Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to attend DrupalCon DC 2009. (DrupalCon is the semi-annual gathering of Drupal developers, users, themers, consultants, and contributors; its generally held once in the US and once in Europe each year – the next will be DrupalCon Paris in September 2009).

I’ll be posting more specific updates on individual presentations and news on Open Parenthesis and Optaros Labs, but wanted to share some general impressions here.

1. The Drupal community is large, and growing. At DrupalCon Boston in early 2008, there were 864 registered attendees, and that was the largest DrupalCon to date. DrupalCon DC had 1400 attendees, and could have had more. (It was sold out at 1400, and I’ve run into many folks on Twitter or elsewhere who wanted to come but could not due to it being sold out).
2. The Drupal community increasingly includes large, well established media companies, like The McClatchy Company, The Economist, PBS, Mansueto Digital (parent company of FastCompany), Rodale Publishing, IDG, and others. (This has been true for some time, of course, but the presence of those large companies is increasingly visible, and in some cases they are becoming more directly involved).
3. There’s much interest in making the Drupal 7 release easier than Drupal 6 release was, in the sense of getting a larger number of contributed modules upgraded in advance of (or at least very quickly after) the release: no more “module update lag.” (Dries announced an expected code freeze for Drupal 7 of Sept. 1st, 2009, with a release coming “when it’s ready” after that).
4. This year continued the strong commitment in the Drupal community to improving the usability and user experience of both Drupal.org and Drupal itself. Drupal is really taking a strong lead here, engaging with usability and design groups external to the project as well as within the community in a consistent and productive way – I hope we’ll see more open source projects taking this approach over time.
5. There’s growing support for Semantic Web technologies and standards being integrated more tightly into Drupal core. One highly visible case is RDFa support, which would enable very rich metadata to be output by Drupal in a format that semantic web applications know and can consume.

I’m always impressed by the breadth and depth of the Drupal community, and this year was no exception. Hope to see you all at DrupalCon Paris in September!