Dries gave us an overview of what have we accomplished in the last eight years.  It was an inclusive talk that really brought to light how many of us have been, are, and continue to be involved in the Drupal project. His talk included a History of Drupal – and included a great photo of him in the dorms with a sombrero!  This blog post is really a stream of consciousness from the keynote session.

History of Drupal

• Dries left home at the age of 17 and went to school in 1999
• Built a wireless network for the dorm
• Built a message board to keep track of the network.  It was called “drop.org”
• Used drop.org to experiment with new technologies
• When folks started using it they started suggesting features.
• Jan 15, 2001 Open Sourced Drupal 1.0,0
• For the first couple of years Dries focused on the technology
• 2004 – Presentation in Vancouver for the first time
• A lot of us started early on and have stuck around
• Drupalcon 2005 was the first Drupalcon in Antwerp 45 people attended.  Dries was bowled over.
• 10 books have been written
• 2004-05 the Drupal site looked like it does today
• In Germany and Cambridge and Paris sprints have improved our “house”  The new site is going public as a test site today.
• New site uses Solr search.  Drag and Drop dashboard!
• Dries has spent over 5000 Euros this year on trademark costs
• In 2005 there was a big server meltdown.  Until then it was hosted on Dries’ own machine.  One day it melted.  Needed 3000 Euros to buy a new server.  Within a day $10,000 was raised.  Offered free hosting and then a free server.
• At OSCON people camped out at the little Drupal table.
• Then the Drupal Association seeds were planted
• In Brussels there was 150 people, then 300 people at Yahoo! conference.  Then the Lullabot conference
• 900 People in Boston
• 1500 here in DC
• People are having un-conferences this year.  Events are happening all over the world every day.
• Drupal has doubled in size every year.

 Some stats for Drupal.org

• 200K/month core downloads
• Contributed projects 4400
• Unique Users per month 1.5 million

This represents a doubling every year since the project was open sourced.

Drupal is “Built by everyone, controlled no one, and it actually magically works.”

A way to grow Drupal is to engage in a long tail of contributions.  More folks working on smaller bits will help achieve this vision.

• In 2002 there was no menu, no breadcrumbs, nothing.
• In 2004 more usability improvements
• Drupal 5 had an installer
• Drupal 6 Installer looked nicer and usability improvements

DRUPAL 7

• Opened dev in Feb of 2007
• Code Freeze will be Sept 1, 2009
• Release when ready – Roughly 6 months left though
• When is it ready?  When all critical issues get down to zero
• Usability – in talking to people folks are frustrated with it.  Things are better but not good enough.
• There is a usability team – formal usability testing occurred last week.
• Improvements include better file handling and fields in Core.
• The field storage model is still being worked on.  Exciting that we will be able to have different storage engine.
• Testing – How well are we doing?  If we teach one person to write tests, others will write them.  Currently there are about 10,000 tests.  75% of files are covered.  Total coverage is about 78%.  We have 100% tests passing.
• Better Database abstraction layer is available.
• Other things that would “be nice to have”
  • OAuth support
  • Job Queues
  • RDFa output
  • XMPP
  • Activity Log
• “The web isn’t all that old yet … … can you imagine what it will look like in another 20 years?’
• The internet is one big machine.
  • We started by linking machines
  • Then we started linking pages
  • Now we’re linking data
  • Next linking things (like your fridge)

A Movement needs a mission

• Drupal is a mission
• D7 release and help folks use Drupal
• Help transform the Web

There is a difference between telling people what to do and creating a movement. A movement needs a healthy ecosystem. A movement needs leaders.  Will you step up?