State of Drupal in DrupalCon Denver video presentation - March 2012

Excellent presentation Dries !

http://bcove.me/ehw8jepn

link to PDF presentation

Layout initiative for Drupal 8

The goal of the Layout initiative is to make all elements on the page into contextual blocks that can be rearranged and organized into flexible layouts (and even layouts within layouts) through a drag and drop interface.
Specifically, the initiative breaks down as:

1. Contextual blocks: Provide the ability to pass in relevant configuration data to blocks so they can react on something other than the URL of the request.
2. Blocks everywhere: Make all page elements—from the site logo to menus to the main page content—into blocks which can be treated the same.
3. Multiple page layouts: Choose from either pre-configured layouts such as "3-Column" and "Grid" or make your own custom layouts for pages.
4. Partial page rendering: Allow for individual page components to be loaded and rendered independently, allowing for better performance and independent AJAX requests.
5. Better UI/UX to manage blocks: A visual, drag and drop interface for creating page layouts and populating with blocks.

This approach to building pages yields a number of benefits, including the ability to customize the look and feel of a site based on a variety of contextual information, the ability to render parts of the page independently for performance, increased consistency, and increased flexibility for site builders to re-use page elements in a number of contexts

  You can join the discussions in the Blocks and Layouts Everywhere Initiative on groups.drupal.org and help work on Layout issues on drupal.org.

Code size and API functions on Drupal 4, 5 ,6 and 7 vesrions

Date of Drupal 8 released

December 1, 2012:
 Feature freeze. No new features are allowed (unless specifically exempted), focus turns instead to API and UI clean-ups and polishing of existing features.

February 1, 2013:
Code freeze: focus on bug fixes, stabilization. No API changes, instead focusing on bug fixing, preparing for release, and getting the count of critical bugs down to 0.

August, 2013 (DrupalCon Europe 2013): Drupal 8 released