Drupal Past Predictions

Dries Buytaert sent an email to core contributors in August 2010 asking what we though Drupal would look like if it was 10x bigger:

I'm thinking about topics to talk about for my DrupalCon keynote. In my keynote, I'd like to paint a picture of how the world would look like if Drupal were 10 times bigger.

For example, I think it would mean we'd have one or more mobile solutions for Drupal (because for Drupal to grow 10 times bigger we'd need to have one).

If you try to fast forward in your brain, and imagine a Drupal world that is 10 times bigger, what would it look like?

What else would we have?What would the ecosystem look like? What would that your world look like as a developer/designer?

How would Drupal have adopted to the changing web/internet?

Here was my answer:

How does Drupal play in a world where we will do data design first, and display == mobile touch across multiple screens? How do we stay relevant in that world?

The next frontier is not LAMP or any stack at all but Google App Engine and from the ground up web apps written on top of node.js and other server-side JavaScript. Quercus is a kludge. Where is the line from where Drupal is today to that non-LAMP future?

Say we power 10% of the web, and that's where the 10x. How do we federate automatically? How do we build the open web? How do we CREATE standards and get others to adopt them, rather than being the first to "build a module for that".

How can Drupal sites re-use data on a more massive scale? Have you seen http://scratchpads.eu/ (next round of funding is 20M EU)? That is the sound of Drupal powering a "knowledge sphere" that (again) has a straight line to the early days and John VanDyk's entomology site.

How do we promote our culture of sharing / give back by default in a world where every regional web shop takes Drupal off the shelf, adds a design, and could care less about core? aka the WordPress model


That was almost 9 years ago. I'm still thinking about these same topics, reflected in the last part of FISSION's mission: "exploring fundamental shifts in the way we host, deploy, and run software for humans."

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Tags: Drupal

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