State of Drupal (Szeged 2008)

I was unfortunately unable to get to Drupalcon Szeged last month, so I’m now making my way through the videos and slide decks from sessions there.

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

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Don’t Make Me Decide Yet: Lowering the Barrier to Entry

A few days ago Josh Porter was tweeting about the notion of “fatigue points”:

I think it’s a very useful concept, pointing out that people’s decisions aren’t binary: it isn’t a single yes/no decision but an active, ongoing negotiation, which determines which services you use and don’t use.

You can also think about the barrier to entry of a new user in a similar fashion. Any time you try out a new application or service there are a few barriers, and whatever the application developer can do to lower those barriers the more users will get over that threshold.
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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!)
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