Dries Buytaert

Today was a great day for Drupal.

We kicked off our largest Drupal conference ever – more than 800 Drupal enthusiasts from all over of the world are getting together in Boston for one week to brainstorm, to share and to work on Drupal. DrupalCon Boston sold out six days in advance. It is twice the size of DrupalCon Barcelona, held just 6 months ago. It has been a blast so far.

Today I also gave my traditional State of Drupal keynote presentation. While the preparation of such a presentation is never easy, I relish the chance to both look back upon what the Drupal community has accomplished in the past year and look forward to what the future holds in store for Drupal.

The slides and video of my presentation will be made available later, but needless to say, the state of our union is strong. We released Drupal 6 last month, and the response has been outstanding. Drupal 6 is our best release ever and a tremendous milestone for every member of the Drupal community.

Last but not least, today also marks the official "launch" of Acquia. That is, Acquia issued a press release outlining our product and services roadmap for 2008. In this announcement, and on the Acquia website, we introduced two projects that we are very excited about — code-named Carbon and Spokes.

Carbon will be Acquia's first Drupal distribution. Spokes will be an intelligent update notification service. This service will supply detailed compatibility and interdependency information to Acquia subscribers about updates to supported distributions.

In a model similar to established commercial open source vendors like Red Hat, MySQL and Ubuntu, the update notification service will be available to customers who purchase Acquia subscriptions, while the distribution will be made available freely.

We believe quite strongly in fostering an open product development environment at Acquia – enabling you to voice your opinions about what Acquia should build. In fact, Ubuntu is already doing this today with Ubuntu Brainstorm — using Drupal to invite their community to submit and vote on product ideas.

I encourage each of you to learn more about Carbon and Spokes and look forward to hearing your input and suggestions. I founded Acquia with Jay with the goal of growing Drupal by a factor of 10, creating opportunities for all of us to grow as individuals, as community members and as organizations. We will only achieve this by working together with you to do what's best for Drupal overall.

Thank you – for your enthusiasm, for your contributions, and your continued support.

Thank you – for making today a great day for Drupal.