Liveblogging #drupalcon: Keynote By Dries Talks Of Large Scale Goals

The first keynote speech of DrupalCon 2011 was delivered by Dries Buytaert, the original creator of Drupal, which spelled out a very bright future for Drupal and his goals for the system, more of that later.

He started off with the figure of attendees, a massive 1,750 making this the biggest DrupalCon held in Europe!

Dries went on to emphasise the adoption of Open Source by large media firms and how Drupal is at the forefront of this. But not only media, government offices are also getting involved. Data.gov.uk and London.gov.uk are just two UK sites that use Drupal.

If you think Drupal is only for small scale websites then you might want to check out Symantec which has over 240,000 users making this a huge success story for the company.

Drupal 7 Adoption

Dries highlighted concerns in the community that apparent adoption of Drupal 7 has been slow but this is not the case. Drupal 6 took twelve months to reach 100,000 users, whereas Drupal 7 only took half that time to reach the same number.

The State of Drupal Survey Results

Growth of Drupal around the world sees that Western Europe is leading the way with 44% of users, not far behind North America with 41%.

The top 3 opportunities for Drupal going forward are:

• Replacing legacy system
• Usability - ease of use
• IT cost reduction

Many companies used to use a variety of systems to get the end results they wanted such as Vignette and Wordpress to add a blog to a corporate website. But now Drupal is filling the void as it can combine multiple functionality together in one system to achieve the same result. Replacing legacy systems such as Vignette is seen as the biggest opportunity for Drupal to grow.

Marketing Drupal

One key area Dries mentioned was the fact Drupal doesn't really have a marketing strategy and this is a key area that needs to change in order for Drupal to reach the goals he has set for it. A case in point being the showcase page on the Drupal site that lacks screen grabs and other elements that could help promote the CMS to a wider audience.

Drupal 8

The priorities for Drupal 8 were also outlined:

• Native HTML5/CSS3
• Media/Assest handling
• Usability

To conclude Dries sees a bright future for Drupal and feels it's in a unique position in the industry which all sounds good to me :o)

Watch the keynote in full.