The big takeaway from DrupalCon is that they are releasing a new version of Drupal, for the first time ever that will exist alongside Drupal core.
This new Drupal CMS (codenamed project starshot) will be less focused on developers and instead will cater to "ambitious site builders". It relies on existing contributor projects like Recipes, Project Browser and Automatic Updates. This should result in a better user experience out of the box, and if done correctly should lower the overall cost of ownership of having a Drupal site for end clients. For agencies, it should help speed up development. Much like Distributions, it will allow us to bootstrap a site with minimal effort. But unlike Distributions, it won't lock you into any specific ecosystem.
There are some concerns. Namely it initially comes across as WordPress in Drupal and WordPress already exists and has a much larger market share than Drupal. There's also talk of setting up a marketplace for Starshot recipes, which made me cringe a bit.
However this can be the thing that gets non-profits and smaller clients interested in Drupal again. The other concern is that it's not exactly code-free. You still have to export yml files, but you can then upload that into any Drupal site and import the configuration.
There's still a lot of work to be done before Starshot is ready for production environments, but it is exciting and they are actively looking for devs to contribute. I would love to see Polycot lend a hand in some way!
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