DrupalCon Prague 2013: FUTURE-FRIENDLY EVOLUTION AND THE DRUPAL RELEASE CYCLE

This talk explores the challenges and opportunities surrounding backward compatibility in Drupal development. The speaker discusses the traditional approach of breaking APIs to allow for innovation, highlighting how this has led to painful upgrade experiences and hindered progress. With the significant architectural changes in Drupal 8, particularly the shift to object-oriented design, there is now an opportunity to enhance the system while maintaining backward compatibility. The session presents a visionary framework for a new core development release cycle focused on semantic versioning, aiming to strike a balance between innovation and forward compatibility while encouraging contributions to the core. This approach hopes to transform how Drupal evolves from version 8 onward.