DrupalConDC State of the Drupal

Dries Buyteart:
We do this every six months about...
DrupalCon DC 2009 State of Drupal

spoiler: DRÜPAL ROCKS!!

History of Drupal, his student dorm photo with the giant red sombrero in 1999.

Learning more about PHP and MySQL, the new kids on the block at this time.

DrupalCon Antwerp, more than twice the expected people.

Slide with Robert douglass and his French horn. Wrote the very first Drupal book.

Demoed:
Drag and droppable widgets AND tabs for the front page dashboard for users logged into Drupal.org.

I think it will be a really big thing

Spent 5,000 Euros on trademarks, looking at putting ads on Drupal.com to pay for that.

Core downloads doubled to 200,000 a month.
4,400 contributed projects.
Uniques/month almost doubled to 1.5M.

All about allowing people to self-organize.

Long tail of contributions.

In a company, instead of open source, you can't have the guy who contributes once a year.

Coordination instead of planning.

Sometimes you have to plan (redesign of Drupal.org code sprints)

September 1: Code freeze.

And it will be released when it's ready.

With another 6 months of development, I think we'll have quite a nice release.

When it's ready: no critical issues.

Usability slide of unusable short matchsticks, watering can with the handle on the same side of the slot, and

Shipping with two install profiles for Drupal 7 - minimal (which is what we get today) and standard with dummy data.

Good but not enough.

Exciting things:

• Usabiity team.
  Also, Acquia hired Mark Boulton to help with Drupal 7 usability (for the entire community).
• File API.
• CCK in core.
• Database abstraction layer

Wouldn't it be nice if you could classify users with taxonomy?
Make poll module a field so polls can be attached to anything?

hasn't happened but it can keep people busy.

Evolution of the Internet:

• Linking machines.
• Linking pages (how Google made all their money)
• Linking data
• Linking things (knowing what is in your fridge)

Think of the Internet as one machine.

Data portability and interoperability should be a given.

Tim Berners-Lee calls this the Giant Global graph.

Dries wants in core:

• OAuth support
• Job queues
• RDFa output (only by way of RDF itself in core, darn it!)
• Real-time messaging (XMPP)
• Activity log

A movement needs a mission.

Medium-term mission, make it more usable, let people easily make any kind of
Great developer platform.

We have the platform to help bootstrap some of these technologies.

There is adifference between telling people what to do and creating a movement-- letting people rally around problems and solve them.

A movement needs a healthy ecosystem. Companies give us the muscles to tackle some really hard problems. More bigger companies, make code sprints and these conferences possible.

A movement, Drupal, needs many leaders. Most people are lurkers, not leaders. Drupal has thousands of contributors. Most people here have learned how to make contributions.

You didn't ask how to help Drupal, you just did. And asked for feedback afterwards, which is a good sign of leadership.

All of us help each other.

This is how we democratize publishing
[etc.]
and help change the world

Jose Zamora, Knight Foundation, gets up right after Dries. "Glad to be part of this movement."

Dries providing technical help for the slides for the State of the Knight Drupal Initiative.

Goal of lowering the barriers to online publishing: asked Drupal community for ideas. You established open public application process.
Together we selected the six we thought would have the greatest impact.

digital conversation
digital publication free and open for all

Winners will receive a total of $485,380.

Addison Berry - to create clear, concise, up-to-date instructions for Drupal and to set up a standardized process to run documentation sprints.

Bill Fitzgerald - multiple geographic communities to share local news and information with one another.

Dave Cohen - to allow anyone to easily create a one-click Drupal online news sites with Facebook integration.

Nick Vidal - to develop software that allows individuals to create a personalied stream of info in their social network -- filter, distribute, and recommend. (goddamn i've give a version of this proposal several times)

Rob Loach - allow anyone to add microblogging to a Drupal site.

Development Seeed - to create open-source digital information tools that will help citizens better communicate and understand news of their community.

Good, but...

Where's Sam Boyer's Decision stuff? And that's not enough money for everything above!

Resolution