It is that time of the year again! After predictions for 2004 and 2005, we continue this tradition about what Drupal will do in 2006.

Looking back to the predictions for 2005, it seems that some predictions were far from right, if serious at all. Some posters, however, turned out to be true fortune tellers...

Review

• Dries: "People will be surprised by the lack of progress in 2005". And right he was.
• Dries: "People won't understand [the lack of a long-term vision] and it will trigger them to create their own Drupal distributions and forks.". Some people didn't understand this indeed, but I dont think there was a new fork in 2005, was there?
• Silverwing: "There will be a focus/beginning development of Drupal to be used in school settings". He turned out to be right.
• Judah: "[Users] will request easier installation for plugins and online theme editing. Drupal developers will focus on this at the end of 2005". Well, the focus on easier installations is there; however, this has not resulted yet in a working installer -- but work is underway.
• Bèr: "Drupal.org will become a legal entity, and donations will allow core maintainers to communicate, develop and promote in a much more efficient way." As was the case in 2004, there has been lots of talk on this issue. However, with the Mambo/Joomla controversy still fresh in our memory, it is more important to set up a foundation in a right way than to set up a foundation.
• Steven was right when he predicted “that 2005 will see the inclusion of Javascript in Drupal core." With AJAX in 4.7 core, he turned out be a true fortune teller. Though, the duvel is still in the box.

Other predictions that hit the spot:

• "Drupal will be slashdotted at least 3 times in 2005." Well, that was easily done.
• "Once a major flaw in the code will make all drupal sites vulnerable to a nasty "own3d" posting on all listed drupal sites. A fix has been made available within 2 hours yet doesnt make it to the frontpage and hence many blog sites will run some other than intended content”. That one didn't happen the way I described it but too many sites got hacked by the XML-RPC exploit. It also shows that no matter how fast we create a fix, it's irrelevant if our users are unwilling, or simply don't know, to install it.
• "Someone will write a book about Drupal" Indeed, some books were published.

And no, Drupal did not become a reality TV show.

Retrospective

All our fortune tellers missed the biggest thing that happened to Drupal: the downtime of Drupal.org, the very successful fundraising and the resulting new infrastructure hosted at the Open Source Lab.

In fact, 2005 was a rather smashing year, with lots of new code, contributors and users. Quick highlights include:

• Three great Drupal Conferences.
• Many new contributors
• Much better marketing.
• Big sites like ourmedia.org and The Onion switching to Drupal
• A great Drupal ad and nice banners for special events.
• Google's Summer of Code program where Drupal gained code, coders, and publicity.

And certainly Dries and Karlijn will remember 2005 as the year of their engagement.

Predictions

So, now that we've refreshed your memory, it's time for you to polish up your crystal ball and share your insights for the future! What do you think 2006 will bring us? And no, suggesting that Buytaert.net will switch to Drupal does not count.

Drupal version: Drupal 4.7.x