[development] Notes From Worldwide Developer Conference

[Khalid B]

Here are the highlights from the conference for those who missed it. The
Lullabot guys will publish a podcast of the entire conference call later.
There was also an IRC chat in parallel with the conference. Not sure
if anyone is going to publish that or not.

Part 1: Dries talked about the future of Drupal mainly.

Making Drupal easier for users is a primary goal.

The following are the areas of focus for the next Drupal release

- Installer
Paves the way for install profiles.
Being written by CivicSpace (Kieran Lal, Jeremy).

- CCK
Allows creation of node types without creating modules

- Views
Very powerful presentation tool

- URL aliases
Easier for users and modules to create aliases

- Templating
Move theming stuff out of modules into template files.
Separates code from presentation.

- Better File/Image Handling
Upload module needs improvements.
File handling

- Default theme in core
Bluemarine has served its purpose, but need something less boring.

- Internationalization
Translating Drupal into different languages, and countries/regions that
are bi/multilingual (Europe, Canada, ...etc.)

- Usability changes / Performance Improvements
Block visibility by role.
Forum/Flatforum.

This is not an exhaustive list. There are other areas for improvement.

Help with ideas, contributing code, testing patches, writing documentation
or in any other area that you feel like.

Questions and Answers:

- Drupal Foundation.
No decision on this so far.

- Adoption of 3rd party Javascript library.
What we have works. No commitment to other parties so far.

- What are the interesting Summer of Code projects?
Usability and accessability of Drupal

- Dries and Drupal
Will continue to spend time on Drupal since it interests him.

- Image modules are popular downloads

Part 2: Karoly Negyesi (chx)
(Poor voice quality. Hard to hear much. I missed that part.)

Part 3: Angela Byron (webchick)
Much better voice quality!
Overview of Google 2006 Summer of Code projects, one by one.

Could not accept all applicants. Only 14 of them.

Konstantin Kaefer gave an overview of his project: Drupal administration
improvement.

Conference still going as I sign off from it.