Launching the Drupal Site Template Marketplace

This presentation discusses the launch of the site template marketplace for Drupal, highlighting the first eleven site templates available at marketplace.drupal.org. The speaker explains the significance of this initiative, which aims to simplify the onboarding process for new Drupal users, particularly in industries like healthcare, education, and government. They emphasize the collaboration with several pilot partners who contributed to the templates, detailing the development process that included wireframes and quality assessments. The session features insights from various contributors who share their experiences in creating templates, the challenges faced, and the broader implications for enhancing Drupal's market presence against competitors like WordPress.

try and figure out how to run this, how how to run the time and make all this happen. But oh, and there's the button. Okay, so we're getting started. Um, thanks everyone for joining us. This is the launching the site template marketplace session. So, if you saw the Dre's note this morning, which I think most everybody did, but maybe you haven't watched the recording yet if you

missed it. Um, one of the things that was announced was marketplace.grupal.org, org which is up right now and shows the first 11 site templates that are available for Drupal. Um so we're very very excited about this. It's super super cool. There's a bunch of pilot partners who joined us to help build the first uh templates. These are the partners who participated in this program and got to

the finish line to get us templates for the um uh Dre note today. Um so I'll talk a little bit about a couple of different things. So, I'm going to talk about the actual process of building a site template marketplace, what some of the technical components are, what some of the challenges are, and then I also want to feature some a little bit of information about each

of the templates we do have and give the opportunity to the folks who built them, who are in the room to talk about them briefly as well. Um, so let's start off with this. Why are we doing this? What the heck's the point? If you're in this room, you probably uh have a sense of of why you're interested. And in fact, let me get a little bit

of a maybe a show of hands of a few things here. So, if you're here again because you have actively made a template, you raise your hand again. You're in that group of folks. Okay, we've all gathered in this corner. Good. If you're in here because you are interested in using a template um either as part of your agency work or as an end user, please raise

your hand. Nice. Very, very, very cool. That's awesome. If you're interested in being in part of the next wave of people to develop templates, would you also raise your hand? >> Excellent. Thank you very much. Okay, so that's awesome. So, that covers covers all the bases and I think uh the content is in in good shape. Um I guessed right. Um but for the initiative as a

whole, the audience there are multiple audiences that we're building this for, right? Um Dre talks about these in similar ways. As we talk about these internally, I may get them slightly wrong. Someone may correct me, but the number one audience for this is the Drupal evaluator, right? We the the folks with a long history in Drupal know that one of the hardest steps in Drupal is the

first step. It's being given the blank slate when you first install Drupal and not knowing where to go next or how to get started. So, Drupal CMS as an initiative as a whole, the idea of bundling Drupal core together with common contributed modules um and all of these things, recipes, themes, etc. was was the first step on that journey and site templates takes it further by customizing

them to a particular industry that people might need. Second audience is the Drupal agency. We are trying to grow the pie of Drupal, the adoption rate in general. We're trying to bring more people into the Drupal world. And in particular, we want to create economic opportunity for those Drupal agencies who choose to participate in building templates in the hopes that not only will that template propagate in

the world and hopefully help your reputations, but lead directly to service contracts for customization, for future enhancements, maybe updates, whatever you might need for the folks who start out in those templates. And then the third audience is a very broad-based just broadening of the ecosystem, right? We want more people just using Drupal, not just in this the evaluator sense, but we want the the notion of, hey,

I'm a I'm a solo freelance designer. Maybe I work in JavaScript. Maybe I do all these other things, but maybe now this Drupal thing has some kind of economic economic opportunity for me. Maybe I could maybe I used to make WordPress templates and I want to think about making a Drupal one. they're going to run into a little bit of a quality gate that uh they might

not be used to, but uh but we want them here and we want to we want to invite them in. Um so briefly again I want to leave more time for our our makers and more time for um uh for questions even and so on at the end. But from wireframes to implementation, uh Christina Chumlis over here helped us uh with the Drupal Association building out kind

of the wireframes for what the ultimate vision of the um site template marketplace is going to be. And we had multiple I think we have sort of three phases. We have an MVP phase, a pilot phase, which is what we launched, and then a vision for what it will be as it grows and what it looks like as a mature market. So we went from some MVPs

where we worked out things like the quality signals that we want to display for each template, how we want to present these uh the descriptions of them, look some look and feel basics and things like that. Um worked with Christina on those things. Um and some things we want to do in future like provide a a dashboard to the template makers that gives a sense of you

know what's revenue that you may have made if you sell commercial templates. gives you a portal into submitting more, into seeing where you are in the the approval process for your template, all of those kinds of things. And that's what led us to what you saw on the stage today or what you've seen if you've actually gone to marketplace.org. Um the initial pilot marketplace for all of

these templates, the 11 that are currently online. So very exciting. Um, we've gone from uh that I feel like I'm seeing my heading multiple times here. So, okay. So, we've gone from that launch to sort of the next phase of things. One of the things that you will see, so for all the folks in the room who raised their hand for the I'm interested in making one

