At the recent DrupalCon 2008 in Boston, Dries gave usual “State of Drupal” keynote:

After a quick mention of the work the community did on Drupal 6, Dries focused mostly on what is coming in Drupal 7 and what he sees as the important work to be done. This included showing video from the recent University of Minnesota Libraries usability testing. It’s great to see the lead on a significant open source project highlighting the importance of usability, especially as the community grows.

Additionally, Dries highlighted test coverage, and made the argument that the “code freeze” portion of the development cycle for Drupal 7 could be much shorter if broader test coverage were provided. Having a good automated test framework contributes greatly to the ease of development and debugging for new module authors, existing module maintainers, and the implementers of sites based on Drupal.

Finally, Dries also described longer term planning about the use of Drupal in places where HTML is not the assumed or even primary output: social networking frameworks and the semantic web. This resonates with much of the discussion in other open source communities (DiSo, for example) and reinforces the critical role open source plays in innovation on the web.

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