'll be very focused on improving the developer experience and lowering the barriers to participation (while maintaining Drupal's power and flexibility).

In general, I think content management systems have matured to a point where, for most people, they have relatively few differentiators at their core. That is why user experience is becoming perhaps the most important differentiator for non-niche users. The Drupal 7 usability project was a bold move but I hope we learned that bold moves aren't all that disruptive as they sometimes appear at the beginning. As Benjamin Disraeli, former British Prime Minister, put it: "Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.". I hope that, like 2009, we all continue to focus on user experience in 2010 because the single biggest barrier to the success of Drupal will continue to be ease of use as an end-user tool.

Mentally, it feels like we've surpassed Joomla! already, but it will take a number of years for that to trickle down and sink in, and even longer for the numbers to start reflecting that. I don't think we'll surpass Wordpress any time soon, but I do think Wordpress will continue to approach us from the bottom up. But, as Open Source goes mainstream, it won't matter all that much. In 2010, we'll start to compete against proprietary vendors, some of which will start to adopt Open Source strategies themselves. If they succeed, it could change the game because they'll bring focus and execution on top of the Open Source value proposition. Whatever happens, we'll benefit from the extra competition in 2010.

Thanks for 2009! It's been an honor to be a part of the Drupal project, and it remains so today. We have plenty of work to do in 2010 so let's all focus on making change happen.

My predictions for 2009

It is that time of year again. Time to reflect on 2008, and to put on my Drupal Nostradamus hat and look forward to 2009. But first of all, thanks for 2008! It's been a pretty crazy ride.

Drupal

My personal Drupal highlights for 2008 include the Drupal 6 release (the best Drupal release ever!), both DrupalCon Boston and DrupalCon Szeged, the Drupal.org redesign that is in progress, and, of course, beating Joomla and Wordpress at the Packt awards. ;-) As I predicted last year, more than ten books were written about Drupal, compared to a single book in 2007. The increase in Drupal books is another highlight as I actively helped connect authors to publishers. I truly enjoyed being part of the Drupal community in 2008.

My personal low for 2008 is regret that some key modules lagged behind the Drupal 6 release. The majority of these modules have now been released, and Drupal 6 is finally getting on the fast lane now. The message is clear: we'll continue to see tremendous growth and adoption in 2009.

Why?

1. Drupal 6 is easier to use, runs faster, and comes with many great new features. The work we did on Drupal 6 throughout 2007 and 2008 will pay off in 2009.
2. Economic pressure will help accelerate Drupal's growth, and that of Open Source in general. More site owners will discover that with Drupal, you can build a better website cheaper than with many of its proprietary counterparts.
3. Social publishing (blogs, forums, wikis, social networks, etc.) will become more pervasive and continue to make inroads in organizations seeking to facilitate collaboration between teams and departments. These applications, while nothing new, make many aspects of business better, are here to stay, and will mature over time. Drupal continues to be in that sweet spot.

I'll continue to have a software love affair with Drupal in 2009. At the moment, I'm very excited about the community's growing interest in the semantic web -- and all the related interoperability and decentralization technologies. The seed of what I hope will become a strong marriage between Drupal and semantic web technologies was planted in my DrupalCon Boston 2008 keynote in February (with the help, hard work and preparation of many others), and will continue to grow in 2009. Drupal continues to be a technology pioneer in 2009.

I predict that Drupal 7 will be released in the fourth quarter of 2009. The two most exciting features in Drupal 7 core will be custom content types and radical improvements in usability. To reduce the risk of important modules falling behind in support or update path, a significant portion of the Content Construction Kit (CCK) related modules will move to core and we'll pave the way for the Views modules. The same holds true for other important contributed modules, including token module, path auto module, and image handling functionality. In 2009, core becomes bigger, not smaller. The Drupal 7 code freeze will be longer than expected regardless our new continuous test framework, and the upgrade path to Drupal 7 will be more painful than hoped for. But like always, we'll come out stronger than before ...

Despite Drupal being loved by many, we'll have to work hard in 2009. The thing that holds Drupal back is failure to execute many of the ideas and plans that we have. As a community, we need to grow more mentors in 2009, and we must all make sure that they are set up for success rather than failure. The community's responsibility to itself should be to remove barriers to participation and single points of failure. Alarm bells should go off when there is a desire to introduce red tape, unnecessary hurdles or dependencies, or when we fail to collaborate and make progress in key areas of the project. At the same time, we need to help more Drupal companies figure out how to contribute back to Drupal in substantial ways. Contributions are gold, talk is silver. Helping people contribute must become platinum.

