Drupal CMS, site templates and beyond

This talk introduces Drupal CMS, highlighting its evolution from Drupal core to a user-friendly platform aimed at simplifying the website creation process. The speakers, Christina and Pam, clarify the goals behind releasing Drupal CMS 1 and 2, which include reducing site setup time and making initial decisions about modules and themes less daunting for users. They emphasize that Drupal CMS is built on the solid foundation of Drupal core, while offering pre-packaged site templates and tools to accelerate site development. New features like site templates, recommended add-ons, and improved theming options are discussed, illustrating how these advancements make the platform more accessible to a wider audience, including those who may have previously found Drupal intimidating. Furthermore, they mention the need for community support to enhance and promote Drupal CMS.

So, um, hi everyone. I'm Christina. I'm coming from Barcelona. Um, I've been working with Drupal CMS for a while now. A product designer of Drupal CMS, but also COO at a Spanish company called Cambrio. Um, and Pam. >> Oh, hi. I'm Pam. I'm uh I live in Australia, but I'm from the US. Um, I live in Australia. I work for an Australian Drupal agency called Technocrat. and

I'm the product owner for Drupal CMS. And when Christina says she's working on Drupal CMS for a while, since the beginning, so we've both been there since day one. >> All right. So, um let's start at the beginning, especially uh there is a lot of uh space uh free at the front for the ones arriving now. So um a little bit of like what we're going to

talk uh we're going to first go through like the vision and the strategy and why we're doing all this. Uh for some people it still doesn't make sense and what is Drupal CMS. It's something that we're al also going to touch on because for a lot of people still nowadays we get questions that it's like okay you still don't know exactly how this can solve your problem.

So I think it's important to go through that. Then we're going to go through the current release. What's in there and what you can do with that and obviously what's coming also. So let's start first with the vision and strategy and why we decided that this needed needed to happen uh to launch something that is called Drupal CMS and it's is it Drupal core? Is it not

Drupal core? What does it have? What are the differences? but especially why we are doing this. So basically the fir the Drupal CMS one uh was launched last year in January. We started like around actually when it was launched in Portland. >> Yeah. Like May >> Yeah. May 2024. Yeah. So a few months after starting we launched Drupal CMS one and um basically uh this year we

launched Drupal CMS 2. Um we're basically uh one sec. Uh we're basically trying to uh make sure uh that we launch a product that can actually be used uh to start the Drupal site in hours instead of days. And uh that's easy to say uh but not that easy to do. And especially the pain point that we're trying to solve here is that all these initial decisions

of okay which are like the Drupal modules that I should be installing because you know there is not like two or three modules on Drupal.org to choose from which are the standard ones which one of them work together with with each other. So all those decisions that need to happen at the beginning that's the decisions that we're already making for the people that can install can install

directly without like having to uh spend time on that. So what we're trying to do in this phase uh like Drupal CMS one especially and now on Drupal CMS 2 is trying to make things easy that were hard before. Um basically we're trying to make these pain points uh be a little a little bit less painful so we can actually build that Drupal site in fewer hours.

Uh but still it's a few hours and we're on that phase. In the future we want to make everything way easier to install just from uh the beginning. Uh this is a little bit the high level goal uh that we want and when we're saying no code what we're basic basically trying to say is that we're going we want to make the site builder experience easier meaning

that you shouldn't be writing unless you need a really custom stuff or a custom feature. You shouldn't be needing a uh um experienced developer to do everything if that's something that already exists on Drupal. shouldn't be coding anything at all unless you want to as I'm saying customize something. So as you're saying as you see uh we are on the phase two Drupal CMS 2. So there's

still room for improvement uh but we've already achieved a few things. So um from these two years um more or less yeah so from these two years what we've seen uh at the beginning it was a little bit more like hopes that we had now we've already talked with people we've there's people that there is more room in the front if for those like standing in case

you want so um what we've already seen we've seen people talking about that we've seen uh either outside the Drupal island or within like Drupal CMS, Slack channels or in uh conferences, people coming to us and saying things. We've already seen a few things and um for example, we've seen that this really helps uh people using Drupal CMS to accelerate their existing sites, their existing things that

they are uh their existing sites or projects that they are starting to build. And basically they are able to uh uh cut the time that they spend installing a Drupal site dramat dramatically. So basically there are two ways of using Drupal CMS. You can either use the site templates themselves and use it as a reference to build your own projects and start from there if you're an

agency or you per you for example can actually install Drupal CMS and start building on top of that. you can either choose uh one way or the other and it already is helping a lot of people to just go straight and avoid a lot of decisions on the way. Something that we've already seen and uh it's that that goes a little bit mind-blowing but it's already right

now two years after that we're seeing that there's people old people from Drupal that stepped away and are coming back and we're seeing devs from other platforms. I'm not going to name them but they are starting to try Drupal again. they are starting they are starting to give it another chance again to start uh using Drupal and altogether it's important because for a long time Drupal was

perceived as some as something complicated something of course stable something you something powerful you can do a lot of things but it got really complicated and again a lot of people is trying Drupal with Drupal CMS and that's helping to be as that's helping us to be again on the table to be again on the conversation as something to be evaluated to be used >> All right.