of those templates, um, you will see at the top of that page, there's this box that says, "Hey, um, if you'd like to become a creator, please click on that box." And there's a lot more information on that page that I'm not going to go over directly here. I'll take some questions maybe if you want. Um, but the main thing is there's there's two there's there's a

series of general requirements for everybody. There's also requirements for two categories of folks like organization partners, Drupal certified partners or individual partners. So, people who are at that sort of freelance level but think they might want to dip their toes in this. And so, you'll be able to read the kind of requirements as we see them now. And there will be a further button that takes you

to kind of an application so we can learn what it is you want to pitch. We as the CMS kind of uh site template leadership task force team can give you feedback on whether or not that's a good fit for that that next phase etc etc. Um and then from there to to actually bring them into that marketplace and kind of start the journey. Um, so I'm

going to switch here after that kind of intro period to uh giving a little bit of a preview of some of these first templates and inviting if the right relevant person is in the room inviting them to kind of talk about that a little bit. So um preview uh previews of these first templates. So media current helped to build the template that was built uh as bite

and shipped in the first Drupal CMS release in CMS 1.0 I believe is when that did. Do we have someone who wanted to show anything else off? I don't think so, but I get a little face blind when I'm staring at a crowd. Okay. Um, and similarly, the Dropica team helped put together Haven, which has also shipped for the nonprofit side of the site template marketplace. Just

double checking. Okay. So, I'll go to the one where I definitely know I've got a cheerleader to show off some work. Uh so uh Mike, would you come up and talk a little bit about um what you've done with Driftyard and the Meridian template and you and Andy can maybe uh give us a little bit. >> Thanks, Tim. I can literally talk about this for half an

hour, but I'm limited to three minutes. >> Yeah, three to five minutes. So, um Dripyard, we make premium themes obviously, and we're super excited about kind of going into site templates. I I feel that site templates is is an opportunity for a new market for Drupal. You know, we all know that people would not touch Drupal for like sub six figure uh sites before, but if you

we have currently uh we have one of two um only what am I trying to say? We are we are one of two that has paid site templates. So, we charge $900 for our site template, which sounds like a lot out of the box, but it's a beautiful theme, very accessible, and built properly. Um, as I said, prior you would you would have to pay like a

$100,000 or more to build out a proper Drupal site with a proper development team. Uh now if we have a if we have like a robust marketplace, you can download a a fully functioning Drupal site uh for less than $1,000 and be kind of up and running and off to the races. And what that gives you even even if it's not exactly perfect for you, you have

the full power of Drupal to tweak it. You know, like if you need to tweak a view, you tweak a view. If you need to create another content type, you create another content type. you know, the themes are built from single directory components. It's straightforward to wire your data into those. Um, right now we only have one site template. Andy's been working really hard on building like

a whole bunch of tooling so we can rapidly create multiple site templates. I would love to see a like a Drupal CMS installer that literally has hundreds of site templates in there. Obviously, the UI would need to change pretty significantly, but we uh Andy, Adam, and I like like we spent a couple weekends ago like working overtime to try to get uh paid site templates into the

Drupal CMS installer and we did it and I think I think this is going to be a gamecher. Um Andy, do you want to talk about like some of some of the rough spots you had around recipes and stuff? Yeah, I think I mean we're on the bleeding edge of getting this stuff into uh core and uh or into CMS I guess and so we've had uh

fun troubleshooting config that worked one day and didn't work the next and uh even yesterday I think there was a CMS or a canvas uh release that hosed everything we have done or you know everything we were hoping to present. So but we we got it fixed because we're with the right people. So that's the amazing part of uh Drupal Con. But uh yeah, it hasn't been

easy, but we're here and I think, you know, we feel really good about what we've created and we feel really good about the platform for others to be able to do the same thing. Uh it's a a really exciting time to be in Drupal and building things that actually look nice now. >> Yeah. >> Like like I'm I I just want to say like traditionally Drupal strengths

has been like content modeling, security, and like integrations and stuff like that. And our weaknesses have been page building, designs, and getting started. And with like Drupal CMS site templates and canvas, like you know, these what were formerly weaknesses can now become our strengths. And like I think that Drupal can just like kick the ass of our competitors. I'm I'm really excited about it. >> Our competitors,

>> oh uh our first competitor is WordPress. Um WordPress has been eating our lunch for for far too long. But like even things like uh like Web Flow, like there's a million headless solutions. um you know all the way up of course to AM but we've been kind of you know competing with AM for a little while and I'm sure there's several others too. >> I'm gonna

ask you all another question actually while I've got you up here. Um for the folks this was a pilot program in a very true sense right we were figuring out how to interface with partners to do this work how to you know lay down the train tracks while we're while we're while we're moving for all of this kind of stuff >> uh all the way to the

last minute. Um, is there some advice you might give to other folks who are thinking about joining the next generation of template makers or would you like to reflect on maybe what was most challenging about this this first step? >> Uh, I I think the big the biggest advice would be like like as you're building be active. You know, Adam uh Adam Honik right here is like

the most responsive person probably in all of Drupal. um he he he will like say like what you're doing is right, what you're doing is wrong very very quickly and as long as you know you're on the right path um things things are are pretty good. Uh like we made some mistakes pretty early by like uh starting our site templates with Drupal core as opposed to Drupal

CMS that led to a little bit of pain but now that we know not to do that you know it's it's going to be like pretty straightforward. Cool. Thanks very much. >> Oh, and buy your stuff. >> That's right. >> Um, awesome. So, let me keep going. I want to keep featuring more folks and giving them a chance to talk a little bit about their experience again.

