My predictions

As starter of the "DrupalDictions 2007" posting, it would only fair to chip in some of my own ones as well. I try not to make predictions like "CCK will hit core" and will focus more on the business en community site of the Drupal CMS.

1. Elephants do it with elephants
   Drupal is getting used more and more by Big Corporations. They choose Drupal for its strength, fast adopting of new technology, disposable technology, great community plumbing and very stabile and high quality codebase. However, no matter how agile the marketing department of the Big Company wants to be, Big Companies cant change fast, cant implement fast and have their own changemanagement procedures and embedded slowness. So they need an implemting party that canb be both: be agile, implement fast yet speak the language of the Prince II coordinator and the lingo lingo of the project manager. Smaller implementers –as most Drupal shops are right now- often don’t have these skills. And that is not a bad thing perse but it just means that both parties are not aligned. To bypass this potential shortcoming, 2007 will be the years where elephant do it with elephants. Big Company choosing Drupal will hire a Big Company to implement Drupal. This company will hire the independent Drupal consultant and the smaller Drupal shops for delivery while adding project management to be aligned with both the Drupal customer and the Drupal community.
2. ESB is for Gartner 1.0 people
   Most (Java) based CMS-es can be described as modern legacy. They have new versions every 2 years and some updates a long the way but cant keep up with community stuff, AJAX, crowdtasking and all that other Web2.0 lingo. We will see that the tradition J2EE based CMS world will shift towards midoffice; integrating the frontend and the backend data. For example in an Enterprise Service Bus. There will still be a place for Java in the enterprise, but it will be deeper in the organization, closer to the source data and mainly for integration. Java’s grow market will not be the frontend, the agile edge towards the user/customer that has to change / adopt fast and often. This means that traditional Java based CMS-es will have to shift focus towards the inside of the organization and do it fast, the frontend will be dominated by PHP and ASP based CMS-es in no time.
3. Drupal as a "site"kick (pun intended)
   Drupal will be mainly used by Big Companies as a "site"kick for their corporate site. So example.com will get a smaller blog.example.com or debate.example.com. This way big sites can add fast disposable marketing / event sites without the burden and ballast of their corporate system. Due to the fact that these kind of site need more integration, a lot of new modules (both open and proprietary) will focus on "Drupal for the enterprise", like the current LDAP module already does.
4. Really Smart Syndication
   Due to the growing need of integration, RSS will be used in unforeseen ways. RSS now is merely used for clients and aggregators sites to grab content and display it without having to exactly visit the site where the content cam from. Smarter aggregators might be able to do some context awareness and aggregate syndicated news is a smart way. When I was responsible for the operations of the internet service of my employer, I tracked dozen of CERT / Secuity newsfeed and matched against our installed base of software so I only saw security news related to Sendmail and IIS (to name the offenders) and not for software we didn’t use. As I said, unforeseen, but stuff I can imagine that will be done in RSS is for example data that is now transferred via syslog, SNMP or even batched FTP and BSMTP. Think about, sure syslog is robust, but wouldn’t it be more useful to transfer the error logging via XML? If not, don’t. But I have seen lots of cases where it would be useful. Another creative RSS implementation, bi-directional RSS; trackbacks in combination with RSS makes it possible to trigger actions on both sites using RSS as layer6 transportation.
5. How to use an iPod with your cassette player?
   When Drupal wil become more and more important, the need for integration with legacy systems will become bigger. And Drupal will find some creative ways to communicate with backend legacy (both old and new legacy) systems. Try to think of it this way: if you own an iPod and a classic car with only a cassette player, you will find a tool that combines them very handy. That will happen to Drupal as well
6. MediaDrupal
   Drupal will be the thing in both the old (originally printed) and new (online) media. "Media plumbing" on might say. Dozens and dozend of big newspapers will either switch to Drupal for the main site or for the "sitekick"-site.
7. Old news
   The node system in Drupal is already being copied. The powerful taxomony system that has been in Drupal for years will be copied in the next year as well and the inmense power will finally be understood by both publishers and other CMS vendors. The extreme power of the combination of CCK and Views will catch on in two years, independent if it makes core or not, it will take several years before other CMS and potential users will understand it.
8. There is no place like 127.0.0.1
   It is hard to define what makes a good developer. It is clear it is not just coding skills, communication, understanding customer needs are just a few of the needed qualities. Drupal coders (no offense guys) are not very user friendly. The fact that within the Drupal developer world a siteadmin using Drupal is called an "enduser" says enough. Most coders are even proud that they don’t like user ("lusers"), creating their own subculture where there is no place for "support?". My best guess, the truly great coders that have more skills than those that go via the keyboard but know how to interact and have (empathic) feelings will join Drupal and gain lots of powers upsetting the current gods. My advice: if you are a coder, look beyond 127.0.0.1, the time that you could lean on the arrogance of your knowledge is over.
9. OSS alignment
   More and more companies that never did anything for the community or the code of Drupal will do Drupal installs and make custom modules for the many new customers that are showing up demanding Drupal services. Giving the fact that those parties might know PHP but nothing about Drupal, their implementation will be bad. Very bad. They will lett their customers walk the road to Drupal hell. This will givbe Drupal a bad name while it has nothing to do with Drupal but everything with an overheated market.
10. drupal.ebay.com

Speaking of the market, there will be a drupalcodersexchange.com site where demand and supply of Drupal knowledge will be traded. Too many people –including me- have had this idea for years but there is still not such a site while the demand for such a service is enormous. So yes, there will be a marketplace for Drupalcoders in 2007

That’s my list, I got dozen of other things to share as well but will that in due time. As said before, I will post less to my blog but I aim for higher quality.. And writing about the state and future of Drupal will be in those postings for sure.