DrupalCon Paris Roundup
Better late than never, but here's my very brief DrupalCon Paris roundup...
Drupal 7
I'm always highly sceptical when people start rolling out the Gartner Hype Cycle (which, peculiarly, is not cyclical), but nevertheless it was great to hear about the projected timescales for D7 - code freeze now, followed by full release in early 2010. I'm not a #smallcore or #largecore fan, but #appropriatecore. It's great that blog etc are being moved out of core, but more important that rdf and especially cck are heading the other way in to core. If Drupal is to maintain its trend towards become a web application framework, rather than a CMS+, systems like cck and the new theme engine are vital.
Geo
Jer Davis, Allie Micka, Alan Palazzolo and Bec White gave a great overview to a packed room of the current state of the Drupal Geo stack. There's something at every level from geodatabase to visualisation using OpenLayers. In the coming years Drupal is going to become a really sweet platform for developing geo-centered web applications. :)
RDF
Despite all the whizzy geo stuff going on this was the highlight for me. RDFa as an enabler of the semantic web is one of those topics that's been pushed around for a few years now. With RDFa being pushed into Drupal core this means that by default all nodes created using core modules on any Drupal site will emit RDFa tags. All those 'authored by:' tags will contain dc metadata. Suddenly there's going to be whole load more RDFa tags floating around the web, which with Google and Yahoo! using them to enhance their search results, is no bad thing.
As ever it was great to catch up with other Drupallers from the UK and beyond. See you at the next one!
