Development Seed Blog

I love reading the annual Drupal predictions for the New Year and thought it would be a good time to share some of our goals. A lot of them have to do with our work with Drupal, but they are not just technical; they are all rooted in the needs of the progressive organizations we work with.

We will focus our energy in three main areas in 2007: building dynamic intranets for large and geographically disperse teams, making multilingual websites work better, and focusing on offsite network centric outreach. A lot of this is because of our continued specialization in international development.

Intranets: Our prediction is that by mid summer more than half of our work will be dedicated towards building internal systems (intranets and internal tools powered by Drupal). We are talking about both small intranets that teams use to stay on the same page when they are spread around the globe and large internal systems for teams right here in DC. We have a feeling that people will be craving some web 2.0 interactive tools to use internally to improve their team’s efficiency. If you want to read some of the latest news on our work with internal tools, check out the post on tracking news for the World Bank and the World Resources Institute.

Making websites truly multilingual: In 2006 we sponsored work on i18n, but we really didn’t get our hands as dirty as we wanted. For the coming year we are going to look at some of the underlying needs for successful multilingual websites and then make sure that they are addressed in Drupal 6.0. To make multilingual support better we have brought Jose Reyero on board after working with him for over a year on i18n. We are also working with Gabor Hojtsy to determine what Drupal needs to better handle multilingual sites. We want to help the community filter up the best options and then invest in the approaches that come out looking the strongest. While this talk is happening, we are also moving forward with timely solutions and are finishing upgrading i18n to Drupal 5.0. Now that Jose has i18n stable for 5.0, he is working on more detailed documentation that we hope will make it even easier to build multilingual sites. Finally, we will be rolling out a large multilingual website in the spring on Drupal 5.0 for the International Council on Archives.

Offsite network centric strategy: In 2007 we think people will realize that they need to look beyond what they are doing on their website if they want to really get their message out. This will start with people going to other people’s websites and talking. Sounds like common sense, right? What does this have to do with our work? We think that some basic admin modules that plug into Drupal sites will help facilitate this, like showing referrers in the footer of each page when an administrator is signed in. Or maybe by showing each referrer’s Technorati and Alexa rank to show how influential the sites are. Would turning referrer listings into tag clouds and showing these clouds over time help managers get more interested in their stats? What if there was an admin page that showed all the pages on your site that people had bookmarked in del.icio.us? Or that showed your most recent Alexa and Technorati ranking? Essentially, we want to build an admin interface that helps users better interact with their stats in real time rather than just looking at monthly server logs.

So that is our plan for 2007, for now at least. We’re looking forward to more awesome work with the Drupal community and progressive organizations. Happy New Year everyone! I hope you are as excited as we are for the coming year.