Dries’ keynote lasted a larger part of an hour and touched many important aspects of the future of Drupal. With the release of Drupal6, all eyes are on Drupal7, of course. Dries pulled up poll results showing that most users expect one major release per year. Considering that Drupal7 release is expected some time around Valentine’s day next year, too. Is that becoming a tradition?
The release may be delayed only if the community decides to finally get on writing automated tests for the released code. In such case Dries promised to postpone the core’s code-freeze to facilitate the change. He seems quite eager to get more unit, functional and integration tests into Drupal. That, however, not only means people changing how they write code, but – identifying a suitable testing framework. Dries noted that Simpletest is too large, while some other, lighter frameworks are missing crucial functionality.
Dries also talked about usability tests performed in a professional usability lab in Minnesota. They were not too encouraging. The Drupal way of managing content and sites is apparently not too intuitive for an “average Joe”. “Where you see problem, Dries seems opportunity”, though :), so the take-away from this news is – do expect more intuitive, better UI in Drupal7.
Closer to the end of the keynote Dries pulled a little “industry visionary/Steve Jobs” thing on us, talking about the future strategic positioning of Drupal. “Data and interoperability are the future” – was the tag-line.
Following is a brief record of the conceptual analysis he presented to us:
“web 2.0 = web 1.0 + user management + extensibility [where Drupal rocks now]
web 3.0 = web 2.0 + interoperability [is where Drupal should head to]
Supporting different formats of output (XML, JSON, HTML, XHTML) is crucial.
Conclusion:
“More power to fields, less power to nodes. Make it more granular and assemble with some semantic sugar.”
Basically, Dries thinks that one of the biggest shortcomings of Drupal is that it’s so strongly tied to HTML. Since powerful data manipulation (data exchange in particular) is the future of the Web, Drupal needs to provide strong data-manipulation and data-exchange capabilities.
Dries feels that in order to achieve the interoperability and output-agnostic rendering, Drupal needs to increase the emphasis on fields, making them first-class citizens; this would retire nodes from the position of being central entities in Drupal.
Dries said that his attention has long been occupied by RDF. RDF triplets are perfect examples of well-designed fields. RDF also comes with a robust query language – SparQL – Views On Steroids, as Dries called it.
RDF is interesting especially since there is enormous number of RDF databases (Wikipedia and CIA country facts being the two most famous ones), that Drupal users could tap into.