State of Drupal by Dries Buytaert
Day one of the DrupalCon Paris 2009 started with a round-up of recent development on Drupal 7. Dries Buytaert, the initial coder and starter of the Drupal project, explained first how innovation seems to go in recurring curves that go up and down, but eventually go all up in the long run. He quoted Schumpeter, Saffo the Gartner hype cycle, and showed his own graph of how he feels Drupal development is happening.
After the DrupalCon weekend there will be a code freeze, and the rest of autumn will be used to refine the new features that have been taken into Drupal, and to do better documentation and allow for localization of the new Drupal release.
He also rose the question whether Drupal should be a framework, a product or a service, and opted himself for making it possible of being everything. A CMS framework for those who need the possibility to highly customize their publishing work, and a service to those who want to use modern web technologies with a certain amount of control, but don't want to set up all by themselves.
Drupal 7 looks like it is going to be even more customizable in terms of content types (CCK module goes as Field API into core), and üprovide a better layer for theming.