Dries Buytaert gives a state of Drupal talk at every DrupalCon. Here are some of the excerpts from DrupalCon2010, The entire talk is online and I highly recommend you to listen to it. Some of the key highlights of Drupal
- CVS – RIP. Starting Drupal 8 development, source code will move to Git from CVS
- 19 different distributions of Drupal are available currently. This phenomenon is mostly unique to Drupal where multiple distributions are available.
- Jacob Redding has been appointed at the Interim GM of Drupal Association
- Semantic Web and linked data: Move from WWW to GGG (Global Giant Graph). This is the based on the vision of Tim Berners-Lee. RDF is part of core in Drupal 7. This will enable to mark up different objects with RDF (e.g. products in a web shop application). Essentially RDF lets you turn the internet into a database and reuse data.
- More big companies are getting involved in Drupal. There are now multi-million dollar Drupal projects and Drupal is hitting on the radar of companies like Cap Gemini. Accenture, IBM, etc. These consulting companies will jump on a bandwagon only if the market is big enough. Microsoft is a platinum sponsor of DrupalCon 2010. Drupal is now being supported on MS SQL server as well.
- No SQL movement: Drupal 7 now works with CouchDB, mongoDB, Cassandra, etc. This is one of the most interesting developments for me, since this is truly forward looking vision.
- Pro Drupal Development book, will be available in July
- Drupal amounts for more than 1% of the web. But there is ground to cover. Wordpress owns 8.5% of the web and Joomla 1.5%. I will leave the translation for you. Drupal 6 is the most used version.