I recently spent three days at DrupalCorn Camp 2013 in Iowa City.  I came away with a better understanding of the future of Drupal 8, and a lot of ideas about improving the current Drupal7 appliance.  While I was there I tried to promote or at least mention TurnKey Linux in every conversation.

1. Now that Drupal 7 is being installed using pear and drush, it's time to take it to the next level and let the user select the distribution to be installed.  This would satisfy some of the requests in the candidate queue such as Acquia Drupal, Aegir, Openatrium, etc. Allowing the user to choose the distribution, requires moving a portion of the install process until firstboot or more technically, firstlogin.  I'd like to see some extensions to core that would allow tasks to be executed on firstlogin instead of firstboot.  That ability would have resolved some of the issues presented by OpenVZ.  I worked most of last winter on a script to implement this but it wasn't clear how I could get it accepted into the next version appliance.  The methods I use allow the appliance to be multi-site, hosting multiple distributions and different versions of Drupal on the same host.
2. At DrupalCorn, Michael Hofmockel gave a presentation 45 Modules in 45 Minutes.  That reminded me that many of the modules installed by default in the Drupal7 appliance are carried over from the Drupal6 appliance.  Many of them are obsolete and have been replaced by newer, better Drupal 7.x modules.  It's time to review and update the list of default modules.
3. The General Redneck, Allan Chappell, gave several great presentations on Drupal Debuggin and continuous integration.  That got me thinking about the possibility of forking the Drupal appliance to create a developer edition of Drupal7 e.g. turnkey-drupal7-de with all the development tools such as PHPUnit and Headless Selenium while keeping the standard turnkey-drupal7 for deployment to production.
4. The changes to Drupal 8 are so massive that it will be some time before we can start thinking about a Drupal 8 appliance.  I'm sure there will be a dramatic impact on drush.  It will be interesting to watch this unfold.
    

Any suggestions or comments will be appreciated.