Drupalcon Day 1 continued

I made a stab at live blogging with the usability session, but I think it will work better for me just to jot down the random points that particularly strike me at the time, and fill in more thoughts later. Hopefully most if not all sessions will be on video, so there's no need to be a scribe...

Dries' keynote

Skipping some things covered under other sessions (usability, Knight Foundation)... Dries spoke of the thinking that went into identifying the Drupal 7 wishlist. Looks like a good plan to really solidify Drupal's place. Given that the community wants to see an annual major release, we have a decision to make - four months of development followed by eight frozen months, or nine months of development and a three-month freeze. The latter is only possible with testing. Testing TESTING  TESTING. A signficant question is (assuming we achieve sufficiently comprehensive testing) - would three months be enough time for the most relied-upon contrib modules to catch up?

An excellent funding suggestion - core contributors pay $1 per test their patch breaks. Who will be giving beer money - and who will become unwilling Major Sponsors?

Dries spent a significant amount of time discussing RDF/semantic web/Web 3.0/insert your buzzphrase here. Afraid I didn't capture much detail, apart from the idea of making Drupal more field-centric rather than node-centric (where fields serve as subjects and objects).

Now, some random thoughts I jotted down during the talk:

• In a non-Drupal migration project I was involved in, we had production and test environments running in parallel - in different stages either bulk loading production data into the test environment, in others doing parallel data entry. I have some softly-formed thoughts on getting a head start on Drupal 7 in this way - setting up a Drupal 7 version of my site, and trying to replicate from the current (Drupal 6) site. Besides getting that head start, I would expect to learn a few lessons to apply with Cyrve - how do you cut over from old to new without having a big blackout period on new content? This is a question that's often neglected until D-day approaches...
• Apropos of nothing - my passport is long expired, time to renew it so I'm ready for the next overseas Drupalcon...

Drupal and the Knight Foundation

I have notes from a couple of other sessions, but it's getting well past my bedtime and I wanted to skip ahead to this. Last October I submitted a Drupal-based proposal to the Knight News Challenge - and got shot down. But, not only did Lisa Williams and Ben Melancon do better - the Knight Foundation people were impressed enough by the Drupal submissions they received that they are issuing a new challenge for Drupal-based community services. Stay tuned...