DrupalCon 2008 Szeged Has Started!

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The state of drupal

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Drupalcon coverage stories, photos, twitter etc you can find at our Drupalcon channel page

Drupalcon started today.  Registration process went fairly smoothly and first session is in progress. 500 people signed up and looking at the room that sounds about right. Update of Dries' first session will follow soon when he starts.

IMPORTANT NOTE: CONGRATS ANGIE on becoming the D7 co-maintainer!!

Updates:
The Vice-mayor of Szeged, Mr. Sandor Nagy is giving us a nice welcome. He was a software developer before he became the vice mayor. Szeged uses a lot of open source tools and technology including open office, and joomla (boo!) powers the city website. The city is a sponsor of the drupal conference.

9:55am Dries is giving his keynote, we are about 45 min. behind schedule. Dries is going over the results of his survey... The factors inhibiting drupal's growth: contrib modules not updated to d6, the learning curve, not enough access to drupal talent - the demand for drupal talent outstrips supply.  Also, the drupal.org experience was sited as an issue (which correlates with traffic growth to the site slowing/not growing as fast as we'd like).  also, drupal lacks key features. only 21% of drupal.org users consider themselves 'end users' which raises the question - where are the end users going? Dries' personal goal, "for drupal to empower people to quickly and easily assemble powerful, rich and interactive websites"

10:05: we are good at basic web technologies (html, css, hosting, cck / views, php, sql, etc.) but less so at security, scalability, and test driven dev, which is dispaointing - these need to be a prioirty - our software needs to perform and be rock solid.  and folks want to learn more about: cck/views, js/ajax, module development, php development...

in July, drupal.org served 21million pages to 1.1 unique visitors - this only counts the main drupal.org site (not groups.drupal, asociation.drupal.org, etc.). Most of the traffic (33%) comes from the US - the traffic stats reflect the confrence attendance stats. Avg traffic growth was 40% compared to last year. Strong growth from these countries: slovak republic, russina federation, turkey, china, mexico, bulgaria, etc. so we are spreading to more people internationally - which could be due in part to internationalization being a big part of drupal 6 (d6). are there simple things we can do to translate drupal.org pages into other languages (like wikipedia does?)

where do you spend most of your time on drupal.org? novices spend time in the handbooks and forums, where as experts spend time in the issues queue. most people felt taht moduel reviews and module ratings were important for d.o.

10:10 - drupal.org redesign is the big 2008-09 project. Mark Boulton Design was chosen to lead the efforts. He'll give the keynote tommorow. See http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-org-redesign-analysis for more info.  WE NEED YOUR HELP to make this a successful project. 

the total number of Drupal 6 downloads have surpased all D5 downloads to date.  The ping home data for the last 7 days shows 12,172 drupal 5 installs (note that the update module which does the ping is not part of core - it's contrib, which is why this number is low, this was added to core in drupal 6, but it still needs to be activated). Drupal 6 has been out for 6 months. there are 22,632 drupal 6 install that ping home. the actual number of drupal sites out there is much higher, but we have no way to track these. Drupal 5 install base only 35% run the most secure / latest version (5.10). Drupal 6, only 37% are on the latest - we need to figure out how we can improve this - why aren't people udating??  

Drupal 6 module usage stats: views 29%, token 25%, cck 23%, image 20%, pathauto 20%,... cck and views dominate the charts. should path auto be in core? (yes!! at least some of it's features). Wysiwyg editors fck, imce, and tinymce are all very popular - there are 3 in the top 20 most used modules (wysiwyg should also be in core!)

10:25 on average 23% of people don't install any modules or themes after they download drupal. 10% have one modules installed, 8% have 2. the avg number of installed modules is just under 5 modules - only 40% have more then 5 modules.

Drupal 7 wish list... novices want usability, better media handling, coustom content types in core, views in core... experts want similar things but also performance improvements. by far usability improvements were number 1 on both lists and we have already made great inroads towards this in d7. Dries is playing back recordings from the university usability testing - they are embarassing, almost shocking, with end users very confused. we have a lot we need to improve if we expect mainstream adoption and rapid growth. the playback of these test is awesome - with eye tracking data and voice overs of the recorded conversations. you can really see how confused people are - as they look all over the screen. the full video is up on drupal.org.  also, people have lots of issues with the language we use - the terminology. 

dries reccomends skitch - a screenshot annotation tool for the mac. if you are on the pc you can use snagit. skitch is a free tool, snagit isn't afaik. they both allow you to draw and write on top of screen shots. snagit will even preserve urls / web link in your screenshots. he also uses ishowu which costs $20us and it records videos - both are great for bug reporting and feature development.

10:40 Dries wants to see RDF support added. he spoke about this extensively in Boston earlier this year. he's showing the video he showed in Boston created by Ben Lavender, Miglius Alaburda and Arto Bendiken which shows the power of all this in action. the video shows mashpups that were quickly created by importing content from various data sources. in order to do this, drupal needs to give more power to fileds and have export capabilities in multiple output formats (i..e json). we are making progress towards this vision - the goal isn't to get ther in drupal7, but we should make great inroads. the semantic web...

10:50am a test framework and a lot of tests is important. a lot of work has been done in both writing tests and a test harness that runs all the tests we have against code commits to ensure we don't break things.

Should we add another drupal 7 branch maintainer? The time has come... Dries asked, "how cares about usability, testing, cck and views... who can lead drupal to success" and the answer is WebChick (Angie Byron). CONGRATS ANGIE on becoming the D7 co-maintainer as soon as she finishes her work on the Orielly book she's writing with the other lullabots.  

because we are running so late, Dries didn't take any questions...

where does dries get all the amazing fotos for his preseentations? he always had great video and background fotos.