The future of Drupal

Now that Drupal 7 is released we can look forward to Drupal 8. What can we do better? What features do we need for Drupal 8? This was the main topic of the keynote of Dries Buytaert at Drupalcon Chicago on March 8th.

Drupal 8 should be ready for the future of course, and the future according to Dries is:

"Being anywhere at any time, reaching any information or people needed at any device"

any device

This means that drupal should be able to output to laptops / computers, but also to tablets, net-books, smart-phones and TV's. The number of devices will probably only increase in the future. Drupal was invented for the desktop 10 years ago. If Drupal was to start today, it would probably be designed for mobile first and desktop second.

Drupal need to output different formats for different devices. It is very good in HTML today, but it should also be able to output different forms of XML and HTML5. And drupal should be able to function as a back end for native apps on mobile phones. For this really to work you need web services.

any information

The internet is a collection of different clouds. There will be more and more data sources every day and Drupal should be able to work with those. Drupal is more and more connected with different systems like a mail system, document management of CRM system. So interoperability is key.

people

Social today is a individual experience. It is connecting with your buddies and friends. People use there smart-phones and tablets for consumer apps, social apps, but also enterprise apps. People expect the experience, as with the other apps, to be smooth and user friendly. There is a big lesson in the iPhone for Drupal. The iPhone is one of the most complex smart-phones out there, but also one of the easiest to use. Drupal should be a delightful experience (in terms of accessibility, usability and performance).

other issues

The two main pain points in Drupal for large companies right now are configuration management and content staging. Those issues should be addressed in Drupal 8. This means that there should be exportables in core and universally unique id's.

This all leads to the first 4 main features that should be addressed wiht the development of Drupal 8:

• UUID
• Web Services
• HTML5
• Configuration management

He also talked about the development process. Some things should change whit the development of Drupal 8. 

A lot of things already went very well with the development of Drupal 7:

• Patches of contributers where tested
• The development documentation is updated during development
• There is an Usability team
• Development snapshots. This really helped testing
• There is an Accessibility team

But there where also some things that could be better:

• People didn't feel empowered
• Unpredictable release cycle
• Not enough communication
• Better priorities
• Too many critical bugs
• Performance should come first

Dries proposed some changes to the development process. The shift from CVS to Git will enable some things that can improve the development process for Drupal 8. All major changes should be developed in a Git sandbox. If a feature passes some gates, it will be merged in the main branch. The gates that have to be passed are:

• Performance
• Accessibility
• Usability
• Documentation (should be up to date)
• Testing
• No critical bugs

One of the most amazing suggestions or rules that Dries wants to introduce is the "No more than 15 critical bugs" in the master branch. That may be possible with the suggested gates and would be awesome of course. This makes the release cycle more predictable.

A last thing to remember is that the future is not only about new features. The ecosystem is really important and we should keep working on the ecosystem, keep learning and keep getting better!