State of Drupal (DrupalCon 2009 notes)

State of Drupal
Dries Buytaert

talk theme: "Drupal Rocks"

Meet Dries in 1999 ~10 years ago
young geek: Assembler, Compilers, Linux kernel wireless, chess, stamps

Drop.org message board

Drupal 1.0.0 -- January 15th, 2001
for news-driven community or portal site

Jeremy @ kerneltrap needed a site to resist slashdotting
Dries gives him admin privileges to drop.org to try out

folks in Drupal community have tended to be young

Mark Boulton's redesign of Drupal.org
drupal.com forthcoming
Lullabot podcast an important milestone

action/attendance/attention doubling by year

• downloads
• conference attendance
• contributed projects
• uniques/month

Hundreds of thousands of websites
thousands of developers
more than 4000 extension modules
100% yearly growth
24/7
Free

Built by everyone
Controlled by nobody
Like the internet: always a little bit broken, yet works

"Replace planning with coordination." -- Clay Shirky

(Dries:)
"I never believed in formal roadmaps"
"I never believed in hierarchies"
"I never believed that the Drupal Association should be in charge of the roadmap"

Long tail of contributions -- difference between companies and open source

"How do we avoid creating institutions, how do we avoid doing planning?"

code freeze for Drupal 7 on Sept 1st, 2009.
doesn't mean it will be released then: will be released when it's ready

Drupal 5 had installer
Drupal 6 made it clean

Usability...

Drupal 7:

• default install profile
• usability team
• Better media/document handling: File API
• Fields API (CCK) in core
• RIP Profile module
• testing
• serious database abstraction layer improvement

Dries would like to see these features in core:

• OAuth Support
• Job queues
• RDFa output
• Real-time messaging (XMPP)
• Activity log

Start thinking of the internet as one big machine -- all devices are views into the one machine

Trends:

• Linking machines (internet)
• Linking pages (web)
• Linking data (semantic web?)
• Linking things (internet of things)

Linking data is called:

• Kevin Kelly: "One machine"
• Tim Berners-Lee: "Giant Global Graph"
• "Web 3.0"

Drupal is a Movement

A movement needs a mission.
Right now mini mission is usability: allow folks to make any website they want easily, without restriction.
A larger mission is in helping transform the web.
There is a difference between telling people what to do and creating a movement.
A movement needs a healthy ecosystem.
A movement needs leaders.
Most people are not leaders, they're lurkers -- waiting, watching what happens.
You are not most people.