Um, we'll keep going here. I think we've got Canopy folks here. Would you like to come up and talk, Jim? >> Sure. >> All right. So, uh, Canopy Studios has worked on the, uh, one of the healthcare templates that's available in the marketplace. We know that healthcare is an enormous market for Drupal, of course. Um, it's used everywhere from like the clinic level to hospital administration kind

of level work. So, yeah, please, we'd love to love to hear from you. >> Thank you. >> Hey, I'm Jim. This is Carrie and the rest of uh the healthcare team over there. Uh, >> get a little up on the mic >> from Canopy. Hi. Okay. Um, so we didn't really want to speak, but you know, we'll just let Mike speak all afternoon if we didn't do

it. Um, so we don't wanted to talk about making uh the healthcare site template. Um, we started with a plan. Uh, we really wanted to come up with a solid plan for a solid site before we even thought about development. Um so we really you know took uh who the site was for um example sites that Canopy has built uh for healthcare organizations. We really went into

content strategy and user experience. Um before um starting with what are the goals uh for the users? What does a healthcare site need? Um and then developed the site map. Uh so we had a site map in Figma. uh then we started looking at the content model um and from the sitemap that's how we started defining our content model in Drupal which is you know uh what

Drupal's really good at uh we actually used AI and an MCP server in a well doumented uh content model document to actually build out 80% of the uh Drupal structure and then refined it from Uh for designs, we really contemplated using Dripyard's themes as our base. Uh they're like amazing uh themes, really well put together. Uh they're solving problems in Canvas. Uh no one's run into yet.

uh they're solving problems in page builders like that Gutenberg hasn't even figured out like how to get JavaScript components to work in the admin experience with a click of a button like pure genius Mike um if you're not going to use premium themes uh you know we wanted to open source this uh you know to give back to the Drupal community that have given us so much

uh so uh we ended up not going with the dripyard themes But we ended up going with uh Mercury uh which was developed for by Drupal CMS. Do you want to say a little bit about Sure. >> Yeah. Theing Mercury? >> Yeah. So we uh poured in Mercury and then um we just kind of took our designs and then there were a lot of components that we

were using like but we added a little bit of extra spice to them like the button component. We added like target link and um working with the single directory components and canvas is great. It's actually like uh like Michael Mike said about WordPress like there's Gutenberg. This blows Gutenberg away. >> Um which is awesome. And also the one thing that this is going to really win on

is that with WordPress, you have to have all these premium plugins like FastWP, um, Mega Menu, all these other things that you're going to have to pay an annual license for. But with Drupal Views, you get that straight out of the box. And um, yeah, this is going to really this is a huge game changer for Drupal. So, >> you raised a point. I'm going to chime

in and please stay up here because I may ask you a question or two, but one of the really important considerations that I guess we spoke about when we first announced site templates, but maybe didn't reiterate again in this conversation or on the on the stage is Drupal's site templates even though they can be free or premium are still GPL open source at their core. Right? So

there are it is possible to bundle proprietary components for certain elements that are not Drupal derived. So that's fundamental Guard can run their business model for the premium themes. But it means that like the add-on e ecosystem, right, the module ecosystem has s has not suddenly become 10 different competing ways to embed a Mailchimp newsletter box on your thing that all cost you $100 a year. Um,

and that's a really big big part of this conversation. We're trying to we're trying to learn from the kinds of marketplaces that everybody else has built over the last 20 years and build one that's better. Um, so So, so I'm somebody who's very familiar with Drupal theming, but this is still pretty new to me. So, are you basically starting with a theme and then adding components to

it or how how does >> Let me repeat the question. So, you talked about building on top of Mercury for example, but the the fundamental question was for for thieving these site templates, are you do you start from scratch? Do you start from some kind of starter kit or do you build on top of these things? Um, how does it how does it actually work to build

this stuff together? >> Well, we used the Mercury theme as the the jumping off point and then we did an analysis of what components already came with the Mercury theme and then we just added to it or modified the styles of what came with it so that it worked better with our site. I mean, we I think we built it in what, two weeks? Yeah. >> So,

from like design to full-blown um site, which is amazing. And it comes with default content >> as well. So, we've got five content types that come >> five or six. Yeah. >> Yeah. Five or six content types plus uh views for like news, events, um physicians, um just all comes out. Yeah. So, the default content comes in and you know what you're looking at straight out of

the box, which is great. >> Raises a point. Please, >> I was just going to follow up. So, in the Drupal theme, there are single >> So, the components are there. Um, we didn't really touch uh page templates too much. >> Um, and view templates. We tried to avoid those. So, we're using views that use the the teaser single directory components or uh in canvas you can

