Dries Buytaert: The State of Drupal

Blogged by Steve Parks on Wednesday, 3 September 2009

DrupalCon Paris is underway now, with Dries Buytaert cutting a Cat5 cable instead of a ribbon to officially open proceedings.

He's now speaking in his role as the project founder and lead about the 'state of drupal'.

And first, the subject of the code freeze for Drupal 7 - he's describing the waves of drupal development work, and how it builds up towards code freeze into a patch frenzy - and how developers complain.

He shows a quote:
Paul Saffo: "People overestimate short-term benefits of innovation, but under-estimate long term benefits".

He talks about Gartner's 'hype cycle' which starts with an innovation trigger, early adopters, then positive hype, peak of inflated expectations, negative hype, trough of disillusionment, slope of enlightenment, then settles into a plateau of productivity.

He says that drupal 6 has settled nicely into the plataeu of productivity.

He says that Drupal7 needs to be at the height of the curve of inflated expectations before code freeze (which prevents new features from being added). The question is, is it there?

Dries outlines some of the changes made. One of the highlights of this is that Fields API is now in core (essentially CCK. Tacxonomy terms and node bodies are now fields. JQueryUI is in core. There are new themes, and much much more.

Dries says the code is going to freeze - but some things are half-baked like Fields API, Usability improvements, test coverage - and more importantly performance has degraded.

So - code freeze is extended one week to next Monday to allow people to work on D7 udring DrupalCon Paris. The second phase is named 'code slush', which is time limited to 5 weeks. No new features or functionality will be allowed - except 10 carefully chosen exceptions. Important API changes for existing features will be allowed. Usability, testing, documentation and performance improvement changes will be allowed. The API and Schema freeze will be on Oct 15th.

The 10 exceptions are: Imagefield, Field translations, converting profile module to field API, convert taxonomy terms to fields API, overlays, edit anywhere, shortcuts, dashboard, plugin manager, RDF/RDFa.

Then the last phase is 'strictly polish' - small usability, testing, documentation and performance changes only. This is time limited to 4 weeks.

The final phase is bugs and release blockers only. After this, Drupal 7 will be released when it's ready - hopefully early 2010.

He shows a quote from Joseph Schumpeter who says that Radical innovation drives creative destruction.

Dries says that everything goes from being an innovation to simply a service - even computer hardware is doing this. It starts as an innovation, then is available as a bespoke product, then as a general product, then as a service. That's when innovations mature.

Dries says he likes this. Drupal distributions are the way to go. He says install profiles are becoming modules. Plugin manager will also be in core - allowing easy module installationa nd upgrading. It's also worth looking at Features.

He says richness and reach equal success. Drupal has richness, but not yet reach. Distributions will achieve that reach. He believes drupal is a framework AND a product, and wants to develop both.

For drupal 8 he wants to consider make more of a distinction between the two in the codebase - so you could just install the 'framework' if you want.

He says that we need to move from simply innovation driven development to market or user driven development. Drupal 7 usability is a good example of this.

Quote: "If you're not afraid, you're not doing the right thing." But the result is some pain.

The usability created friction between designers and developers - but this shows it's achieving something - and changing drupal. Drupal is growing up, and this is part of the reality of growing up. We have no choice but to grow up.

We have to reach out to new people and learn how to interact with them.

We need to increase the reach - its our biggest challenge and biggest opportunity.

There's some discussion/argument in the questions about how the process of the usability changes was handled.

There's a question about the upgrade path, and whether it'll be easy. Dries says there'll be a data upgrade path - but API's will break - so custom modules need to be updated.

In other announcements:
NowPublic has been acquired by Examiner. An ironic new drupal adopter is the Java.net community of Java developers!

And that's the end of Dries' presentation - now on with DrupalCon!

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