CHALLENGES AHEAD OF DRUPAL IN 2017
What is done is done. What happened, happened. There are only a few days left until the year 2016 finishes. 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, we’ll look at where Drupal can still improve in the following year.
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.
