Dries Buytaert

State of Drupal presentation (March 2012)

Last week at DrupalCon Denver, I gave my traditional state of Drupal presentation. A total of 3000 were present at DrupalCon. A lot of people asked me for my slides. So in good tradition, you can download a copy of my slides (PDF, 21 MB) or you can watch a video recording of my keynote.

Drupal 8 feature freeze: December 1st, 2012

Last summer, I blogged about how I think about Drupal release date planning, tying it to the Gartner hype cycle and the corollary Drupal mood cycle.

The release timeline I laid out in my previous blog post was a Drupal 8 release 18 months after Drupal 7 had achieved the “Plateau of Productivity", the point in time where developing in Drupal 6 seems mostly pointless due to the maturity of Drupal 7.

At that time, I said that I felt that Drupal 7’s “plateau of productivity" was about 6-9 months away. Today, almost 9 months later, I think that by any reasonable measure we are currently there. There are over 300,000 live Drupal 7 installations, which represents nearly 50% of all reported Drupal sites. The top Drupal modules all have Drupal 7 releases, the vast majority of which are either stable releases or release candidates.

Having reached the “plateau of productivity" also means that I feel comfortable announcing the Drupal 8 release timeline (after catch and I talked about it). Without further ado, here is how the rest of the Drupal release cycle breaks down:

Timeline:

• December 1, 2012: Feature freeze. No new features are allowed (unless specifically exempted), focus turns instead to API and UI clean-ups and polishing of existing features.
• February 1, 2013: Code freeze: focus on bug fixes, stabilization. No API changes, instead focusing on bug fixing, preparing for release, and getting the count of critical bugs down to 0.
• August, 2013 (DrupalCon Europe 2013): Drupal 8 released, to wild, international fanfare. :-)

This means that Drupal 8 is 18 months away. Time to shift Drupal 8 core development into higher gear!

The ~6-month window for bug fixes laid out here is obviously much shorter than the 18-month window for bug fixes we ended up having with Drupal 7, but the hope is that the issue count thresholds that we’ve introduced this release will ensure this process is much shorter than in Drupal 7, since we’ll be going from approximately 15 down to 0, rather than approximately 300 to 0.

This timeline also means that if there are Drupal 8 initiatives you’d like to see happen, or other specific features or things you want to see fixed in Drupal core, now is the time to make those things happen. If you’ve never helped with Drupal core development before and would like to, stop by IRC during Core office hours, or join us at DrupalCon Denver. There will also be plenty of other sprints at DrupalCon around various Drupal core initiatives, and you can always start your own!

See you in Denver and in the issue queue! :-)

State of Drupal presentation (August 2011)

Three weeks ago, at DrupalCon London, I gave my traditional State of Drupal presentation. In good tradition, you can download a copy of my slides (PDF, 37 MB) or you can watch a video recording of my keynote.

My presentation was based on the results of the State of Drupal survey, which got over 3,000 responses from people all over the world. Because I didn't have time to talk about all the survey questions in my keynote, I've decided to make a summary of all the survey results (PDF, 160 KB) available as well. It gives a more complete view on the survey results.

However, there is much more data hidden in the raw survey results, so if you'd like to do your own analysis, you can download a copy of the raw survey results (CSV format or XLS format) and look at the raw data yourself. I anonymized the data by removing the name and company information. If you decide to analyze the raw data, consider sharing your findings with all of us.

DrupalCon London was a blast and I would like to thank everyone for making it such a great event.

State of Drupal presentation (March 2011)

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.

State of Drupal presentation (April 2010)

Two weeks ago at DrupalCon San Francisco I gave my traditional state of Drupal presentation. A total of 6000 people watched my keynote live; 3000 were present at DrupalCon, and another 3000 watched the live video stream. Nonetheless, a lot of people asked me for my slides. So in good tradition, you can download a copy of my slides (PDF, 48 MB) or you can watch a video recording of my keynote on archive.org.

Picture taken backstage while waiting to go on stage for my keynote.

Picture taken after my keynote just before packing up my laptop.

State of Drupal presentation (September 2009)

Two weeks ago at DrupalCon Paris, I gave my traditional state of Drupal presentation. The video of the presentation is available from archive.org, and you can download a copy of my slides (PDF, 8 MB) as well.

I don't want to give away the spoiler, but essentially, the state of Drupal is strong. :) We should be really proud of what we have accomplished with Drupal 6, and what we're about to accomplish with Drupal 7. In the presentation, I also talk about what it means for Drupal to grow up, and what the next phase of our life will most likely look like.

State of Drupal presentation (March 2009)

Last week at DrupalCon DC I gave my traditional state of Drupal presentation in front of 1400 Drupalistas. The video of the presentation is provided below, and you can download a copy of my slides (PDF, 20 MB) as well. The video is available in alternative encoding formats from archive.org. Topics I talked about: the history of Drupal, the Drupal 7 release, the future of Drupal, etc. Have a look!