How Did We Do? Revisiting Our CMS Predictions for 2015
Back at the beginning of 2015 we made 10 predictions for the year ahead.
We said that the last few years had been quiet in the CMS world, and that 2015 would finally bring big changes.
Let’s see whether 2015 did prove to be as revolutionary we predicted …
#1. New user interfaces
Wrong.
We predicted that CMS interface design would finally improve after several years of stagnation.
Sadly, it’s hard to claim this happend. Ghost abandoned plans for their dashboard. Drupal 8’s interface is the same as Drupal 7’s. Joomla and WordPress made few changes.
Perhaps next year this prediction will come true, thanks to project like WordPress’ Javascript-driven Calypso.
#2. Conferences outside the US and Europe
Half-correct.
Until 2014, CMS conferences were very US and Euro-centric. Joomla did take their World Conference to India and Drupal is planning to go to India early next year.
But, the trends is not strong. No more events international events are planned after DrupalCon Asia.
#3. The biggest hack So Far
Wrong. And we’re very happy to admit that.
In 2014, we saw Drupalgeddon and a whole series of attacks on WordPress plugins. Many of these issues impacted hundred of thousands or even millions of sites.
If a bigger attack that Drupalgeddon were to hit, it would be a WordPress hack. But, WordPress has done a superb job with security and particularly auto-updates. They’ve had huge security issues, but the use of auto-updates stopped them from having a real world impact.
#4. Open source launches are SaaS-first
Correct.
We mentioned that Ghost and Discourse and other projects were all launching with SaaS options, in order to provide an immediate revenue source. This trend seems to be escalating thanks to projects like Mautic, plus WordPress plugins and Drupal distributions.
#5. SSL all the things
Half-Correct.
If we’d written this blog post a week ago, this might be marked as “Wrong”. But Letsencrypt.org launched last week and was immediately taken up by a wide variety of projects and companies. I suspect that Letencrypt will be very widely available by mid-2016.
#6. GoPHP7
Wrong.
PHP 7 was scheduled for launch in mid-October. It arrived only 6 weeks behind schedule.
Will there be a strong movement to get people to update? No, we don’t think so. Instead, the PHP community is focusing energy on getting people to move away from very old PHP 4 and 5 versions.
#7. Drupal 8 Launches “Early”
Half-correct.
Drupal 8 was a long undertaking. To say the least.
We prediceted that the Drupal 8 team would pick a date, release 8.0 and start getting user adoption and iterating.
Did that happen? Not fully, but some promised features, such as the migration path, were pushed off to 8.1/
#8. Joomla 3 is the One True Version
Wrong.
We predicted that Joomla would adopt the WordPress release cycle and standardize on Joomla 3.
Certainly the user community has standardized on Joomla 3. However, the Joomla developers are making plans for Joomla 4.
#9. WordPress Changes Much Faster Than in 2014
Wrong.
WordPress had a quiet year for changes in 2014. The last sizable update was in December 2013 with the new admin area design.
We expect WordPress to move more quickly in 2015, starting with the integration of the WordPress API. The first part of the API will be added to the core this week, but WordPress continued to iterate relatively slowly.
#10. This Will Be a Defining Year For PHP Projects
Correct.
We said that many major PHP projects were over 10 years old and facing big turning points. That proved true.
Drupal 8, Magento 2, Symfony 3 and PHP7 were among the major releases.
Both Drupal and WordPress seem to have set course towards a world with PHP backends and Javascript frontends.
2015 was a far more interesting than many recent years and will go a very long way towards defining the future of the PHP world.
It certainly was a more successful year for our favorite CMSs than it was for our predictions!
