One of the favorite keynotes of any Drupalcon of course is the State of Drupal address. Here’s video of Dries from Szeged:

(I took the one supplied by archive.org and cut out the first 37 minutes, including Drupalcon logistics – 10% female attendance!- and a welcome from the vice-mayor of Szeged, Sandor Nagy, who revealed that Szeged is open source friendly but unfortunately uses Joomla! to manage their web pages).

I love Dries’ approach. Most of the talk is structured around this list of the five things preventing Drupal from achieving world domination:

1. Slow porting of contributed modules
2. Learning curve
3. Restricted access to Drupal talent
4. Drupal.org Experience
5. Lack of Features

He basically walks through each, commenting on what might be going on and how the Drupal community at large can address the issue.

Highlights:

• Seems clear that more features need to move into core. Some (more) aspects of pathauto, CCK, and Views into core, perhaps a WYSIWYG editor (though Dries said he isn’t quite ready to pick one here). Looking at what modules most people install helps determine where core should go.
• Multimedia handling and file handling generally – cleaning up the relationship between files and nodes.
• Usability improvements – here the focus is on Drupal.org as well as Drupal itself. The default install and administer experience is still too confusing. There’s an initial step for first time users that is still too high.
• RDF/Semantic Web – moving beyond the assumption that output = xhtml (This was also a theme at Drupalcon Boston)

When will Drupal 7 be frozen? When it is ready to be frozen. Not likely before January 2009, maybe not even then.

Mollom will ask “suspicious” commenters to solve a CAPTCHA before allowing their comments to post.

If this proves too onerous I will go back to just using Askimet but I wanted to try it out.

Thanks to Dries, Benjamin, et al for running Mollom and to Matthias Vandermaesen for maintaining the WP-Mollom plugin.

[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.