Drupalcon: Life, The Universe, and Everything

I made it back from Hungary last Friday, and am only now starting to convince my body that it really isn't 9 hours later than it is. After Drupalcon, I managed to make it out to Eger, for castles and a valley of wine cellars (thanks for the recommendation Chrys). Following Eger I returned to Budapest to explore more castles, a Cold-war-era statue park, and some labyrinths all made possible by some of the best public transit I've experienced.

Being back, and having had a bit of time to process all that I took in at Drupalcon, I wanted to do a bit of a review of some of the highlights. For most of the talks I mention below, there are either slides, video or both available here.

The venue and organization

The venue itself was very nice. Spacious and airy, it was the perfect place for Drupal geeks from all over the world to congregate and talk about, well, Drupal. Also, many thanks to all the volunteers and the Hungary Drupal community that made Szeged a reality.

I can't talk about the venue and the organization of the event without at least mentioning the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy theme. I won't go into too much detail, as the pictures do that, but suffice to say I thought it was awesome and thorough (42+ languages, a babelfish, don't panic and the certainty of knowing where one's towel is).

The State of Drupal

Dries, while opening the conference with his State of Drupal talk, hit on many aspects of the future of Drupal.  One highlight was the idea of embracing RDF, which not only makes for richer content, but addresses the problem of importing and exporting for Drupal in an application-independent manner. Another very interesting point was that most Drupal developers feel they are best at HTML, and by the same token, want to learn about HTML the least. That's good I suppose...

Drupal 7 preview

Many of the sessions I attended provided a very exciting preview of Drupal 7, and I came away with high hopes for the new version.

Larry Garfield proposed the idea of getting handlers into core. My favorite example of why this might be useful was about the idea of swapping out default file handling, for say, a file handler that sends all images to Flickr, and all videos to YouTube, but behaves normally for everything else. To do this without handlers, one would need to either hack core (oh noes), hack image and video modules, or write a custom module. With handlers, the modules can simply be concerned with the Drupal API, thus making this sort of behavior module-independent. Essentially, handlers are one of the last steps towards making Drupal completely customizable without hacking core (thus saving kittens).

The very next day, Larry gave an overview of the new database layer that landed, which takes advantage of PHP's PDO abstraction layer, shortly before Drupalcon. The short of it is that the new abstraction layer looks awesome. The dynamic query builder will take the place of complicated string concatenation and pattern matching that plagues certain hooks and modules today. The new layer also provides—out of the box, so-to-speak—the ability to support master/slave replication and transactions, to name a few. Also, since this is all object-oriented, simple (but fragile) INSERT statements are no longer directly coded into modules. Instead, inserts and updates are built up using placeholders, and can be reused. Finally, the new db_merge() function will make checking for an existing record (in order to determine if an INSERT or an UPDATE is needed) a thing of the past.

Barry Jaspan gave a talk on the Field API that will hopefully be landing in Drupal core for 7 (ie, CCK in core). However, the field API isn't just about moving the CCK module's functionality into Drupal. Along the way, the code will be transformed into a real API (so that the creation and modification of fields is no longer dependant on a form submission). Another key change is the idea that fields will be attachable to anything, not just nodes. During the talk, field definitions looked to be custom classes, which seemed very clean and extendible. It was later rumored around the halls that this idea had been scrapped, but I'm unable to find any hard evidence indicating one way or another.

Peter Wolanin discussed the idea of page rendering being capable of outputting many different formats in Drupal 7. The central idea of the talk was to move page rendering to a later stage in the process, so that data can be rendered as, for example, JSON, XML or XHTML, depending on any number of factors. The only way to currently change format, is to either pre-empt the rendering level (by exiting the script early) or to re-render data, which is inefficient at best. Needless to say, this would be a welcome change.

And finally, the new file handling patch continues to get closer to RTBC.

So long, and thanks for all the fish

That's all I have time for now, although there were many other very exciting and informative sessions/BoFs (I saw a demo of the progress being made with the Geo module, as well as the work Development Seed is doing with Mapnik, and am very excited about the future of mapping and Drupal).