Dries Buytaert

Two weeks ago, at DrupalCon Chicago, I gave my traditional State of Drupal presentation. In good tradition, you can download a copy of my slides (PDF, 52 MB) or you can watch a video recording of my keynote on archive.org.

Just before DrupalCon, m62.net, a presentation development company, offered to help me with the production of my slides. I took them up on their offer. They helped me put together the video and helped me with the visuals, as well as the delivery. They went above and beyond to help me -- all free of charge. I think the slides were very effective in delivering the message so a big "Thank you!" to m62.

You know when a piece of software is mature when it starts being adopted by financial services organizations. ING Financial Services recently moved a number of sites from Oracle Stellent to Drupal. Among these sites are http://ing.us, the main portal for their US market. The driver behind this migration was to move to a platform that was more dynamic and provided faster time to market.

During the initial launch of the project, ING had no one that knew Drupal, MySQL or PHP. They brought in external help to do the site development. Today, they have an in-house team to develop upcoming Drupal sites. Many large organizations follow exactly this trajectory.

Investor.gov recently switched to Drupal from WordPress. The site houses a lot of information for investors.

The new investor.gov is a good looking site that also seems to be 508 compliant (for accessibility). The site is easy to use, making it easy for users to get the information they need without being overwhelmed.

All in all, the site is great example of how governments can leverage Drupal to create beautiful and accessible sites. Nice work SEC!

At DrupalCon Chicago I created the Drupal 8 development branch in front of a room full of core contributors. This means that we have officially started work on Drupal 8 and that I started to accept new features and improvements for Drupal 8, the next major version of Drupal.

In my State of Drupal presentation in Chicago I outlined what I believe should be the strategic direction for Drupal 8. If you want all the details, you can watch a video recording of my keynote. If you don't want to watch the entire video, here is the executive summary:

1. Multi-device publishing (aka mobile); clean HTML/CSS, HTML5, contexts, web services APIs, etc
2. Interopability and integration with cloud services: web service APIs, pluggable components, clean data models, etc
3. Delightful experience: accessibility, usability, performance
4. Configuration management: better separation between content and configuration, universally unique identifiers (UUIDs), exportables, more consistent CRUD APIs, etc
5. Content staging

I plan to blog more about each of these topics in the next couple of months. In the mean time, let's continue all the conversations and let's start work. Woot!

Sam Boyer helping me to create the Drupal 8 branch. Picture taken by <a href="http://affinitybridge.com">Ariane Khachatourians</a>.

A screenshot of my screen after we created the Drupal 8 branch.

DrupalCon Chicago ended a few days ago. I'm mostly over my post-DrupalCon blues. As I'm digging out of the back-log of work and sending follow-up e-mails, though, I'm also trying to wrap my head around what happened at DrupalCon. Here are the things which stood out for me:

• DrupalCon Chicago had about 3,000 attendees, which translates to a tremendous amount of energy.
• Having everyone stay in the same hotel which was used for the conference was great. It still blows my mind that we rented basically the entire Sheraton hotel for one week.
• There were two excellent keynote talks: one from Clay Shirky and one from the Jared Spool -- both are people of whom I have admired for a long time.
• Jared Spool RTFM-ing me in his keynote.
• Kieran Lal bought a big round of drinks (and tried to expense it).
• The blue Drupal M&Ms that were provided backstage to help me get ready for my keynote were memorable.
• A Drupal couple getting married in Birds-of-a-Feather session at DrupalCon was spectacular. Congratulations to the happy couple!
• The opening party at the Field Museum was the best Drupal party to date. We danced with elephants and dinosaurs!
• We raised more than $700,000 USD from 60+ sponsors. Thanks to Palantir.net, Acquia and VPS.net for being Diamond Sponsors. Thanks to Workhabit, Trellon, Phase2 and Pantheon for being Platinum Sponsors. Without our sponsors, DrupalCon would not have happened.
• Creating the Drupal 8 development branch with many of the core developers in the room was energizing. We're ready for Drupal 8!
• Microsoft apologizing for IE6 with an advertisement in the DrupalCon program guide was incredible. They even offered a drink by way of an apology. Yes, it was a magical week.
• Drupal Watchdog, the very first Drupal print magazine, was distributed to every attendee. A year ago, I predicted that Drupal would one day have its own print magazine. I didn't expect it to happen this fast. Maybe I should predict that there will be a Drupal developer on the moon within ten years and see if it happens by next Drupal Con.

Thanks for all of the people that helped to organize DrupalCon, and thanks in particular to Tiffany Farris and George De Met. It takes a lot to coordinate an event like this and it is not something we should take for granted. You all did an amazing job. Thanks!

We're about to launch a new add-on product in private beta at Mollom. That new product is effectively a "hosted moderation interface". Our goals are to:

1. Provide an optimized and intelligent moderation interface -- sort and bulk moderate comments by spam score, profanity content and more.
2. Make it easier to moderate multiple websites -- moderate all your sites from a single, unified moderation interface.
3. Make it easier to support moderation teams -- create moderation teams, define their workflows and track the performance of individual team members.
4. Provide moderation as a service -- seamlessly outsource the moderation of your site fully or partially to a dedicated team.

The product is a work in progress, but we believe we'll soon be able to accept a limited number of private beta test users. If you're interested in being an early beta tester, sign up here or leave a comment on this post.

We just re-launched the Acquia Network with a new look and feel, powerful new services and a new developer-focused subscription. Peter Guagenti, who has championed the effort within Acquia, has all the details in his announcement blog post. The Acquia Network is near and dear to my heart as it has been the core of our offerings since the founding of the company and is a key element for Acquia's product vision.

We're living in an interesting time; the web is becoming more and more complex, and on top of that, people's expectations of your website are also increasing. Think about it. Five years ago, it was as simple as adding a blog feature to your site to leap-frog your competition, but today that is just not good enough. You likely need a mobile version of your site, blazing fast response times, carefully tuned content, and much more. It is more subtle, more difficult and more work than it ever was before. Going at it alone can be tough.

The idea behind the Acquia Network has always been to give developers and site owners the best possible tools to help them keep up with the growing complexity of building a great web experience. The new and rebooted Acquia Network makes that promise even stronger as we added three new tools to help build better web experiences: New Relic (performance monitoring), Mobify (mobile) and Visual Website Optimizer (A/B testing). There is more that can be done, so expect the Acquia Network to evolve and grow quite a bit in the weeks ahead. More details in Peter's announcement blog post.