Dries Buytaert

Drupal project lead Dries Buytaert just unveiled the Drupal Starshot Initiative and I couldn't be more excited! Starshot is all about putting users first. Enhancing Drupal core with additional components tailored to everyday users of the interface. Technically, it builds on Drupal core's robust foundation, utilizing Automatic Updates/Package Manager for seamless installation and maintenance, Recipes for the base system and on-demand additions, and Project Browser to help with recipe and extension discovery.

As I was talking to people about Starshot at DrupalCon Portland I realized it is easy to overlook how fundamental the changes proposed are in terms of how Drupal will innovate and the benefits end users will enjoy. At the same time those that did not have time to watch the whole keynote had understandable misconceptions about its nature. Some were concerned the fundamental changes are happening in the architecture, or a fork / parallel project is being set up. That is not where/how Starshot revolutionizes Drupal though. To address those misconceptions, I already worked on answers to frequently asked questions and published on the Starshot page.

This blog post will focus on the benefits that I see. I had the chance to participate in two hours of Starshot BoFs and then an hour long Q&A session at DrupalCon Portland. I also covered more technical details of Starshot's architecture in my Drupal 11 talk (including the most popular question on what the Launch button might lead to). Finally I had countless conversations with people at the event. Maybe confirmation bias, but there were only a couple people I talked to that were entirely skeptical. On the other hand I got very different viewpoints on what will the benefits be depending on who I talked to.

I think all of those are great, so I compiled them. Let's see 15 different reasons why I am super excited about Starshot and how it is very different from previous initiatives.

Dries approached me a few months ago, whether I was satisfied with unsolicited content submission solutions I was using on my sites. Well, I was using captcha as anyone else, and the promise of an automated content analysis service which would get my site rid of captchas in most cases did sound very attractive, so I jumped on the train and installed Mollom on this blog. It was hard to not get the word out and always talk in secret-speak instead with people who I knew use or know about Mollom. Since yesterday, Mollom is in public beta, so people can try it for themselves. My spam/ham graph from the Mollom site shows how well does this service serve my site without me doing much about it (and the graph/site looks sexy too):

While Mollom started off with spam identification, it is already doing unsolicited user registration blocking and other content protection schemes are on the plan, including quality and offtopic content analysis. I am eager to see what comes out of this adventure of Dries.

We were happy to welcome Dries Buytaert in Hungary at our Drupal conference, around one month ago. We had Marcell Kiss-Tóth helping us with a video camera, and after his hard work with the editing, the conference session videos are now downloadable. You are most probably interested in Dries' presentation, since all other sessions were in Hungarian. The downloadable is very good in audio quality. You can download the video from drupalconf.amon.hu or alternatively from liktor.hu.

As a side note, after the conference, I also decided to publish my Drupal lego figure shots, which were used in my presentation. These are licensed under a Creative Commons license, so you can reuse them in your presentations or build upon them if you wish.