have uh patterns that you create for each view mode. >> Okay. >> Um, so we actually didn't create a content type that didn't use canvas to lay it out. It's 100% canvas. >> Yeah. Yeah, >> the only the key with that too though is that there are a lot of fields types that are not currently supported with Canvas like the phone and the address field or smart

date. So, we pivoted on that and we created views that we just placed on those content templates. So, it doesn't render correctly when you're looking at the preview, but when you look at the full node, you can see it. And it's still the standard Drupal editing experience. >> It does render in the preview now. >> Oh, it does. They fix it >> fixed on Friday. >> Oh,

okay. I didn't see that. Great to know. So Pam, I think you had a question. >> I just had a quick question. Did you design it based on Mercury or did you design it and then you chose Mercury? >> We designed it and then chose Mercury because we were not sure which direction we were going to head. >> Yeah. And actually, thanks to the timeline set forth

by the Drupal CMS product manager, we we actually did most of the designing while we were building out the content types. Yeah, it's a design in a browser. Wing it. See what happens. >> No, it I I do want to point out that all all of our partners in this initial pilot launch had a very limited time to actually put all of this together. So, you may

remember that um the Drupal CMS release and not not the one that just happened January 28th and we are at Drupal Con in in March and that is not a long time. Right. Right. We selected partners at the beginning of the year to try and do this and we had to we had to tell them effectively what I said earlier like we are throwing down railway tracks

in front of this moving train and you're going to have to be able to be okay with that because we don't we don't have an alternative and um and we we very deliberately said okay we laid out a process that said we had you all submit a use case proposal uh about what what kind of audience you're targeting how you thought you would approach that follow that

up with design brief kind of Figma and wireframes sort of thing so we could validate that. Then Janu January 28th came and it was released and we were like okay you can go. Um but it's very impressive what what all of these partners did. Uh we have a couple more questions. Um am I sorry again crowdfaced blindness. Do I have more of my site template makers in

the room who have not yet presented yet before I keep going on questions because I'm we'll just otherwise we'll just roll into more questions. >> Would you like to? Yeah. >> Okay. So, let's do this. Um, so we'll swing back around. Why don't you head back and we'll we'll go into an open Q&A section. >> Yeah. Awesome. >> Um, please come on up. >> How's it going?

>> Yeah. Okay. So, I'm going to run through a few until we get to get to the open sense lab one real quick. Um so uh the morphed team also focus focused on the government space uh produced convivial gov um again focusing on canvas single directory components um tailwind for front-end stuff all of these sorts of things uh put some cool things together worked with Adam on

some last minute work to get things get things going um some really cool stuff uh the proet team produced uh provis edu so another form of an educationalbased template um their default content is oriented around sort of the community college experience. Um they did some uh interesting things around that as well. Another healthcare for uh format from QED42 in the form of pulse and then with our

other partner here to tell us a little bit about it. Um I'd like to go to open sense labs to talk a little bit about Caresphere or one of the others that you've worked on. So I'll just summarize uh for both of them like uh yeah that was a tough timeline and thanks to Adam and Villa for giving the reviews and uh we were able to work

out on them till the last moment though but yeah there is a lot to go uh still on those and we will be you know we committed to improve and uh yeah get to that point. Uh yeah thanks for that and uh even after this uh we are more excited for you know uh putting more templates out there in the second phase. So yeah, thanks for that.

>> Yeah, that's absolutely. Could you tell us a little bit about why you chose the template audiences that you chose to do >> uh yeah uh so I did the initial analysis uh in terms of the most usage of WordPress templates that were the events and the nonprofit. Uh so that was the initial idea of the choosing of these two particular templates. Oh, that makes a lot

of sense. And I know a lot of things were challenging about this whole process, but is there any particular advice that you might have for other people who go into this template process or something you might do differently going into your next wave of template work? >> Yeah, I think the major advice which we got was regarding the demo content which we did not pay attention to

in the beginning. So that was that was that would be the best advice for us >> in that sense of of making that demo content feel as slick and polished as the technical side of things. Yes. >> Which I think we're not used to so much in Drupal because we ship a lot of we ship a lot of Laura Mipsum most of the >> and we did

not did did not want to allow >> Awesome. Um okay so let me go here. I'm going to go through the last couple for for folks that So the last couple that are in the marketplace uh there is the uh local or local government template from Anertch which focuses on local government portals that can be used at a variety of scales. It can be done at the

sort of local council level, the city, the town, the county all the way up to a a city or regional government kind of level. Um, Archimedes from Zucha uh is another educational uh template um built primarily for the sort of primary and secondary school or even the daycare kind of facility audience. A really interesting one. Um uh convene is the other one from open sense labs which

has has to do specifically uh with a event and conference marketing. Um and I think is a really exciting uh kind of different uh target. So it's not the same as uh the government, education, healthcare kind of primary verticals that we originally targeted, but it is one that is a very common case in the Drupal space. And that that uh looking at the most used WordPress kind

of templates is very clever. I appreciate that uh that tidbit. Um so again, for other folks who are interested in participating as a maker of templates, I really do want to encourage you uh look at that become a creator button at the top of the marketplace. read the requirements there, look at the applications, even existing makers, skim through those again. They'll be very familiar to you because

