In an interview with CIO.com, Dries Buytaert, who is the original developer of Drupal and the CTO at Acquia, outlined his major goals for the next version of Drupal.

As the article pointed out, it's been more than a year since the release of Drupal 7, but Buytaert and the Drupal development community have some clear ideas about the direction of Drupal 8. First of all, to nobody's surprise, it's going to make it easier to distribute content to mobile channels. What's more it will use HTML5 underpinnings to facilitate that mobility, but Buytaert says it's not just about mobile. He wants to be able deliver content to any device from Drupal.

Buytaert also wants the system to be easier to use from an end-user perspective. In other words, he wants simpler editorial tools for a better experience, but he also wants to enhance the back end. It will aim to provide better APIs with clearer documentation to make it easier for developers working with Drupal.

Finally, he wants Drupal 8 to work better for larger organizations and that means continuing to evolve Drupal as a web development platform with more sophisticated tools required by larger organizations such as "configuration management, content staging, [and] universally unique identifier."

Buytaert told CIO.com that the release date is not yet available, but he sees it as a couple of years away, so it could be a while before we see the next full update of this popular open source web content management system.

For more information:
- see the CIO.com interview

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