Besides the obvious possibilities for a Drupal boom in 2010 (launch of Drupal 7), there are several other reasons that may spark an increase in popularity.
Government Interest
The fact that whitehouse.gov launched on Drupal was huge news in 2009, but with the recently published "
Open Government Directive," the whitehouse site may be just the tip of the iceberg for Drupal.
Dries
states the importance of the directive in his blog saying, "
It could be big for Drupal." The directive instructs every federal agency to publish an outline for "transparency, participation, and collaboration" on the subdomain "/open" of each agency website.
Acquia (powered by Drupal) plans to have some sort of "starter kit" to offer in January to these agencies to quickly achieve the directive requirements.
Drupal Gardens
I always get a little irritated when people say, "Anyone can easily build their own site with Drupal." In my opinion, sure, a newbie with little experience can create some pages and link them to menus, but to make a website in Drupal that's worth putting on the web, you need to have some experience and training behind you. That is Drupal though. Drupal Gardens will prove the "Anyone can.." statement.
Drupal Gardens is for the Drupal newbies. It will attract the non-Drupal users that want to make a website - easily and mostly by themselves. Watch the
video demo of Drupal Gardens, or read Frankie's blog post on why "
Drupal Gardens will make Drupal easier to use". In my opinion, it's all about promotion. Dries reinforces that thought on his
blog post on Drupal Gardens:
"[Drupal Gardens] is all about promoting Drupal so we don't want to hide that. Our goal is to make the base service free of charge, and to introduce Drupal to hundreds of thousands of users."
Emergence of Installation Profiles
LevelTen took a stab at an installation profile with
iSite Essentials when we realized we kept installing and configuring the same modules for all of our clients. Installation profiles allow a pre-configured set of modules that work together for a specific kind of site. For example, development is in progress for a
Wiki, a
Wedding site,
Social Network, among many others. Installation profiles can now be fully packaged as Drupal distributions, so the user just installs it as normal. It's just a matter of time before some solid installation profiles are kicked out and the year 2010 just might be it.
With government interest, Drupal Gardens, and installation profiles under its belt, Drupal is destined to do great things in 2010.
