First report from DrupalCon London

DrupalCon London has just started and the keynote is underway; this is Dries Buytaert's "State of Drupal" address. Some of the leading news:

• DrupalCon London was sold out with 1750 attendees.
• Increasingly more large companies and organizations are standardizing on Drupal for all their websites. The same is taking place in the public sector and even in the financial world, including the NYSE.
• The time it took for Drupal 6 to have 100,000 live sites for Drupal 6 was 12 months. People concerned that Drupal 7 is not being adopted "as rapidly" should realize we hit the 100,000 sites mark at 6 months after Drupal 7 was released. And there are already some larger sites using Drupal 7. Many important Drupal 6 modules aren't fully ported to Drupal 7, but there are also a lot more great new modules that are currently only for Drupal 7, so it really is time.

Some of the key projects to watch now are the Workbench, Media, and Commerce modules, all of which bring evolutionary, if not revolutionary, changes to what is possible to do with Drupal.

Over 3000 people answered the "State of Drupal 2011" survey, three quarters of whom are in the "proficient" (2.3 years of experience with Drupal) group, and about 10 percent in the beginner and expert groups. It's likely there are a lot more "beginners" in the greater community who just are not "plugged in" enough to have been aware of the survey.

More than a third of the people responded to the "biggest competitor" question with "Wordpress"; the next most popular answer was Joomla! Bear in mind that there were no "choices" for this survey question, so these responses were all written in. The big "trade off" in Drupal is the balance between the complexity of Drupal — the ability to do almost anything with it — and the ability to use it easily. What makes Drupal awesome is the large range of modules, but it also is one of the biggest challenges to site building with Drupal; picking the modules to use and becoming proficient at using them gets to be a full-time job.

Dries used the example of the iPhone as a product that balances incredible power with great ease of use; making Drupal the iPhone of open-source content management systems is a goal he put forward for the Drupal community; we need both more functionality and more ease of use. But of course (Dries didn't say this), open source thrives on services which are easier to sell to people who are confused and overwhelmed than to people who feel like they can do anything with the product. Realistically, this probably does have an impact on the traditional complexity of open-source projects.

To keep the quality of Drupal 8 code up, the core team has decided to cap the number of "critical bugs" and "major bugs and tasks" at 15 and 100, respectively. New features won't be considered until features already included have been implemented without too many major or critical bugs. This is helping to keep the stability of the code base good enough that the challenges of building additional complexity onto it can be kept minimal.

Major features that are being implemented in Drupal 8 include:

• Greatly increased native support for CSS3 and HTML5.
• Improved handling of media files (this week the core team hope to determine what key goals are in this area)
• Improving UX and ease of use; also simplifying ease of understanding terminology used by the Drupal community and improvements to Drupal.org to make it, for example, easier to find modules
• Mobile support: Major goals to make native apps and other features to power mobile web
• WYSIWYG in core
• Better APIs with improved support for OOP
• Configuration management
• Improved import/export of content
• Content staging: Ability to more easily push content live from development or staging environments

Expect more soon… at least three of us are about to attend a session by Moshe Weitzman on data migration into Drupal. It looks like they should have picked a larger room since this will be standing room only.