A word to the warning--these notes were taken on the fly and represent, to the best of my rapid fingers, the essence of what Dries said.

Things have changed and not changed. Dries started out indicating that the folks who are registered this year are still 93% male and 7% female. There are 34 countries represented with the USA and Canada as the top two representative countries.

State of Drupal Boston--some highlights.

• Drupal 6 released Feb 13th 2008
• More contributors and patches from 5 to 6
• Drupal 6 has more features
• Easier to Administer
• Easier to Theme
• API improvements--bringing on things like the theme developer module
• More Secure
• Easier to Scale
• Easier to Develop
• For more people--better translation. Can reach out to many more people

There have been 100,000 downloads of Drupal 6 in the first month. Already 20,000 Drupal 6 installations pinging home.

Still, Drupal is still in the early stages. Folks are reviewing its potential, but it is analogous to the electric car. How do people look at purchasing an electric car? You may decide:

• Never
• Not until I've seen enough that they will be serviced well
• after most people have switched
• I'll be the first guy on the block

Just as folks are looking at the electric car, folks are watching Drupal. Drupal has not become mainstream and proves to be a very difficult transition. History has proven that this is a "do or die" transition. That said, we have momentum and we need to keep that going.

Three things need to be done.

• Redesign Drupal.org
• Drupal 7 "Killer" release
• Strategic but sweeping changes

Currently we are enjoying a

• growing install base
• growing ecosystem

This represents new users however we have not adjusted our "house"--Drupal.org--to accommodate the next group of users. In fact, our current group is still in pain.

Dries would like to see a Drupal.org redesign but to do this there is need of

• money
• project management
• Developer resources
• Designer resources

And we all need to have a willingness to accept change.

For Drupal 7, there is the intention of taking the most requested and user and developer features and end up with seven end user features pulls the top three most desired developer features. One more item has been added to the list--usability.

The point really is that the experience IS the product. We need to improve the experience to garner additional users. Even though we are focusing on adding 10 new features to create a "Killer Release" for 7, we ought to look at removing some features from core as well. There are two suggested candidates--throttle and ping.

Dries is looking for a Branch Maintainer for 7. He is looking for someone with...

1. experience
2. responsibility
3. time
4. and a vision for d7

Dries went on to talk about when will the code freeze be. Drupal 6 had a 5 month development cycle and a 7 month code freeze. Given that information, Drupal code freeze for 7 should be on May 15th, 2008.

However, if we are willing to commit for 100% test coverage--then we could engage in 9 months of dev and 3 month of freeze. If we design for testability will lead to better APIs and would encourage experimentation and innovation.

For Drupal 7 we need to

• write un it tests, functional tests and integration tests
• ship core tests with Drupal core
• figure out what test frameworks to use, and if we can ship with core as well

Dries went onto talk about Web 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 and explained that..

Web 1.0 is web content management

Web 2.0 is 1.0 + user management + infinite extensibility

Web 3.0 is Web 2.0 + infinite interoperability. That is to say that we will be looking at data-portability and web service APIs which could equal the semantic Web. Dries predicts that there will be less focus on functionality more focus on data and that the following ought to happen.

1. Integrate data from different sources
2. Allow other people to reuse your data
3. Decentralize data so no party owns all data
4. Make data easily exportable

So that brought the question, how do we get there? We need to look at providing more power to fields--less power to nodes.

• Decompose content into small species
• Treat fields as first class citizen
• connect the fields with semantic sugar
• get it into Drupal 7

This leads to the notion that ANY knowledge in this world can be decomposed in RDF triples of subject, predicate, and object and something like SPARQL can query RDF. RDF MAKES the Internet one big database and SPARQL is the views on steroids. "The Future is here, just not evenly distributed yet."

The social graph just connects people--we have an opportunity to build a graph that connects everything. We are moving from the WWW to the giant global graph (GGG).

This can provide for:

• better search
• better targeted ads
• deeper integration
• better personalization
• import/export
• cck and views in core
• drupal.org integration

We can get some of this in Drupal 7

• more power to files
• XML documents to exchange message/data
• RDF to be used to make data uniform, predictable to tap its potential
• Lets look at SPARQL to try and make it happen

Dries emphasised that we need to keep Drupal FAST and that our ultimate goals to make Drupal mainstream include the following.

• Make drupal easy to use
• Eliminate webmaster
• Eliminate developer
• Eliminate designer
• Eliminate publisher