OpenSourcery

I have just returned from DrupalCon San Francisco 2010, the largest DrupalCon ever. With over 3000 attending, and $72,000 worth of coffee consumed, it was a very lively event. Thanks to the awesome work of those organizing, nearly all of the sessions now have high quality video available on the DrupalCon site, and on Archive.org. Below are the sessions that really left an impression on me regarding the future direction of Drupal.

Advanced Drush

While there is no video for this as of this writing, the highlight here was the sudo drush make-me-a-sandwich moment (as well as the Drush core-cli command).

The Heart of Open Atrium: Context, PURL and Spaces

While we've been using context on most projects for quite some time, the work presented here around the spaces presets has me itching to try integrating them into some upcoming projects.

Page render drill down in Drupal 7

The page rendering system in Drupal 7 waits much later in the process to transform structured data into the relevant output format (which is typically HTML). Practically speaking, what this allows for is hook_page_alter, which has access to the contents of the entire page, in a structured array. Two highlights:

• The block module will no longer be a required module in Drupal 7. Rather, it is simply an optional UI for placing blocks in the page. This means that the Context module in Drupal 7 won't have to implement weird workarounds to steal block placement from the block module (and as such, should work seamlessly with the i18n module).
• Instead of only having to caching options (page and block level), any part of the page can be cached. Furthermore, by using the query string and qrguments as the cache key, these caching mechanisms can work with content that is under access control.

PubSubHubbub to the rescue-- Real-time feeds and the future of social networks

This talk wasn't specific to Drupal (yet anyway), but rather, provides a sort of roadmap to the future of Drupal and the social web. By combining 4 rather new protocols (PubSubHubbub, WebFinger, ActivityStreams and Salmon), Brett Slatkin of Google walks through the potential for realtime feeds being used to contect people like never before.

It would be very powerful if any Drupal site out there were capable of sharing, in real time, at the level Brett outlines in this talk. The Feeds module is already capable of consuming PubSubHubbub, and support for ActivityStreams have a little momentum. Salmon and WebFinger, as well as publishing to hubs for PubSubHubbub are the pieces that need to be filled in.

Drupal 7 and the State of Drupal

At Dries' keynote, he showed a best case scenario (June 2010), a worst case scenario (October 2010), and an ideal scenario (lock the 3000 attendees in until it was released at the conference) for the Drupal 7 release.

While we already missed the ideal scenario, the progress made on critical bugs at the conference has the community working at a velocity that should come in closer to the best case scenario. Over the course of the week, thanks to the awesome gatherings at the chx coder lounge, the number of critical bugs dropped from 114 to 94 as of this writing.