you've seen the the sort of preview versions, but if you'd like to add more in the second wave, um, let us know and get in touch. So, we're going to do Q&A. And so, I'd like to invite everybody back who was part of that conversation who can help answer questions. So, you're welcome to to take some seats here or things like that, but I know it seemed

like no matter there were questions for just about everyone who was here. So, feel free to come back up and and join. Um, question at the back from Andre, >> right? >> Yeah. Yeah. for the people who know both how do I say what if I wanted >> how do you differentiate >> yeah let me repeat the question for this for the sake of the recording which

is just we now have a really interesting opportunity to do onetoone competition in the WordPress space which is which is a place we've sort of moved away from as we went mid and high market but as as WordPress goes starts to try and go mid market. We're back in a position where we want to have this conversation. And as Andre said, if I if I were trying

to tell someone who knows both what the differentiating factor is in choosing a Drupal version, what would I tell them? Now, does anyone want to try and tackle that? >> I can always talk about this. Um, so, uh, Drupal's differentiating factor is is Drupal. Like, like I mean, our content modeling system is obvious and our flexibility is so much greater than WordPress. If you try to install

more than 10 WordPress plugins, the whole system will crash into like a burning flame. Um, but what to really concentrate on is like Drupal's traditional weaknesses, which in my opinion are page building, designs, and getting started. Like these can now be our strengths. And and if if if we I if if we focus on saying like, hey, we're able we're able to do all the stuff that

that make this amazing editorial interface that before was very difficult and it just comes out of the box right now. That's a really big deal. And then you get Drupal's content modeling ability. You get views, you get field UI, you get all this stuff just baked in for free with like ECA, all the AI stuff that WordPress can't even touch. Like for me, decisions pretty pretty easy.

I think it's also important especially for I don't I haven't used but I think they'll have to answer it but from what I understand the way canvas works is like far and away better for editors than so it's like it's not just that we have themes now we actually have not just a par editing experience like it's >> so Pam's >> is that fair to say >>

Pam's leading question >> was we don't just have parody we have the better option when it comes to page editing and things like that is that true um >> it will be Yeah, it will be. >> I think when translation is supported then it will be. I mean I've worked I work with both WordPress on Drupal and you know patterns and blocks is it's very powerful in

WordPress. Um page builders are portable. Um we like builder whatever it is the site origin elementor all those awful ones. U but I think because Drupal I mean also has like Yoast um premium you don't need that if you've got Drupal. You don't have to pay for ACF. You don't have to build these custom post types. You have the UI in Drupal. You can just do it

or AI be able to do it. It's a much easier interface. I've worked with both for like 15 years and I I'm a Drupal girl 100%. >> Always modules are interoperable versus, you know, silos of functionality in WordPress. So that's always going to be a huge win for >> and security as well because like WordPress plugins, the security updates come out like once a week. So you're

like, "Okay, we're gonna have to update this one." And Drupal's at least on a, you know, a schedule. So it's it's a much easier maintaining experience as >> That's awesome. Did you hear that? Drupal is a much easier experience to maintain than WordPress. >> And the caching, I mean, >> yeah. All right. We've got we've got I know I saw questions all around the room, but please

>> So my question is more of a roadmap thing. So you talked about the first phase and now the second phase which seems to be ending on June 15th. >> Oh yeah. So you're Yeah. >> Then what comes after? When do things get opened up more and what will the requirements be for getting a template approved for for that? >> Yeah, that's a really good question and

um that train track is still being built and that train is still moving. Um but to repeat the question, it was for the template builders. what is the road map from today to where we're going and how we have more general availability for template makers and more general availability of templates for the consumer ecosystem. So for the template makers the the sort of particular goal of the

second phase is partly an internal one. So Pam and Adam and I in particular um uh learned a huge amount from the process of working even with just you know about 11 partners about what's necessary to do um quality to review the pace of communication how we need to organize you know that decision to go concept designs then implementation all of these sorts of things and we

need to systematize that stuff we need to turn it into I I briefly previewed sort of a dashboard where We could have a like kind of um what's the what are those like pizza throbbber things that are like your your your site template is being they're they're adding the pepperoni and it's in the oven and it's going to be here like we we need to start creating

some of those sorts of things in order to scale because we don't have the resources to accept a huge volume in order to be able to to review them all well. So, at the moment, that is like the major barrier. And then a lot of the very specific things that you're seeing uh on there possibly some overly restrictive or overly cautious details that are just designed to

be like, okay, uh is this good? Can we loosen this one? Can we begin to broaden some of these things up? And that June 15th deadline that we that I've I've have there for the next set of submissions is with the intention of providing a certain amount of time to uh a next wave release of that set of templates and eventually we will go into general availability

rolling releases based on completion of reviews. Um and it's the intent to do that by Roderdam as soon as we can solve the basically the the quality control portion. Um so that's that's the main thing. So um one way to one way to throttle the volume we have to manage is to elevate the the difficulty of acceptance at first um the the level of requirements and then

