Dries Buyatart opening keynote

We’re in a very full ballroom for the opening keynote by Dries Buyatart. There are thousands of people in here. The WiFi network is overloaded, really glad I brought the Verizon MiFi.

The theme of the opening video was pride and fun. Some really amazing stats in that montage – five years ago at the first DrupalCon there were 30 people. Today there are 3,000. Over a million websites are now built on Drupal, an estimated 1.7% of the internet. There are now more than a half-million Drupal users worldwide, and over 130K unique visitors a day visit Drupal.org. This is a community that is energized and engaged. In the words on the screen it’s a community that’s proud to be a part of something that’s both fun and world changing.

First part of the speech is about the release of Drupal 7. Over 1,000 people contributed code, but a core group of 30 developers wrote half of the patches, who were recognized and asked to stand.

Talking about what they did right with D7: test-driven development, accessibility, usability, test builds.

And what they can do better: empowerment, release cycle predictability, high-bandwidth communication, better priorities, too many critical bugs, putting performance first.

Talking about what all this means for Drupal 8 development. Branched development – the Git migration provides more flexibility for sandbox builds for testing, which can then be pulled into the main tree. A promise that no more than 15 critical bugs at any given time, to help with a predictable release schedule.

He seems to be taking a step back now – talking about structuring the team for developing the next release. Then onto a video titled “What is Drupal?” Quotes are heavily focused on how it’s a community, both in being a part of building it and in how it empowers people to do great things in their web work. All of the quotes are listed on Dries’ blog.

So, onto the future. The future is about ubiquitous connectivity – being able to connect to people on any device, anywhere, at any time. Smartphone shipments are beginning to eclipse PC shipments. The social computing experience today is far more individualisitic – it’s about being connected to your friends. Demand for mobile enterprise access is also emerging as a huge need.

So what does this mean for Drupal 8?

• Multi-device publishing. Right now it takes a large investment to make your website work natively on all devices. By the time D8 is released it will be expected of all sites. This means a development focus on HTML5, CSS3 and a markup-free core.
• Interoperability. Being able to connect to external services – MailChimp, SalesForce, etc. This means a dev focus on Clean APIs, context, web services, standard-based connections
• Increase of both Simplicity and Power. Analogy of the iPhone as both the most powerful cell phone he’s had, but it’s also very simple to use. For individuals the expectation of a delightful experience is rising – performance, accessibility, usability.

Large organizations are adopting Drupal. Grammy.com adopted because it scales well. U.S. House of Representatives is moving all 500+ congressional websites to Drupal. Symantect Connect is an example of a large user community website, in which they’ve outsourced support to their community – 95% of their technical questions are now answered by the community. He interviewed 20 large organizations about their pain points and there were some. The main ones going on the roadmap are configuration management and content staging.

The future is not just about features. The ecosystem is important. This means making sure that Drupal shops are professionally run, that there is investment in Drupal.org, the Git migration. All of the things that strengthen and make the community more credible will make the platform more attractive to more businesses.

In summary Drupal 8 development is going to focus on different processes, staging management and the ecosystem. Four initial initiatives: web services. UUIDs, HTML5, ______ (didn’t catch the last one)

Q&A going on now. Interesting point, question was what the biggest risk to Drupal is right now – answer is “becoming too big.” Danger is there that development will become slower, less agile, less able to adapt. The past five years have seen it go from a “best kept secret” to a very mainstream platform. It’s part of growing up, but doesn’t mean that the community has to give up on its core values and continue having fun. Also, the Drupal Camps are a good compliment as smaller regional gatherings to fill in the gaps as DrupalCon grows bigger.