Yes, the end of the year is just around the corner so the old habit of looking back and forward regarding all things Drupal is here again! It is time to see what we predicted right, where we where not really on the spot and where we failed to see what was going on. And of course to make our new predictions for 2008! Take a look at last years predictions.

The Right's

This year must be the year where we made our own predicated future since so many predictions where right. Let us take a look at some of them:

• Steven was right about many:
• "Drupal wins a major open-source award for all the effort put in to make Drupal more usable, without compromising its flexibility." And so we did by claiming the Packt Publishing CMS award!
• "2007 sees the inclusion of some form of drag-and-drop blocks to the admin. Possibly reordering book pages and menu items." Code has been written to make this happen, weights in an ultralight form.
• And then there was: "Dries starts a company." Dries is indeed making a new a splash in the Drupal community.
• More good predictions: "There will NOT be a huge explosion in Drupal installation profiles." Not many indeed, but more then I expected. And "Drupal will 'arrive' and no longer be seen as the hot newcomer." Since many RFP explicitly ask for Drupal and we are on the radar of all big technology research firms, I will not say we are "there" yet but Drupal sure is no newcomer any more, not even in the boardroom.
• And then people suggested Dries to work on other stuff than Drupal: "Must be time for Dries to produce something other than Drupal releases." And he did resulting in Axl and (any time now) in "Dr. Dre".
• Another one: "Oh and a few (more than 2) US presidential campaigns will use Drupal to power their site.". I know of at least one.
• "AJAX and JS effects will become a major part of Drupal but a core value of always-degrade-gracefully will persist, but this will come under fire from both sides.". True, Drupal now with 8% yummy.
• "Views and CCK — will be incredibly versatile / extensible / themable / swiss-army-like, and will instantly make another 5 existing core modules redundant.". Controversial, yet not far off.
• "Drupal will be in the 2007 EContent 100 List". Yes, they did recognize us.

The Wrong's

Not everyone and everything was right. Here are some of the wrong's.

• "And this extra one is for the developers, cvs will switch to subversion (svn)." No, we still use CVS.
• According to Google trends, Drupal will be more relevant than Joomla.. Not even near, if we want to be there in the first place.
• An old request: "The downloads section of drupal.org will be redesigned again, with a lot of goodies like community rating of contributions." and prominently featured install profiles." That did not happen in 2007.

The Unforeseen's

Nobody saw the new core committer Gábor Hojtsy that has done tremendous work to bring i18n in Drupal 6. Nobody mentioned the Best DrupalCon ever in Barcelona with 430 people attending. Neither did anyone predicted that Drupal would lead the GoPHP5 movement or saw the impact of OpenID on Drupal. And last but not least, no mentioning of the song everybody loves, or at least loves to hate.

... and more

My own predictions? "Drupal will be mainly used by Big Companies as a "site"kick for their corporate site. So example.com will get a smaller blog.example.com or debate.example.com.". That happened, a lot. In the Netherlands and in Germany newspapers started using Drupal next to their proprietary main site. But the NY Observer even went for their main site over to Drupal

Only Dries can answer his own prediction:

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.

Maybe he will here?

And for 2008?

For 2008 you can make your predictions here. Make them unpredictable, funny and say what will and will not happen. And most of all, work on making sure your predictions become reality during 2008 so next year you will be "The Grand Winner of 2008".