Predictions for 2009

Year (2004) after year (2005), we have had a tradition on Drupal.org to look back at the last year and make predictions for the year ahead. Year (2006) after year (2007) we are amazed at how wrong we were trying to predict the future and how right we are making our own great future. Year after year, and 2008 was no exception. Take a look at the predictions for 2008 to see who was wrong and who was right, and post a comment in this thread to predict what will happen in the Drupal community for 2009.

Back to the future: code, community, people

Let us take a look at what 2008 has brought us; what happened code-wise, what happened in the community and which people were in the spotlight.

2008, the Code

Code-wise, the biggest news was the release of Drupal 6, the award-winning version of Drupal that highly focuses on Internationalisation. And while Drupal version 6 had a slow start, Views2 and CCK 2 make a very strong foundation to deploy new Drupal sites on the best version of Drupal: 6! Most interesting work on modules is now done on this six version, and more and more bigger sites are migrating to this version. Also highly code related was the work the Drupal Association put into the Licensing FAQ, an excellent document describing the impact of the General Public License. A new version, made by more people than ever before, two important modules complete rewritten, hundreds of Drupal 6 modules and a good license FAQ -- 2008 was a very good year for the Drupal code.

2008, the Community

Even more than the codebase, the number of installs and the number of modules, the community grew, both in size and in maturity. Many people and organisations recognised this in 2008 and therefore our product won many prizes last year, including the Packt Publishing Best Open Source CMS award (again) and the Webware award. The prize money goes to the Drupal Association; the honour is for all of us!

2008 was also the year where a very good DrupalCon was organised in a small cosy town, Szeged, with more than 500 attendees! See the highlights at this slideshow and watch the infamous Drupal song performed during the closing keynote. The DrupalCon in Boston was the biggest ever with nearly 900 people attending. Apart from the DrupalCons, Drupal people met at the booming local DrupalCamps, in the lively Drupal Groups or for example at the Do It With Drupal conference; more people meeting in more ways to share ideas and code.

One of the biggest changes in the community, lead by the Drupal Association, is the redesign of the drupal.org website by Mark Boulton Design. Both the result and the road have set new standard in website design. 2008 was also the year where more and more time was spent on usability with academic research which will lead to a better product.

In 2008, more books on Drupal were published than in all the years before 2008! A list of some of the Drupal books published last year in random order:

The community never has been so strong before as in 2008. We are in good form for the future!

2008, the People

Code, community -- it does not exist without people. People making code and working together in the community. We treasure all of our smart people who work on our code, test our products, document Drupal, build websites or evangelise us. In 2008, a few people got some extra airtime. Earl Miles won the well-deserved award of Most Valuable Person of the year in 2008 and the incredible webchick became The best contributor at Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards and the Drupal 7 co-maintainer! And to top that, Dries, the lead and founder of the Drupal community, became a Top Innovator, chosen by Businessweek.

And then there was you, doing everything you could to make the future of Drupal as shiny as it can get, ahead of the rest. Thank you, thank you for making 2008 the best so far!

...the future!
So now, it is time for you to predict what will happen in 2009 for Drupal, as Dries already did. You are free to do this where you see fit, but we do welcome your comments here.

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