walkah: drupalcondc2009

I'm back home from a truly spectacular DrupalCon DC and have been reflecting this morning on some of the feedback from my talk: Why I Hate Drupal.

See the slides and watch the video

I first got the idea for this talk several months ago watching the DjangoCon 2008 keynote Why I Hate Django by Cal Henderson. I had several ideas for things to address, but aside from the session description I intentionally said very little about my talk publicly. This, of course, lead to some interesting speculation and negative feedback. All part of the plan.

As it turned out, I was not lynched and nothing rotten was thrown.

What I was not expecting (and what the video doesn't capture), though, was all of the interesting discussion that followed. I was overwhelmed by the positive response and the number of people who agreed with several of the points I tried to make:

Drupal is not a product. To grow into a "movement", we should focus on becoming a better platform, adopt some better practices around development, be a better framework, and create more space for the creation of "products" (install profiles, etc) on top.

What do you think? How to we "fix" this project?