Keynote speakers

Completely agreed with Larry. It'd great to hear a few suggestions from Rasmus himself on how to turn the tide.

From Mongolia, city of Precious (Эрдэнэт).

How about speaking of adapting Drupal to handhelds, keeping the "One web" principle? that is easing the web designers job who want their website to be friendly to all devices, with 3 possibilities:
+ if the page is acceptable for all devices, keeping it as is,
+ if 2 (or more) pages are necessary but with the same content, one URI should serve 2 (or more) technically different pages according to the connecting device,
+ if the content has to be reduced for handhelds, 2 URIs should be connected by mutual hyperlink, and, according to the connecting device the most fitting URI should be served first.
Of course, Drupal should do a big part of the job, including reducing the pictures' size and compressing their files, transforming large tables into lists, keeping the menu's first two or three main items at the top or the page but moving the other ones to the bottom etc..

However, I hope the keynotes will appear in Drupal.org, because sending someone to Copenhagen would be too expansive for us.

In Szeged, Rasmus suggested turning common.inc into a PHP extension. Perhaps presenting a case study of a PHP project which has successfully taken their original php script(s) and created an extension. Pros. Cons. Challenges.

(I've only just seen Jens' comment above about drupal_php_ext and didn't realise there was such a thing, btw...)

My request is simple: to discuss the state of PHP in the Drupal framework and how it can be improved , in terms of efficiency and design

+1 to Larry of Nate's suggestions. Either would be awesome.

@Rasmus: I'd like to see "The state of PHP - web programming beyond 2010".
* What programming techniques does PHP encourage or discourage?
* How is OOP intended in PHP and how shall we adapt Drupal to leverage the full potential?
* New features in PHP 5.3 and PHP 6?
* Scalable programming in PHP - what language constructs are slow and what shall we use instead?
* PHP community process - how do we get those ugly function workarounds ( http://api.drupal.org/api/group/php_wrappers/7 ) back to PHP core?

Considering it's Rasmus who's talking, I would more want to hear his thoughts on PHP's future and how it would implicate future versions of Drupal or any CMS in the market.

There's been a lot of hassle with PHP's future now that 5.3 has been released and 6.x is, well, non-existed, why should we still keep involved with PHP when the people in charge of PHP's future is too dependent on few key people and the whole OpenSource ecosystem of contributing directly to PHP's core is too hard.

If you compare Core PHP's and Drupal's ecosystem you can see that people using Drupal have a huge advantage over PHP's when there's a time to contribute to the Core, Getting modules done etc. PHP is too closed for people to actually easily get into hacking it and making it better. Implications to this are the time it took between PHP 5.2 and PHP 6.x that never got released and instead people pushed 5.3.

I'm in no way an expert on PHP, i'm more of an expert on Drupal, but what I personally see happening in PHP is worrying me about the future it holds and how other languages will go past PHP if there wont happen a drastic change on how to get the community more involved to help get PHP at least to the same level than other newer languages and past that.

I agree with Larry's suggestion about performance/architecture issues in Drupal 7! Again as Larry said, we're big enough to take it ;)

I'd like to her Rasmus speak about how to leverage the Improvements of PHP 5.3 best. Maybe he has or knows some projects with pracitcal experience, that focused on using or demoing them?
His general take on OOP vs whatever Programming Patterns might be intersting, also here I think of practical examples backing this up instead of going super-meta.

In relation to Larrys suggestion about the performance in Drupal 7 and 8, would it also be interesting to hear Rasmus' opinion and thoughts about the Drupal PHP Extension project (see http://drupal.org/project/drupal_php_ext and http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-php-extension).

Rasmus is a known performance guru, and I'd like to hear his thoughts on Drupal 7's performance (and issues therein). We are going to have to reverse the trend of past Drupal versions in Drupal 8, both in terms of CPU usage and memory usage. Input from the man himself would be very useful.

And it that means he lays a smackdown upon us, hey, we're big enough to take it. :-)

Thoughts on what qualifies as "essential" (as Nate suggests above) and what doesn't would also be welcome.

It'll be great to have Rasmus speaking at DrupalCon! I've enjoyed all his talks I've seen immensely. I regularly reference his Szeged talk with the famous (paraphrased) quote, "Drupal doesn't really work like all those other frameworks." It's a great introduction into teaching the Drupal Menu system (which was what talking about at the time).

Considering Rasmus' broad experience with PHP systems, I'd like to hear his thoughts on what parts of Drupal are important as a framework and what things should be left out (not sure if he's ever heard of the controversial "small core" movement).

I'd also be interested in a talk about PHP and what possibilities we have to leverage within Drupal in the future. Comparisons/examples from other systems would be excellent.

Either way, what a great line-up of speakers. Can't wait to be there.