we can gradually bring that down as we can uh uh automate or support better quality control. So >> I do just want to add something to that though. So um >> introduce yourself. >> Hi I'm Pam. I'm the product owner for Drupal CMS. Um, one really important thing to say is that as long as your site template is free, you can publish it now on drupal.org. So,

it's just a Drupal, it's called a general project. So, it's a specific project type. Um, but it's just a Drupal project. So, there's no gatekeeping on creating a site template. And I think if you're feeling like the whole process is a little too complicated for you, um, publishing your site template on drupal.org, you have to do that anyway in order to make it like distributable. So um

that's a necessary step. And then the marketplace presence currently is literally just an additional node that we um get you to create. So I think as far as the process goes, there's nothing stopping you doing it and publishing it. And if it's good, then there would be nothing stopping us adding it to the marketplace. Honestly, like I'm I mean I'm happy to say this and I apologize

is this breaks anything but like outside of that official process the reason that we had things like testing use case and design review was we had a really tight time frame and we really wanted to show something here. So we wanted to make sure that the the use cases were not overly ambitious and people weren't going to kind of trip themselves up and then not be able

to meet the deadline. So to me the the use case thing is a little bit irrelevant now because you can take all the time you need. It's really about, you know, if if we if we set a specific goal for numbers, then that's a whole other story. But, um, like I said, there's nothing stopping you doing this right now, and I would encourage you to do it.

And I can think of a million use cases that are, you know, the the the funny thing is we ended up getting a lot of overlap. We have government, we have um education, and then we have healthcare. So, there's a lot of spaces that are missing there and and nonprofit, sorry. Um, but yeah, so I think if it sounds complicated, don't worry about it. That was a

temporary thing. And um as long as it's free, if you want to pay, if you want to make it paid, it's a little bit more complicated, but again, we have infrastructure in place for that. If you want to do that, you have to set up the e-commerce yourself right now. But um I think for people who are motivated, the last thing we want to do is scare

you off with process. If you're motivated and you're working in good faith, then um we're happy to work with you to get you on board as soon as possible. >> Thanks, Pam. I'm gonna clip that recording so I can play it back in future meetings. >> What are the technical requirements for submitting like a site template like like when Drupal 12 comes out etc. Are we like

to submit and maintain a site template especially on the Mac marketplace. Is it going to be pegged to a Drupal version? Is it going to be pegged to like I think all the site templates you've demonstrated so far are all built with canvas, right? >> Yes, they are. So Adam's gonna come up >> is it is it are all templates are going to be canvas or like

layout builder is acceptable or some other like custom display builder like you might come up with like how does that work? >> I'm going to talk about I'm going to talk about all of that in my session tomorrow. Um short answer is no. It's not pinned to anything. There's no site templates are recipes and that's basically it. Um you can do whatever you want in there. Um

we we like canvas. We think you should use canvas but there's no technical enforcement of that as far as maintaining them. It's not like modules. Um site templates are just bundles of configuration and content really. So in terms of compatibility with like Drupal 12 for example if the modules that your site template uses are all compatible with Drupal 12 then the site template will be compatible with

Drupal 12. Yeah, the only thing to mention with that is you're most likely going to also be shipping a um a contract theme, which is a separate project that would need to be maintained if you want the site template to continue. But again, um because it's just a starting point, it's not a distribution. And so I know that that mindset is really hard to break free from,

but as Adam said, like once once the site template gets installed, it's thrown away. It's never referenced again. The actual site template itself, the recipe is no longer relevant in any way. It just creates a regular Drupal project that gets managed in the same way. I did just want to quickly clarify as well that um it is true that you can create a site template without canvas.

There's nothing stopping you publishing that on Drupal.org, but it's very unlikely that in the short term we will add non-canvas templates to the marketplace because we think that it would be a really confusing experience for people who are trying to be downloading different site templates and getting a completely different editing experience. So we're definitely for the moment going to limit the marketplace promotion to canvas based site

templates. But but having said that, we also recognize that Canvas doesn't do everything that you might want to do in a site template. So um obviously there are instances where you might need to use something else additionally, but basically we want you to use Canvas and we want you to have Canvas landing pages. The rest do your thing. >> He did say technical though. >> No, I

know. Um the so so when Drupal 12 comes out, you you still have to maintain and publish and output a Drupal 12 compatible version of your site >> Not necessarily. Well, >> you're pinned into 11. You're not >> I mean, I'm being careful and that's why I say not necessarily. It would depend, right? It's, as I say, it's not like doing a module where you have to

adjust for core APIs and stuff. >> Um, depending on how like this is where it gets really fiddly and in the weeds, >> technically trueing and you want and you want to know like if you're if you're looking for a use case for yourself. >> You know, are you gonna have a filter for the version or is it >> ideally not? I mean, >> I would. Yeah,

hopefully not. >> Yeah, I don't know. >> Yeah, it's it's fiddly. We can talk later. >> We don't know yet. >> That's phase four. >> Yeah, I mean the goal is that, right? Best case scenario, you you barely have to touch anything. Maybe you have to update a pinned version in the recipe, >> but >> but but I mean, if you think about it, like on the

