Monday, January 16, 2012

Drupal Predictions for 2012 from Dries Buytaert

The original creator and project lead for the Drupal open source web publishing and collaboration platform, Dries Buytaert was full of optimism and enthusiasm for the coming year.

Here are some of the predictions he made on his blog at buytaert.net on January 05, 2012.

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.

Drupal, with a revamped administrative interface, is well suited for web applications of any kind from web logs (blogs) and micro sites to collaborative social communities. Drupal sports a new user interface, accessibility improvements, better image handling capabilities, support for rich content metadata, security features, scalability and database interoperability enhancements and automated tests to ensure stability.

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.

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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.

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