Looks like 2009 will be yet another exciting year of growth for the Drupal community. Dries Buytaert (Drupal project founder and lead, Acquia co-founder) announced two significant news items for the Drupal world in his recent “Predictions for 2009” blog post: a predicted release date for Drupal 7, and a major change in Acquia’s support offering.

Drupal 7

Although Dries once famously declared that “Drupal never had an official roadmap, and will never have one,” there’s been lots of speculation about when the next major release, Drupal 7, would be released. At DrupalCon Boston in early 2008, Dries discussed a code freeze of mid-October 2008, with a release roughly mid-January 2009, which would be consistent with a roughly annual release cycle but would take advantage of automated testing to decrease the time between “freeze” and “release.”  Six months later, at DrupalCon Szeged, the phrase was “We’ll freeze Drupal 7 when it is ready to be frozen.”

Here’s what Dries had to say this week:

I predict that Drupal 7 will be released in the fourth quarter of 2009. The two most exciting features in Drupal 7 core will be custom content types and radical improvements in usability. To reduce the risk of important modules falling behind in support or update path, a significant portion of the Content Construction Kit (CCK) related modules will move to core and we’ll pave the way for the Views modules. The same holds true for other important contributed modules, including token module, path auto module, and image handling functionality. In 2009, core becomes bigger, not smaller. The Drupal 7 code freeze will be longer than expected regardless our new continuous test framework, and the upgrade path to Drupal 7 will be more painful than hoped for. But like always, we’ll come out stronger than before …

The concept of minimizing the “module lag” time, in which popular but non-core modules have to be upgraded to work with the newest release by bringing some of the most popular and respected modules into core makes great sense to me. Drupal will continue to benefit from the breadth of the community (a module for everything) while recognizing that some modules have really become critical and need to be more closely coordinated with core.

Acquia Support

At Optaros we’ve been very excited about Acquia‘s Drupal distribution and support offerings, as many of our enterprise clients look for commerical support as one aspect of their evaluation of open source platforms, frameworks, and applications. (Disclosure: we’re also proud Acquia platinum partners). One challenge, however, has been the very breadth of the Drupal community and the fact that very few people use Drupal “out of the box,” in the sense that the particular combination of modules and themes which will work for any given web application is generally quite specific. The odds that any given distribution of Drupal could meet even 80% of the real world installations seemed unlikely.

As Dries put it:

It didn’t take long for us to realize that people wanted more than Acquia Drupal: they wanted support for everything Drupal 6.x — all modules, themes and custom code.

The good news is that Acquia is responding to that customer need, and is adapting their support model:

Starting tomorrow, we will support everything Drupal 6.x — not just Acquia Drupal but all modules and themes available on drupal.org as well as custom code. I’m still a firm believer in Drupal distributions so Acquia Drupal still has a role as a packaged on-ramp for people getting started with Drupal. However, anyone will be able to connect any Drupal 6.x site to the Acquia Network — helping us achieve our goal of helping people build and operate great websites with Drupal. Keep an eye on acquia.com if you want to learn more about these changes.

Supporting the full application, including the breadth of modules on Drupal.org, will make the offering more difficult to manage, to be sure, but also will more closely align the value of the support with the needs of Drupal users, especially in the enterprise.

Looking forward to continued work with Acquia and the whole Drupal community – and see you in DC for DrupalCon 2009!