Yesterday's Keynote from Drupal project founder, Dries Buytaert, kicked off the annual North American gathering of Drupalists from around the world, and also kicked off a new Drupal community initiative aimed at promoting the Drupal platform through a coordinated marketing effort using funds raised within the community.

The Drupal Association hopes to raise $100,000 to enable a global group of staff and volunteers to complete the first two phases of a four-phase plan to create consistent and reusable marketing materials to allow agencies and other Drupal promoters to communicate Drupal's benefits to organizations and potential customers quickly and effectively.

Convincing non-geeks and non-technical decision-makers of Drupal's strengths has always been a pain point, and we'll be watching with great interest as this initiative progresses.

Also among the announcements were demonstrations of how easy it could soon be to manipulate content within the Drupal back end using a drag-and-drop interface, which would provide great flexibility for site builders and content editors.

We also expect to see improvements to the Drupal site-builder experience in upcoming releases, as well as improvements to the built-in configuration management process, which eases the deployment process when developing in Drupal.

See the full keynote to get inspired by what's to come in the Drupalverse.

And also see the DrupalCon Nashville Playlist!