Drupal and Open Source in 2008 : Dries Buytaert's Predictions

By John Conroy Jan 3, 2008

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It's Crystal Ball time once again, when every two-bit hack on the Web reaches for the ether and prises back the veil of time, peering into the murky future.

Dries Buytaert is no hack - he's the founder of Drupal and the co-founder of Acquia. But he's as entitled as anyone else to play Nostradamus, and he's just outlined his vision of what we can expect in the open source CMS world, and in the Drupal project over the next twelve months.

OSS CMS Market Consolidation

Buytaert sees consolidation on the horizon, as the leading open-source CMS products attain some kind of critical mass and begin to dominate the sector.

“…near the end of 2008, we'll see the first signs of consolidation in the Open Source CMS market. The Open Source CMS space will become less fragmented; the “big three” (i.e. Wordpress, Joomla! and Drupal) will continue to grow but the growth of many other systems (i.e. Plone, Typo3, Xoops, e107, ezPublish, dotNetNuke, etc) will slow down significantly.”

It will be interesting indeed to see how this prediction plays out. But will a sort of stable and still relevant Middleweight division emerge, incorporating the likes of Plone and ezPublish (and now MovableType, following recent developments?)

Drupal: Users

Drupal will be made easier to use, bringing closer Buytaert's stated objective of democratizing web publishing. “Drupal 7 will ship with one or two install profiles, many UI improvements, more AJAX, a basic WYSIWYG editor (or better WYSIWYG support), some wizards, and improved image and file handling.”

Drupal: Developers

“While we listen to our users in 2008, most of the excitement will be developer-centric.” Two key Drupal development modules: Views and CCK will be more closely integrated with the core product.

“A significant portion, but not all” of the Content Construction Kit (CCK) will be moved to Drupal core, and there will be changes made to the core to enable a better fit with Views. All this will should improve developer efficiency.

Also, “While unheard in Drupal circles right now, object-relational mapping (ORM) will be the buzzword du jour by the summer of 2008. This, in turn, will lead to better web service integration, RIA integration (specifically Flex), and improved import/export functionality in Drupal 7.”

The suggestion has also been made that the pace of core releases will slow, to appease a community which is constantly having to rewire old modules for new releases, potentially at the expense of fresh innovation. But if Dries is already talking about what's going to be in D7…

Drupal Challenges

“Unless we manage to put more effort into (i) marketing, (ii) support, (iii) documentation and (iv) drupal.org this might turn out to be a tough battle for Drupal. Drupal.org will be our biggest challenge in 2008, and much of that will determine whether we'll be one of the “big three” Open Source CMSes at the end of 2008.”

Drupal.org is also the subject of intense debate on the forums at that very website. The Modules section, an utterly vital service, is considered by many to be sub-par. It offers little information on what the best modules in a particular area are and has free-form descriptions which often leave much to the imagination.