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State of Drupal
(First part of this week I am attending DrupalCon 2008)
[Update 3/4/08: Audio from the State of Drupal as well as Jay Batson and Dries' "Presenting Acquia" talk are available on Shai's podcast]
[Updated again 3/6/08: Video from the State of Drupal at Internet Archive]
Not surprisingly, Dries’ state of Drupal presentation was well received by the crowd of assembled Drupalers.
The state of our union is strong, Dries began, citing the success of Drupal 6 in attracting even broader communities of interest. But as we prepare for the broader audiences that success brings, there are things we need to pay more attention to.
The focus of Drupal 7, as Dries recommended to the community, should be on interoperability and usability. This means improving internal and external APIs, enhancing data portability, and redesigning the home of Drupal, drupal.org, to better accomodate the next wave of users joining the community.
(Great to see a project lead of a major open source community paying so much attention to usability!)
The full presentation listed 11 key needs for Drupal 7, highlighting usability and APIs, as well as the more predictable “CCK Fields into core and “Views lite in Core” approach.
Dries also set expectations for the code freeze for Drupal 7 - May 15, 2008- but suggested that code freeze could be delayed as far as October 2008 if 100% test coverage existed for core.
The last section was all about the semantic web and RDF triples, arguing that better usage of structured data in RDF formats could enable Drupal powered sites to become part of the broader emerging data web.
“Google and others want to build a social graph which connects everyone - we have an opportunity to build a larger graph which connects everything.”
I will link to the presentaiton itself when posted - for now also check out http://twitter.com/benfinklea who was live tweeting it and keeping up far better than I could.
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[...] Anyway, back to the “two worlds” topic, the idealist in me hopes a sort of ping pong diplomacy took place. Perhaps the DrupalCon attendees were the New York Philharmonic to AIIM’s North Korea. Maybe a few of the suits learned something from the insightful questions being asked by the messenger bag crowd. Rather than be annoyed, I was actually encouraged by the legacy ECM vendor who came to our booth and grilled me on Alfresco and how it compared to their product. I tried to get her to renounce her faith right then and there but she was tough. AIIM could do more to encourage that kind of cultural exchange and maybe even foster the innovation that old school ECM so sorely lacks. It sounds like the Rocky Mountain Chapter is planning on offering some open source topics soon. That’s great and I hope to see that happen in other chapters. And while we’re at it, maybe AIIM could offer free floor space to non-commercial open source projects. Just a thought. At the very least, I hope the physical presence of 800 - 900 people passionate about open source content management was a jarring reality check to AIIM, legacy ECM vendors, and the larger community. On a tactical note, a nice side-benefit of the co-located conferences was that the Optaros folks attending DrupalCon were able to put in some booth time on the AIIM show floor. If you want to read more about some of the DrupalCon sessions, check out John Eckman’s blog. [...]