Home

2008 Prediction; (Drupal : websites) == (Linux : webhosts)

2 January 2008 - 11:24am — Bevan

I have just one simple prediction for Drupal in 2008;

Drupal becomes to websites and the website-producing industry, what Linux is to webservers and the web-hosting industry.

Realistically this will probably take well into 2009 for this to be effective to the extent that linux, but the foundations for this are already laid and I believe that with the current momentum, it's just time before my prediction becomes true.

Comments

8 April 2008 - 7:50pm — Server Host (not verified)

Drupal is Good

I agree, Drupal is maintained and developed by a community of thousands of users and developers. It really is the best content management software right now.

2 January 2008 - 3:02pm — Sanjeev Jain (not verified)

I don't think it is going to

I don't think it is going to happen considering we are still stuck at defining the audience for Drupal and catering to the edge cases scenarios built by developers of Drupal.

I feel the 95% end user market of Drupal is for people who can't tell PHP apart from an Apple or a Banana. We need to simplify things especially user interface. Our aim should be "If it needs instructions than it is not simple enough". However, developers aren't that 95% of the group and thus they have no incentive to build for masses.

The linux market has exploded on Webservers only with the help of control panel like CPanel/WHM ... We need that CPanel/WHM for Drupal.

8 January 2008 - 1:34pm — Matthew Davidson (not verified)

Linux is not an operating system, Drupal isn't (just) a CMS

You're confusing "Linux" with "operating systems that use Linux". The Linux project has little to zero involvement in CPanel/Webmin/whatever, or for that matter GNOME, KDE, X.org, or anything else that turns their work into a component of a usable operating system. They make an operating system kernel that's used in hundreds (if not thousands) of different operating systems, they don't try to make an entire operating system.

I think the direction Drupal is going in is quite analogous, and I think the prediction is going to come to pass. In 2008 we will start to see more Drupal "distributions" tailored for particular uses. Over time, most Drupal users will either be using a custom "distribution" of Drupal, or something customised for them by a professional Drupal developer (my rates are very reasonable!), in the same way that nobody (apart from masochists) assembles their own Linux-based operating system from scratch. I always start my Drupal sites from a heavily pre-configured template.

After working with Drupal and seeing it develop over the past couple of years, I can't see any compelling reason for developing a web application from scratch, or using any other framework. I don't know of any other project that's comparable to Drupal in this way; any other platform is either so high up the stack that it's inflexible (eg. Mambo), or so low down the stack that it's too time consuming to develop for (eg. Rails). This is what's going to make Drupal reach Linux-like ubiquity, even if end users are mostly unaware they're using it.