sleepcamel.net : brad weikel

Highlights from Dries Buytaert's keynote address.

• Overview of Drupal 6 - bigger community, better administration, easier theming, more secure, more scalability, easier to develop for, better localization. The State of Drupal is <strong>
• However, Drupal is still in the early adoption phase, and a transition to the mainstream is essential (and very difficult). What must happen:
  1. Redesign drupal.org
  2. Drupal 7 killer release
  3. Broad, strategic changes
• Dries gave a broad overview of survey data on requested features for D7, and added Usability to the list.
• Showed a hilarious visualization of eye-tracking on someone creating a new user account, and completely failing due to poor Drupal UI.
• Proposed removal of Ping and Throttle from core.
• Survey data shows that there should be one major release per year. So Drupal 7 should be in code freeze by May 15th, followed by a 7 month test cycle...
• however, if we embrace testing, code freeze could be postponed as late as October 15.
• Haha... Dries suggests a $1 donation for every broken test, to fund next conference.
• Big strategic change: move from extensibility to infinite interoperability.
  • Web 1.0 = web content management
  • Web 2.0 = Web 1.0 + user management + infinite extensibility
  • Web 3.0 = Web 2.0 + infinite interoperability = The Real Symantec Web

  These means much more focus on data, instead of functionality. Extend Drupal to support multiple output formats. More power to fields, less to nodes. This really means a big move towards RDF, using SPARQL (= views on steroids, or distributed Views).

• He showed a very impressive use of these techniques to pull all sorts of geo data from multiple sources, query it against a list of his friends and concerts in Boston, and easily construct a map of their locations. Then showed several other very rich examples.
• "The future is here, it just isn't evenly distributed yet."
• The social graph just connects people. We have the opportunity to create a graph that connects everybody. ("WWW => GGG" [Tim Berners Lee])
• The semantic web will... Eliminate the webmaster. Eliminate the developer. Eliminate the designer. Eliminate the publisher?