day that Drupal 12 is released, you wouldn't you you wouldn't be building a site on it yet, right? Because there's going to be all kinds of contrip stuff. I think we probably are like we want to move toward a world where no one's really thinking that much about the Drupal version because like if you think about WordPress, no one talks about like which version of WordPress are

you using because it's just kind of like everyone's always on the latest. And it's not to say that we always will be on the latest, but like I just I just don't think that's something we like literally haven't even thought about because it just doesn't really feel like it's going to be a problem. We could be wrong because Canvas obviously right now we're like only working in

the 11 space, but I don't know. It just doesn't really >> and I'll I'll mention unless Adam's going to correct me on this, but like we we also do currently forbid like pinning to dev releases and patching and things like this. >> Yeah, there are certain limitations in terms of like you know in terms of how you can use dependencies like you can't pin to a patch

for the same reason. >> Yeah. For the for the deep technical dive though, Adam's session will definitely get you covered. >> As a clarification, only properly maintained WordPress sites are on the >> Yes. >> Uh, good. We still have time for questions. So, I thought I saw a hand. Yes, please. >> I'm uh looking at the site templates and there's a giant download button or rather a

normalsized one. >> Uh, you go there and there's like, are you an advanced user? Totally am. Can I just download the file? Nothing. I don't know where to go. Wants me install easy install. >> Uh, let me I may need to take a look at that landing page again. What you should be getting at the moment is you should be getting Let me double check, but you

should be getting the option to download the Drupal CMS launcher where you will be presented in the installer immediately with all the site templates to install and then you should have the advanced option should take you to the option to install with DDEV or with a composer command. It does bring me down there, but it it's not exactly I just want to download the site template. >>

If you actually literally just wanted to go to like the project page for that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's something. >> So, we purposely don't link the project pages from the marketplace because that's not the target. So, we're trying to abstract away the like Drupalisms and the like. So, if basically if you know that the place to get the template is the project page, then you

already know that we're not we're not like the page is not there to serve you. if that makes >> Yeah. So, >> I don't know what the project page is based off of. >> Yeah. The thing finding it, we may have to figure out a way to to because you don't necessarily know the short name to to guess which project page it's on. So, I I hear

you. Let's think about that a little bit. That's good feedback. >> So, again, very new to Canvas, but I certainly at least at a conceptual level understand about like maybe bringing in a React component and then configuring that and styling that. um how much other Drupal things are going to be required. So for example, if I had an education site, would I need an entity for a

class and an entity for an instructor and would those need to be related, you know, associated or >> Okay. Okay. That's where uh templates come in. Uh patterns, sorry. >> Okay. Yeah. But site building hasn't changed. So if you're planning to build a site with no structured content, then you might not really want to use Drupal. But if you want to build a site with structured content,

you would still do that in the way that you always did. The main difference would be you might not >> layout builder, you might use for the display side, you might use canvas. But okay, structured content won't change at all unless you decide you don't want entities for those things because you don't want them to be reusable, for example, in which case they could be components. But

that's a content modeling question that hasn't really changed. I I don't think um so it isn't changing that that mindset. >> Unless I don't know if you guys >> Yeah. I mean you're you're still creating the entity view mode >> but you're not using the entity view mode form. You're creating a pattern in canvas that replaces that entity view >> Excellent. So in canvas you have you

know your page where you can put your components on an individual uh entity but you also have these patterns that attach to the entity view modes. So for our uh service uh content type we have a teaser pattern and a full display pattern. >> Okay. So, it seems quite likely that two different clients might download the same template and they would have desires that you're not going

to have baked into that template. >> The idea is not that it's it's 100% but it's like we're we're inching closer to 80 maybe and then someday we might hit 90. Yeah, it's sort of, you know, if you envision Drupal core being like 20% and then the Drupal CMS defaults maybe gets you to 30 40 and then we want the site template to give you that to

bridge that next maybe 30 or 40%. And so we we expect of course branding wise and and content model wise there still might be stuff you want to do. The idea is just to keep keep getting closer and closer >> and the ability to use it as a guide. >> the ability to use it as a guide because we're building with the best practices. So when you

download the site template, if you want to add a new content type and you know, how did we build the SDC's? How did we map the values to >> it's there for you to >> that's that's actually a really under underrated point is that the the the structure that you get with the templates, if you continue to follow and extend what's there, you're you're basically on the

path to be using the right best practices. >> You're hopefully not going to find yourself in a brick wall. >> Yeah. Um as as a client perspective, uh if I buy something actually this is good because this is something that I can trust. I have some kind of >> what if what about the trust in long term? >> Yeah. So this is an interesting question. So if

if a especially with a purchase purchasable site template, there's an expectation of quality and an expectation of trust in a product that you're using. And if it's not a subscription product, what is the expectation of long-term quality? Right. Um, that's a good one. And would you like to speak to how you guys are approaching it? >> Uh, yeah. Well, we we sell, you know, add-on support, you

