DrupalCon SF: Keynote, State of Drupal
Notes from Dries Buytaert’s Drupalcon San Francisco keynote, The State of Drupal
About the Drupal Community
- 5 years ago, there were 40 people at the first Drupalcon.
- There are nearly 3000 at this Drupalcon today.
- Self assembly of drupalers in europe: “volcon”, as a result of not being able to travel to San Francisco because of the massive volcano eruption in Iceland.
Key quote: “If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together” — an African proverb.
More Notes
- Drupal 8 will be in Git, not in CVS
- There are 19 full distributions on drupal.org. This seems to be unique to Drupal. What other CMS offers pre-packaged distributions for various purposes?
- 2 years ago Dries rallied for “semantic web and linked data” support in drupal core. It is in Drupal 7. This enables
- better on-site search
- better off-site search (SEO, google)
- deeper integration among sites
- advertising that is better targeted
- “turns the web into a database you can use” (as the rest of the web adopts RDFa)
- More big companies are getting interested in Drupal and launching sites
- Cap Gemini
- Accenture
- IBM
- Microsoft (Acquia Drupal on their web platform, new SQL driver, supported Commerce Guys.)
- Support for NoSQL style databases in field API in Drupal 7 (CouchDB, MongoDB, Cassandra)
- Pro Drupal Development book will be updated for Drupal 7
Drupal Core
- Drupal Core was downloaded 230,000 times in March.
- Drupal powers just over 1% of the web.
- 6600 patches accepted for Drupal 7
- 700 people contributed code to Drupal 7
- 25 people did 50% of code for D7
- Culture of passion and believing. Just dive in and get started helping.
- More than 70 modules will be deprecated in D7.
- There are currently 114 critical bugs
- Releasing when? Maybe June or July?
- Very difficult (more and more so) to really understand the details of the entire system.
- As a result, there are subsystem maintainers.
- New testing framework helps ensure that new changes don’t break things.
- Drupal 7 (improvments) will help drive further drupal adoption
- Only 2% of all drupal sites are in the top 1 million sites. This means that the vast majority of Drupal sites are small to medium sites, on shared or small hosts.
- Drupal will continue in the direction of becoming a commodity or a service. The important thing for Drupal developers is that we keep Drupal relevant to the needs and environment of its users.
- Products evolve to eventually over-satisfy the market, and make room for simpler, better fitting solutions. Example: the mainframe computer is largely replaced by desktop computers. Drupal will likely evolve into an ever more powerful platform, but needs to also remain simple to get started with. Distributions (pre-configured installations of Drupal) are expected to fill this entry-level need.
Drupal 8
- Add features that many enterprise users still require.
- Create a better experience for small sites.
- For both small and Enterprise, improve usability, performance, and the framework.
Wrapping up
- Drupal has a culture of contributing, executing (not just talking about it), and having fun.
- “Awesome happens” –Dries
- Morten announces availability of tickets for Drupalcon Copenhagen at http://cph2010.drupal.org