Dries Buytaert

It is almost 2007 now so let's look back at how I did last year:

1. I predicted that by the end of 2006, there was going to be more content, the need for aggregation and filtering, and ultimately, consolidation of functionality.

   SharePoint 2007 introduces blogs, wikis and RSS. FatWire announced that FatWire 7, to be expected in early 2007, will add blogs, tagging, polls, surveys, etc. Oracle's Stellent announced that they are adding blogs and wikis but also RSS.

2. In terms of Drupal, I predicted that we'll see forum improvements, image and/or document improvements, some basic install profiles, more AJAX, incremental theme system improvements, significant node system changes, and various improvements to the administration pages.

   Except for the forum improvements and the image and/or document improvements, I was right. We're introducing install profiles in Drupal 5, we became jQuery addicts (jQuery is a JavaScript library), we added a new core theme, we started integrating custom content types, and we reworked the Drupal administration pages.

3. I predicted: The exciting trend in 2006 will be the many new media services on the web; people want to publish more content. Most of this will be social media published by individuals or online communities. Not just more content and pictures, but also a lot more video.

   With websites like Digg, MySpace and YouTube, user-generated content was certainly a buzzword in 2006. If anything, 2006 was the year of YouTube, which was purchased by Google for 1.65 billion USD in stock. Social video websites weren't popular yet at the end of 2005 when I predicted them, but it turned out that flash transcoding would become a big deal in 2006.

4. I also predicted that traditional systems like Mambo, Joomla! and even WordPress would grow faster than Drupal. They did.
5. Despite the slightly worrisome tone of this message, 2006 promises to be an exciting year. Drupal will make more inroads on companies, governments, public institutions like school and universities, open source projects, and — most of all — non-professionals. Just like in 2005, we'll make substantial progress.

   No need to argue about this: three Drupal books have been published in 2006, IBM started writing about Drupal, Google invested 70,000 USD, the size of our community grew by more than 230%, MTV started using Drupal, we organized two international Drupal conferences, etc. Thanks to the enthusiasm, the passion and the determination of the Drupal communiy, 2006 has been a pretty crazy ride.

When things come true, it is easy to say 'nothing great, nothing excited', but surely, these were predictions at that time. Call me arrogant, but I think I did a good job predicting 2006. Time to start working on my predictions for 2007 ...