Drupal releasing Drupal 7 in 2010 with usability and scalability as focus points

Drupal news mentioned that the redesign and relaunch of site Drupal.org will help Drupal new users.
When it comes to what to avoid in 2010, Buytatert says that he'd like to introduce more process into Drupal development but not too much. The open source Web CMS keeps getting bigger and better and at a point you get slowed down without some process in place. But there's a definite line where too much process can also slow you down. So the challenge is to maintain high velocity and keep innovating while still growing and not collapsing under their own weight.

Looking ahead past Drupal 7 further into 2010, he can see adding content staging features into the core of Drupal 8, and wants to focus more on Drupal as a product and further focus on issues such as usability. The Drupal community needs to reach a point where they're developing for the end user (site builders) rather than just themselves, making Drupal more enterprise-ready and enabling bigger and bigger projects to run on it.

As to the evolution of the idea of a CMS in 2010, Buytaert sees them becoming more social, almost a social media center. Already in 2009 the large, traditional CMS vendors are struggling to keep up on this front. Yet with the web getting faster and faster, more and more services will be launched, so there's no time to stop to breathe. He feels that closed source vendors are at a severe disadvantage in that type of climate.

Jeff Eaton with Drupal-based company Lullabot (news, site) points out that when Drupal 7 ships, developers will have a much easier time updating and building onto the ecosystem because of the automated unit testing framework that's been put into place. "It's helped the developers working on Drupal 7 reduce subtle and not-so-subtle bugs by automating thousands of tests: every patch submitted for Drupal 7 is automatically applied to the code, tested by a cluster of dedicated servers, and the results are reported to project maintainers before they even examine the code."
Eaton feels that while the testing and distribution packaging frameworks might be relatively quiet changes, they'll play a big part in Drupal's growth in 2010 and beyond.

As far as dangers to Drupal, he feels that they "lie in the balancing the needs of hardcore developers against those of more traditional site builders and designers who just want a site that works. Drupal is being used heavily by both groups, and their needs are very different. Ensuring that enhancements targeted at one group don't hurt the system's usefulness for the other is a tricky game, but it's worth the work."