With 2009 closing and 2010 coming, it is time to look back over our shoulder and see what a great year we had. And it is time to look ahead and predict where the future of Drupal will lead us to in 2010.

2009

Lets start with looking back. Drupal turned eight and in CMS years this means we are young at heart while grownup in our soul.

At Dries' site, you can find a selection of sites that Dries found worthwhile mentioning, maybe because he liked the site, the implementation or the usage or the owner of the site can potentially influence other prospects to see the Drupal light. Let us take a look at that list and see what they have trends we can conclude from that list combined with the knowledge about our community.

Many big name sites switched to Drupal in 2009. In the media / entertainment market, some of the names include:

• Virgin, Slate, Monthy Python and Lucas Arts
• Michael Jackson, Eric Clapton and Robbie Williams
• Edipresse, Infoworld, IFRA
• Grammys, Emmys
• Radio Netherlands Worldwide, Australian Broadcast Company, BBC and CNN as well as Reuters

In the media an entertainment market, Drupal seems to be the go-to choice when selecting a CMS. But Drupal traditionally has a big footprint in the Not for Profit / Government and education sector:

• Human Rights watch, World Food Programme
• Obama, New York state senate, the French government, the Dutch government , the Australian Prime Minister and the British Government
• Duke University, Strayer University, Portland University, MIT, Stanford University and Harvard

This impressive lists is complemented with lots of enterprises switching to Drupal. This list include Symentic, Nokia, AHOLD, Randstad, Sony Ericsson, Mattel, Rackspace, AT&T, FUJI film and even Google!

Drupal is in fact "running the Internet" with Linux Foundation, JAVA.net and even the Internet Systems Consortium all switching to Drupal in 2009.

But by far the biggest news that no-one predicted in 2008 was the Whitehouse going Drupal!

Though this is just a small section of all the new Drupal sites we have been seeing born in 2009, the trends are clear.

• The first trend is that Drupal is being used more and more and by bigger companies. Where Drupal used to flourish in the niche community sites, last year really proved that big enterprises will adopt the best Open Source CMS as well. Drupal – a decade ago a non-existing word – is now a name in boardrooms, town-halls, senates and pressrooms all over the world.
• Secondly, we realized in 2009 that the secret goal of Drupal -World Domination- is getting closer and closer. A couple of years ago, Drupal development and implementations were nearly all done in northern America and western Europe. And if you look at the current trend, Drupal is popular all over the world, including Asia, Australia, Africa and South America.
• A third trend that can be seen while looking back, is that our ecosystem has become bigger and bigger. Drupal.org has around 400,000 users and many of the new converts do not fit the traditional developer profile. So we did not just grow bigger, we also broadened our community. This can be seen by the number and types of books that have been published in 2009 For example, Drupal 6 SEO, Content Administration, Views recipes, Drupal with flash, Site blueprints, Sitebuilding Solutions, Designing, Screening, Scripting and Social Networking. We started to attract people with interest in Search Engine Optimization, Design, IT architecture and User Interfaces.
• Another trend is the fact that no-one can deny that whitehouse.gov switching from a proprietary CMS towards Drupal puts Drupal on the map, any map! It seems that anyone looking into a new CMS for a site has some explaining to do when not taking Drupal (or Open Source in general) into account. This milestone of 2009 really marks the fact that sharing code, peer review and many eyeballs can be a very successful for software development. So successful, in fact, that Drupal now features on all IT research firms like Gartner. This love of corporations for Drupal is mutual with Dries "State of the Drupal" talk focusing on economic cycles.

Other important milestones were the Drupalcon DC (apart from being the biggest conference up to now, it featured a very well designed and award winning website and DrupalCon Paris, featuring Druplicon. Drupal also became easier to install with Install profiles taking off and a number of Drupal distributions like Managing news, Acquia Drupal and Open Atrium. All this work was recognized, we did win the Best PHP Open Source award, Webware 100 the Packt Hall of Fame award, 18 projects funded by Google’s Summer of Code and nearly $500.000 invested from the Knight Foundation.

2009 sure was a year with many many highlights. And many predictions of last year for 2009 were right, including the first Drupal tatoo.

2010

And now it is time for you to predict the future of Drupal for 2010. Will smallcore rule the Drupal world, google.com switch to Drupal, Drupal be pre-installed on all "iTablets"? It is up to you to make funny, witty and smart predictions for the year ahead! My prediction? Drupal will turn nine. For sure.

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