know, so we will happily take your money for ongoing support. um you know and kind of answer questions for you. >> But but also just to clarify the site template itself is just a recipe. What you're buy what you're buying if you buy a dripyard site template is you're buying the configuration and the um content but you're also buying the premium theme. >> So that's a whole

separate thing. That's not a oneandone. That's an ongoing thing that you can buy updates for. So just just to clarify that continue. Sorry. >> And you get support for a certain amount of time with the initial purchase, >> Yep. Yeah. Yeah. out out of the gate, we give you two months for free and then you know you can you can keep on extending that. >> Yeah. So

one model for this um I also don't want to spoil something that might be a key part of Adam's theme, but the other thing when we talk about building site templates is um you can just site build um a regular site and there's a oneliner command line command to export a template. Um so it's actually remarkably easy. it's not necessarily going to do everything you want or

do everything right the first time, but like when we talk about this process of building templates, um it's less complex than you think. So, and there's going to be uh there's also going to be a whole category of use cases, I imagine, within larger organizations or perhaps internally within agencies where they're building templates for internal use um for sort their own repeatable starter uh environments in different

in different cases. If we have a minute, I I would like to hear maybe about the sort of regression process as a project manager. I'm, you know, constantly dealing with like designs and then we're going to dev and then we're going back to designs for another round. And so I just kind of wonder like that experience that's really intriguing to me, the idea of like being able

to build some things and then kind of export them to some extent. But I'm I'm kind of curious like what has been the experience with this rapid development process that had to happen with going back to do some additional tweaks on design side or theming side in collaboration? >> It's a good question. It's probably the last one we'll have time for, but do folks want to speak

to a little bit of >> I mean, I would just say that it's gotten a lot better in the last three months. I don't know. I think we probably all agree three months ago it was horrible. Um, in the last since Friday, actually, it's gotten a lot Um, it's funny because in a way site templates are a little bit freeing. I mean, there's still the theme aspect,

so I don't mean to downplay it, but the great thing about a site template is because it's one and done. If you change something, you don't have to worry about regressions because it can only ever be used at the beginning. So, you can't break someone's site by changing the site template. You can still break the site template by making it uninstallable, but you don't have to worry

about regressions because anyone that's already installed it is no longer affected by changes that you make. that doesn't apply to the theme, but that but then that life sort of the the life of that is the same as it would be for any theme where you know the derpyard guys are are with the Mercury the Drupal CMS seems to be specifically saying we don't want you to

use it as a contra theme that you're upgrading or you can but do it at your own risk because we can't promise that future updates won't break. Um, that's maybe if you guys want to speak to your your plan for how you're doing. >> Let me interject really quickly like a more just a more basic thing that I think you'reing over because you're used to saying it

over and over already is just right uh when we're saying things like site templates are one and done or recipes are one and done. This is because we literally mean you don't update a recipe. You don't update a site template. It is it it's literally a set of instructions about what's installed to your site and then those individual components are updated like normal as if you had

done it all manually. The individual modules within it, all of those pieces within it. So you never apply a site template on top of a site template again, right? So you're that you don't have to worry about that layer of backwards compatibility which is would have which was the reason and has been the reason that distributions in the past were so difficult to maintain and manage updates

for and all those sorts of things. So just to make that fundamental point. Um >> so for the developers and technical project managers in the room the development workflow is different. So you don't have this codebase that is installed and you have your canonical database. Uh once your site template is made uh you know you originally make your site template from a site that you site built

put together but once your site template is made you can your the development process is to apply that recipe at the beginning of a site. So Drush site install recipe you make your changes and thanks to Adam's Drupal CMS helper module you do the one-click you know export site export command and it'll export your recipe, your site template as a whole. So, you know, it's almost as

you're adding a new feature, you're making a new change. You're starting from ground zero every single time on that site. >> So, that's the difference. You know, while you're building it, while you're putting it together, that's your normal Drupal workflow. But once that template is created, your your development workflow completely shifts into kind of a a recipe development that Adam and I will you get very comfortable

running Josh SQL drop. Let's just say >> a little too comfortable. >> Um I believe we have time for one more comment. Did you want to say something? >> Yeah. Um for everyone out there that's really considering building site site templates. I want you to consider building premium site templates. I'm really like I really want to try to get the like our community used to buying site

templates and using using premium site templates. Um, I believe that doing so will bring more more money into the Drupal ecosystem, which we desperately need. Like if you ever been to like a word camp, there's so many like like you go to the you go to the show floor and there's so many uh mod uh plugins and themes trying to sell their stuff here. Like I would

love to get to the point where we're selling where where we have this ecosystem where we're selling lots of paid site templates and then we are sponsor we are getting booths down on the floor. We are helping to fund the Drupal association and if if we if we like we're in we have uh site templates currently paid site templates into Drupal CMS installer. If we can get

like if we can get more e-commerce integration that will help fund the Drupal association which like keeps the lights on keeps the server go servers going and does all this awesome things like I think that's vitally important for our entire ecosystem. >> I think that's a wonderful note to end on and thank you for the support shout out. So, thank you everyone for being here. We really

appreciate it. Thank you to our amazing speakers and hope to see you at the gala.