The Future of Drupal
Date: Wed, 02/01/2012 - 1:36pm
At Studio, we use Drupal a lot as a content management system utilizing both Drupal 6 and 7. It's been a little over a year since Drupal 7 was released to the general public. During that time Drupal 7 has been adopted about twice as fast as Drupal 6 was when it was released. As a digital production shop, we must always look to the future and advise our clients on whether a system like Drupal will be evolving with the needs of the market and our client's consumers. Drupal 8 has yet to be given a release date, but because Drupal is an open source project, we can already see some of the emphasis the managers are putting on Drupal 8 to keep up with the times.
1. Drupal will be evolving from a content management system to a web platform that is capable of doing a wide variety of custom applications. Drupal 7 really represents the halfway mark for this vision. Some enhancements include configuration management, staging content so it pushes out across the site at given times to different places, and having universal unique identifiers to track people and objects through a website. Some of these functionalities already exists in terms of contributed modules and we may seem them incorporated into the core, much like Views was in Drupal 7.
2. Drupal will be multichannel especially with mobile. As mobile devices continue to explode, it's become a necessity to have a mobile site. Now with the iPad and other tablets using touch screens, companies are creating new websites with interactivity using HTML 5. One of the first benefits of the new Drupal Core will be using HTML 5 as a default format. HTML 5 is the fifth generation of the HTML code and its aim is to make it websites much more multimedia friendly. While HTML 5 makes the site interactive, Drupal 8 looks to make all of this a lot easier to do in one system that pushes content out via multiple channels. So if you post something once, it's tailored for both a mobile experience and a PC experience, but has the flexibility to add channels for example as more TVs become internet ready, Drupal 8 will also have a TV version of your site as well.
We shouldn't expect to see Drupal 8 until late 2013 or early 2014. This is mostly due to a number of websites and contributed modules migrating to Drupal 7 from Drupal 6. However, we realize a website is a huge investment and the more content you produce for your website, the more costly it will be to migrate it to a system later in life. This is why we look at the plans for all content management systems, to ensure they are continuing to develop and address market needs. It appears in this case, Drupal continues to be on the right track.
