DrupalCon New Orleans Driesnote

Posted on Mon, 5/9/2016
3 minutes read

These are my notes while listening to Dries talk to open up Drupalcon New Orleans 2016. It is probably full of typos and weird things, I'll be cleaning this up later (hopefully).

Drupal 8

  • We actually realeased Drupal 8!
  • tripled contributors compared to Drupal 7
  • Also released Drupal 8.1 on time
  • Drupal 8 had 60,000 sites in 3 months, much faster than the 7 months it took for Drupal 7.
  • Port more modules!

Market Perspective

  • Richness
    • How many capabilities it has
  • Reach
    • How many people use it

Things like Angualar have a lot of reach, but not a ton of richness because it's new and doesn't have the thousands of APIs that Drupal has. Then there are things like enterprise solutions which are full of features but don't have much reach because they're so expensive. Drupal hopefully is moving towards somewhere in the middle, lots of reach and lots of richness.

Thousands of Drupal sites small & large:

  • Cisco built a customer service portal in Drupal and is saving tons of money from this solution.

Survey Says

2,900 people answered Dries survey from a very broad range of backgrounds. (should pull his blog to put here).

  • Who should we favor when making product decisions?
    • Mostly needed to improve for the non technical positions (content authors, site builders)

Proposed Initiatives

We will look at the survey data and look at our vision which is, build the leading platform to assemle the world's best digital experiences. Also need to look at the market, and have a discussion because collaboration is the essence of Drupal.

Lets propose some initiatives!

  • Media Initiative
    • Authors and editors need simple drag & drop media interfaces
  • Workflow Initiative
    • Give autohors and editors easy to use tools to share, review and approve, stage and collaborate on content before it's live.
    • This already has a team working on it. (link to blog about details)
  • Blocks and layout Initiative
    • Give sitebuilders an easier way to manage blocks & layouts. (totally missed what he said here, it was so fast).
  • Data Modeling tools Initiative
    • Add create content types & relationships super easy.
  • API-First Initiative
    • Integration with o... bleh
    • consolidate our rest api modules into one module to make things simpler.
    • Tesla powers their app using Drupal 8
  • Theme Componenet Library Initiative
    • wow he's really flying through these
    • Atomic design
  • Cross Channel
  • Orchestration

Showed some cool video about using Alexa to tie into a Drupal 8 site.

Need to think about editing content beyond pages.

Key Takeaways

  • Doing better than Drupal 7
  • We can reinvent ourselves and leapfrog over the competition.
  • We're playing the long game, but we will win.
  • We measure sucess not by a module making it to core, but wy it being easy for people to use.