The morning began with a very sudden alarm at 6:30, which was turned off in that very short span of time in which I was awake. Actual wakefulness didn’t occur until almost 9. I rushed through the morning preparation process and made it down to the con before my session was to start. (I didn’t actually oversleep; I had nothing scheduled for the 8:30 slot).

For the ten o’clock session, Adrian, John Van Dyke, JonBob and I had pencilled — or rather sharpied — in an ad hoc Views/CCK session, designed around the idea of getting community ideas to fix a few issues, ensure the direction we’re going is the right one, and to get the community excited about where we’re going.

CCK was pre-released at the beginning of the convention. It’s effectively ready to go in a limited form, and by the 4.7 release we hope to have it fully ready to go. There are a couple of features it desperately needs, particularly the ability to share CCK templates, similar to how you can share Views exports. But it’s out there now, and the first piece of community feedback has already been positive.

The decisions made on Views are basically to break it up a little bit. We need to separate out the query builder, and we want to explore RDF as a possible mechanism to better describe the table relationships. Using that we can get the query builder in core; the next layer is the View builder, which I would also like to see in core but it doesn’t have to be.

The UI, however, will almost certainly remain in contrib. This is perfectly fine; the UI is a beast, and not strictly necessary. It will, however, but much more useful if the view builder mechanism is in core, so that the UI can control core module views.

I also got agreements from Gord and Peter (forget last names off the top of my head) to help out with the new user documentation, which is absolutely outstanding. It’s the hardest documentation to write, and an outside look will help a great deal.

Overall, the session ran from 10am to about 2:30, with a break for lunch. We ran into a pencilled in session by Zack Rosen about making money in the Drupal space, and still contributing to core. Some very interesting points were brought up, and I will follow that thread with interest.

Finally, Dries did his roadmap, which was a powerpoint presentation that included the slide (paraphrased from memory) “I tried to think of a way to say there is no set roadmap for 4.8 without saying there is no set roadmap for 4.8.” Obviously, he didn’t succeed there, but his point was well clear. Dries has a few things he would like to see, but the Drupal direction is largely community driven.

The evening was capped off with Thai food, a beer at Tribeca which is a poor excuse for a “New York” themed bar/pub, (it’s possible the deli sandwiches were authentic but I wouldn’t count on it) and various good-byes here and there. I lost track of a couple of people I wanted to say good-bye too, but it’s not as though I won’t see them online from time to time.