Last year, I predicted that we would see the first signs of consolidation in the Open Source CMS market. I believe that prediction was correct. The "big three" (i.e. Wordpress, Joomla! and Drupal) continued to grow in 2008, while many of the other systems faded into the background a bit. I think that trend will continue in 2009. In the long run, the winners will be platform providers that enable people to connect, create and share value in different ways -- and that do so with the lowest barrier to entry. Expect other systems to (continue to) attack Drupal from both below and above. We're the best platform today, and others will have to move in to stay viable.

Oh, and IBM starts to embrace Drupal in 2009!

Acquia

I'm proud of Acquia. Acquia is the Drupal company that I started with Jay Batson. We announced the start of Acquia at the end of November 2007, and we announced our funding just before the end of 2007. People had a lot of questions about Acquia early in 2008, but throughout the year we demonstrated over and over again that we're committed to Drupal's success and that we want to do what is right for the community. We built a great team and grew from 2 employees early in the year to 30 people today. In September 2008, we launched our first products and started to offer commercial support for a defined software distribution called Acquia Drupal. Today, 3 months after we opened to doors for business, we are serving customers. We worked hard and made our milestones. It has been fun to see a new business take off. I also racked up way more frequent flyer points (i.e. air miles) than what is generally considered healthy.

The first thing you learn when selling in tough economic times is that you must figure out how to give customers exactly what they want and you must do it fast. It didn't take long for us to realize that people wanted more than Acquia Drupal: they wanted support for everything Drupal 6.x -- all modules, themes and custom code. The good news is that Acquia is a nimble company so the last weeks we worked on changing our support model to address customer demands. Starting tomorrow, we will support everything Drupal 6.x -- not just Acquia Drupal but all modules and themes available on drupal.org as well as custom code. I'm still a firm believer in Drupal distributions so Acquia Drupal still has a role as a packaged on-ramp for people getting started with Drupal. However, anyone will be able to connect any Drupal 6.x site to the Acquia Network -- helping us achieve our goal of helping people build and operate great websites with Drupal. Keep an eye on acquia.com if you want to learn more about these changes.

We're passionate about getting our value proposition right, so expect us to continue to tweak and extend our current offering in 2009. We'll also launch a number of new products. Some, like our hosted search service, we've already talked about, and I think we'll finally be ready to talk about a few others in the first quarter of 2009.

Regardless of the down-turn in the economy, I think that Acquia's business will continue to take off nicely in 2009. My heart and gut are convinced that Acquia has a tremendous opportunity to do well, and to do good. I believe (and hope) that Acquia will have the success it takes to continue to invest in Drupal.

Mollom

Together with Benjamin Schrauwen, I also launched Mollom, a web service whose purpose is to dramatically reduce the effort of keeping websites free of spam and the quality of user-generated content high. Mollom is a self-funded company and nowhere near the size or scope of Acquia (Acquia is my full-time commitment) but nevertheless, a lot of progress has been made. We announced Mollom in March, and opened the doors for business at the end of September 2008. Today, we're actively protecting 4,500 websites of which 75-100 have paid subscriptions. Mollom has caught almost 21 million spam messages since it started.

In 2009, I predict that Mollom will continue to experience steady growth and that we'll introduce a premium subscription (i.e. "Mollom Premium" in addition to "Mollom Plus" and "Mollom Free") with enterprise level features. I also predict that our efficiency in blocking spam will raise from our current 99.88% (i.e. 12 in 10,000 spam messages were not caught) to 99.95% or more (i.e. 5 in 10,000 spam messages or less were not caught). While this might sound like a marginal improvement, it actually means we make 2.4 times fewer mistakes.

Mollom has a ton of potential and is great fun, so I have all reasons to believe that 2009 will be a good year for Mollom. If fact, I predict that 'good' will be an understatement.

Conclusion

2008 was a great year, and continues Drupal's great run. The economic realities of 2009 will present challenges, but also opportunities. I believe Drupal's success will continue -- and accelerate -- in 2009, though we'll have to work hard. I predict we'll do exactly that.

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.