CHALLENGES AHEAD OF DRUPAL IN 2017

Year 2016 finished. In that time Drupal 8 turned one, some fascinating new sites and product were launched, a lot of new modules were created, many problems were solved ... but still, there are some reserves. Therefore, I and my team will look at where Drupal can still improve in 2017.

Drupal Community

One of the main problems is that Drupal users are not as active in the community as they should be. So, in 2017 Drupalistas, who professionally work with Drupal, should be more active in the community. They should more actively deliver and seek for the solutions, because they're business models depend on Drupal. As Janez Urevc said in our interview, ?if you are not active in the community, you are leaving the choices about your future in the hands of the others?. So, professional Drupal users, developers ... should first acknowledge that the will benefit from that by themselves. If they don't, Drupal Community should also do more in helping them realize that participation will be exclusively beneficial for them.

With more solutions in the community, there is no doubt that community will also increase in size and that should also be one of the key goals in 2017. That goal will surely be easily achieved with Drupal users becoming more active on social media. They should share their knowledge and warn about problems. But when solving them, they should move the discussion to other, private channels, maybe even meet in person, so that quarrels don’t happen if there is no need for it.

Media Management and Modules

The most obvious problem Drupal face is the lack of Media management in Drupal’s core. Media Manager is absent, so mastering videos, pictures and other media files in poor to say the least. Because of that, many users prefer Wordpress and Joomla, because they are tired of uploading the same image again and again. There are of course modules for that, but that’s not ideal, so including Media Manager in Drupal’s core is a necessity in 2017. We can only hope that Media in Drupal 8 Initiative will finish that as soon as possible.

When we speak of modules, many new were created. But, there are also many Drupal modules, which are not converted properly to Drupal 8. They need either small or major fixes. That issues should be tackled, so as the ones in documentation area in contrib environment. Therefore, Drupal developers should not rush and should tackle these problems first and then consider releasing Drupal 9. There is no reason for new projects to be launched on any other version than Drupal 8, but in 2017 older projects should move to that version only if they see an advantage in doing so.

Drupal events and sharing knowledge

I mentioned spreading knowledge. DrupalCons, Drupal Camps, Sprints … are among options to do so. Some continents should do more in that area, especially South America, which organized only one Drupal Camp this year. There will be no problem if some continents, like North America and Europe, will have less Drupal Camps. They can easily be replaced with smaller, local oriented events, which can create a better feeling of the community. It's true that Drupalistas can't travel every weekend, so spreading Drupal events across the whole world in the most useful way is a key thing in 2017. Because it's really a shame that they are everything but evenly spread.

For the last, there should be more constant in-depth blog posts about Drupal in general and about Drupal developing by Drupal professionals. Because don't forget, Drupal was made by developers for developers. And because developers are constantly looking for tools, which will optimize their development, a trick or two shared with the world will be useful for all the involved parties. One part will get the credit for it, gaining on reputation, and the other part will learn something new. On the other hand, ?soft themes? are also useful, because not everyone is a Drupal expert and may have a Drupal site just for fun.

We hope you can help improve Drupal this year. I and my team will definitely do our best to do so. At this point, all the best in 2017!