Drupal Development
After a busy year in 2011 with the official release of Drupal 7 in January, we here at Microserve have been looking ahead at what is to come in 2012.
Drupal 7 uptake over the last year has been very high, however some of the modules have taken a while to catch up with Drupal with many modules still in dev, alpha, beta or release candidate stages until recently.
As we move into 2012 most modules are now in full release and the problem of installing an alpha module, crossing our fingers and hoping it will work properly should be gone as all of the key modules reach stable releases. It has never been a better time to move or upgrade your site to Drupal 7.
The new year should bring in some interesting new modules, here are a few of our favourite new modules that we hope to see developed in 2012:
- Views Modes (http://drupal.org/project/views_modes) (currently dev)
- Allows you to switch the view mode of a view e.g. from list to table, in the current view without loosing any exposed or contextual filter values.
- Survey Builder (http://drupal.org/project/survey_builder) (currently alpha)
- Build surveys with a drag and drop style interface, re-use questions across surveys and aggregate responses with Views.
- Redis (http://drupal.org/project/redis) (currently alpha)
- Allows you to use the high performance Redis library as a distributed and scalable replacement for the Drupal cache system.
- Boost (http://drupal.org/project/boost) (currently dev)
- Provides static caching of your whole site and offers significant speed improvements for websites with mostly anonymous traffic.
Of course we couldn't look to the future of Drupal and not mention Drupal 8, still very much in the early stages; many suggestions for how its development should progress and what new features should be included are happening right now over at groups.drupal.org.
There are a variety of core initiatives covering a number of ideas which will hopefully be appearing in the next development of Drupal, here are some of the initiatives we are interested in:
- HTML 5 support
- Mobile support
- Web Services
Other initiatives can be found on the Drupal website (http://drupal.org/community-initiatives/drupal-core).
So 2012 should be a good year for Drupal hopefully with a few surprises and plenty of innovation along the way.
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