It's amazing to see how the Drupal community has grown and flourished over the past few years. This DrupalCon has over 3000 attendees - which is absolutely amazing. The last DrupalCon we attended was in Boston, and had a much smaller attendance. At the keynote today, Dries Buytaert the original creator of Drupal mentioned that the first DrupalCon, only five years ago had 40 attendees! Indeed, the San Francisco event is bursting at the seams with many sessions standing room only. Additionally, many attendees didn't even make it due to the flight cancellations as a result of the recent volcano eruption in Iceland.
There are many great features coming in Drupal 7, likely to be released in a few months time. For one thing, CCK (Content Construction Kit) is now rolled into the Drupal Core, officially known as "Fields" going forward. The Image API is also part of Core along with many other smaller helper modules. The latest push appears to be for "NoSQL" solutions that are more modern and flexible. There was considerable talk about integrations with data storage solutions like CouchDB, MongoDB and Cassandra.
Moscone Center - San Francisco
We are pleased to see the dynamism of the Drupal community at this event. Certainly there is a lot of enthusiasm for the incredible success of the Drupal project. However, at the same time people have a refreshing frankness surrounding some of the issues and challenges with the software, such as some of the legacy code issues, for example the lack of proper Object Oriented Code found in many modules.
We at Dragonwell Media are excited to see the ongoing growth and success of Drupal as it is essential to many of the highly valuable solutions we provide our customers.