Founder of Drupal, Dries Buytaert, gives a talk at a special meeting of the Boston Drupal user group located at MIT campus. The event is co-sponsored by Sustainability@MIT and Acquia corporation.
Drupal it is an open source content management system that was started by Dries in 1999 when he was still a student at Antwerp Belgium. After getting his PhD in computer science, Dries when to work on Drupal full-time.
Drupal is a software framework for building websites. Drupal at Drupal.org is also a passionate community of users and developers of Drupal. It takes a long time to build up such a community -- ten years in fact from inception of Drupal in 1999 to the time of this talk in October 2009. Dries talks about the history of this community. The first version of Drupal was released in 2001. The first Drupal conference in Antwerp in 2004, known as DrupalCon, had 40 users attending -- and Dries was shocked to even found that that many people came. In the DrupalCon in Washington DC in 2009, about 1400 people attended. In 2005 was the "Big Drupal Server Meltdown" where the traffic was too much for the server to handle. Dries needed to raise $3000 US dollars in order to buy a new more powerful server. So he put up a PayPal donate button. To his surprise which "freaked" him out, about $10,000 came into his Paypal account. PayPal even shut down his PayPal account due to "suspicious traffic". And he was getting offers of help by donation of webhosting and even a $7000 enterprise-class server from Sun Microsystems.
Drupal is built by everyone and controlled by no one. It is built by a loosely organized group of people from different countries. And amazingly, it works. Dries compares Drupal democray, or "Do-ocracy" like that of the Internet. And like the Internet there's is always some bits and pieces that are broken somewhere if you zoom into the details. But looking at it as a whole, it works and it is among the more reliable and secure systems out there.
In 2009, Drupal is being used by thousands of developers in half a million websites including major sites such as MIT, Harvard, Sony Music, and more recently WhiteHouse.gov by the Obama administration. [ref]
1.5 million unique visitors goes to drupal.org each month and quarter of a million of them download the Drupal software each month. Because Drupal is open-source, this software is free. However, just because there is a download doesn't mean that a site is built using it. Because one of the criticism is that Drupal is difficult to learn in comparison to Wordpress and Joomla. This may be in part because Drupal was initially built by developers for developer. In an attempt to reduce the barrier of adoption, each subsequent version of Drupal attempted to make it more user-friendly.
Dries then talks about the next upcoming version of Drupal 7. At the time of this talk, Drupal 7 is still at the code freeze phase and is not ready to be used for building websites yet.
Dries talks about the new features of Drupal 7 from the perspective of end-users, site builders, and developers.
From the end-user perspective, there is a new information architecture for better navigation and finding administrative functions. This includes a toolbar, customizable short-cut menu, edit-in place, and overlays to improve usability.
From the site-builder perspective, there are improved internationalization support such as adding proper time zone, country-specific date support, and language-aware searches. Users can now cancel their own account. There is also improved image handling including thumbnail generation, image styles and effects. There is of course improved security including prompting for email notification of updates. To reduced brute-force password attacks, they limit login attempts and improved flood control. Other measures include new permission for running site updates, stronger pluggable password hashing, and added key in URL for running cron.php. There will also be a new update manager that enables you to install modules and updates via the Drupal user interface. They also removed some table-based themes from core.
From the developer perspective, Drupal 7 uses test-driven development and automated testing. There is a new database backend based on PHP's Data Objects (PDO) that will enable in theory for Drupal 7 to run on other databases besides MySQL (such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server).
Dries took questions from the audience at the end of the talk.
