Drupalcon Update #1
I'll be posting updates here periodically this week, hopefully, without a lot of heavy editing.
We just heard Dries' "State of Drupal" keynote. Here are a couple of things that I found very interesting.
Better APIs in Core
Drupal will, among other things, place a high level of focus upon improving internal and external APIs. For starters, Dries would like to see good (and scalable/fast) support for RDF. This would exist on two levels: (1) how Drupal stores data in general and (2) within the more specific context of RDF triples. The latter would provide for extreme flexibility in terms of creating relationships between system objects. To make the system even more flexible, Dries is suggesting that we raise CCK fields to "first class" object level, rather than at the node level. We could, therefore build n number of relations between field-level objects. It could hardly be any more flexible.
For general storage, this means the Drupal would instantly become compatible with hundreds (thousands?) of external repositories (ex GeoNames) - all repositories that can output to RDF. As Dries is also promoting other formats as JSON, that number goes up even more dramatically (ex Google Spreadsheets can output to JSON).
User Experience
Dries put Usability Testing on the top 11 keys to a "Killer Release" of Drupal 7. I guess his experience at the U of M Libraries was a good one! It's exciting to be part of Drupal's future.