Dries Buytaert

State of Drupal (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!

Drupal 7 code freeze: September 1st

As I announced in my keynote presentation at DrupalCon DC this morning, the next code freeze will be on September 1st, a little less than six months from now. It's been more than a year since we started work on Drupal 7, and we have two-thirds of the development cycle behind us.

After September 1, we'll focus on the performance, usability and stability of the code we have in hand, and begin preparing for the release of Drupal 7. As a general rule, after the code freeze, only bug fixes will be allowed.

Announcing a code freeze date is always a little bit dangerous in light of a possible slip, but doing so helps prioritize development efforts and helps end-users in their planning. Drupal 7's release date is still unknown. As always, it's ready when it's ready, and the actual release date will depend on the length of the code freeze, which, in turn, depends on how well the Drupal community continues to embrace test-driven development.

I decided on September 1st after talking with people in the community (including my Drupal 7 co-maintainer webchick), reading forums topics, listening to users and examining the download and usage statistics. Now that most of the major modules work with Drupal 6, it's clear that Drupal 6 has really taken off. As an example, Drupal.org is humming along on Drupal 6.

To make Drupal 7 a killer release, we have a lot of work remaining. Another six months of development should leave us with enough time to complete existing work (like fields in core and our database abstraction layer), to add additional features, to incorporate various usability improvements (based on the usability team's work and that of Mark Boulton), and more.

With only six months ahead of us, now is the time to get involved. As usual, the amount of core contributions increases as we approach code freeze so the sooner your patches land, the better.

I haven't blogged much about Drupal 7 yet, and have resisted the urge to do so because I felt people weren't ready for it. For many of us, instead, we've used the last few months to focus on some heavy backend work like the new database abstraction layer and fields in core. As we begin to build the momentum for our next release, expect me to blog more about the exciting development efforts occuring in Drupal 7.

State of Drupal presentation (August 2008)

Last week at DrupalCon Szeged I gave my traditional state of Drupal presentation. The video of the presentation is provided below, and you can download a copy of my slides (PDF, 11MB) as well.

The presentation discusses the results of the recent survey that I conducted; the survey ran for 30+ days and collected more than 1300 responses so it should provide a good idea of the community's current thinking. I'll provide more color and details about the survey results in a number of follow-up posts.

State of Drupal presentation (March 2008)

Last week at DrupalCon Boston I gave my traditional state of Drupal presentation in front of 850 Drupalistas. The video of the presentation is provided below, and you can download a copy of my slides (PDF, 15 MB) as well. The video is available in alternative encoding formats from archive.org.

Topics I talked about: the Drupal 6 release, the state of our union, the need for a drupal.org redesign, the Drupal 7 killer release, the Drupal 7 development cycle, usability, test-driven development, the future of Drupal and the semantic web, etc. There is a lot of material in this presentation and during the course of the next few weeks, I plan to decompose this presentation in a number of extended blog posts. Stay tuned!

State of Drupal presentation (September 2007)

Robert Garrigos from the Drupal Catalan user group just uploaded a video of the State of Drupal presentation that I gave at DrupalCon Barcelona 3 months ago. The presentation shares the results of a survey that I conducted in August; the survey ran for 30+ days, collected more than 1000 responses, and should do a pretty good job capturing the Drupal Zeitgeist.

Have a look at the video below (my presentation starts 12 minutes into the video) and/or download a copy of my slides (PDF, 14MB).