So, as Christina mentioned, um it has come to our attention in the last few months that there are still many people that don't really know what Drupal CMS is. So, we decided to add a section to this to kind of go through it. So um in the old days we had Drupal core and then we had all the stuff that you would do when you were building

a site to make it actually usable. So um Drupal CMS one was kind of like a little ring to fill that gap a little bit. So all of that other stuff that you did became a little bit less but as we know it had limitations mainly around there was not really still a way to just to do any kind of theming because you still had to know

how to make a Drupal custom theme. Then um after we released Drupal CMS 1.0, there were a number of things we included like some content types and there were some things that were opinionated but kind of awkwardly opinionated because we were still trying to make them generic and we just figured out that we couldn't really make it useful and generic. So we introduced this concept of site

templates which is in Drupal CMS 2.0 in which that also allowed us to kind of contract a little bit what Drupal CMS was was including and leave the rest to the site template. So the idea basically is that Drupal CMS just gets you to a finished site faster, but it's still Drupal. It's still Drupal core. It's still built in the same way that any Drupal site would

be built. So basically the way I describe it is it's a prepackaged starting point designed to make it faster and easier to build sites. But the key thing there is that it's a starting point. So these are the some of the things that it includes. the this is I mean a kind of a mix of contrib modules with specific configuration recipes. Um we have a a helper

module that does some shims that basically includes core improvements that aren't in the current core release. So that's kind of handy even if you're not using Drupal CMS. But I think the key point to make is that if if any or all of these things are things that you do or would like to do on your projects, then Drupal CMS is probably a good place to start.

Um, so I guess that's the the answer to the question like, should I use Drupal CMS? Well, if you're making a site that's generally aimed at publishing content, and I know that many Drupal sites aren't that. I have built many myself. Um, if it's kind of a weird like frameworky um, integrationheavy thing that isn't really around publishing, then you probably don't want to use Drupal CMS. But

if it is a publishing um, editor-based site, then Drupal CMS is most likely going to be a good place for you to start. Um, so if you've already got a Drupal website, the good news is it's just Drupal. So all of the stuff that I showed you on that slide about what what the features are, you can have on your site. I mean, some of it you

might already have. Um, if you don't already have it, you can take a look at some of our recipes are um uh kind of oneoff. They're like uh bundled. So you can actually apply our admin UI recipe separately. You can apply our media recipe separately to an existing site. There may be some places where it conflicts if you have existing config that doesn't quite match. But um

the the main thing you would need in order to kind of reach feature parity with Drupal CMS 2.0 is a canvas uh friendly uh theme. So that's that's the other main thing that Drupal CMS provides. it's a little bit tricky to incorporate that on an existing site because obviously the the themes that we ship provide their own kind of content model and um there there would be

a little bit of work to retrofit that but um so anyway the answer is if it's a new site I would recommend that you use Drupal CMS um if it's an existing site then you can pretty easily if you're someone that's familiar with this stuff you can pretty pretty easily do a comparison of the features that we provide and features you may want um and decide from

there. But yeah, highly recommend for existing sites and I'll show you why. So, um just a little bit about the current state which uh we released 2.1 on Friday. I believe it comes with um site templates which are as I said kind of this u use case pre preset list of features and um ideally a theme that kind of get you closer to your goal because we

know what your goal is. So, as I said, you know, if you don't know what someone's building, you can't really provide them with a useful set of content types because the the individual decisions that you might make on fields and naming and all of that kind of stuff, you just don't know enough information. So, the idea with site templates is decide what it's going to do and

then build what you think that should have. Of course, we start with blank, which is not that at all, but um this would basically be if you're not interested in using one of our themes, but you want all of those features, you can install with the blank site template. It gives you literally just an empty theme and no default content, but it has all of those editor

side features that I mentioned. Starter then is um a vanilla theme that's a Tailwind based theme called Mercury that we developed specifically for Drupal CMS. I think this is a really good one for if you don't care that much about how your custom theme, you know, if you don't have um really opinionated ways of building custom themes. This is really handy because it comes with a flexible

uh component library that's ready to go out of the box. So, anyone that's tried canvas might have realized that you can install canvas and then you just kind of get this blank thing that you have to actually provide all of the components for. So, starter is great because it provides those components. It's very generic. It's it's not um you know it's pretty easy to apply an existing

brand if you have one and um it's it's relatively empty. That's just a screenshot of what um what you'll get out of the box of starter. And then the first actual sort of meaningful template that we launched is called bite and this is designed for a SAS product use case. So it's it's still pretty simple. Um it has a kind of a dark theme. It's sort of

like an elegant dark techy kind of theme. and it includes um the same the same canvas component library. So bite has a a custom a a contra theme that is based on mercury. So basically we built Mercury and then we're kind of forking that off to create all of these sub themes. So they all share essentially the same component library with a few with a few differences.

And um this is a a little shot of bite. I'll do a little scroll. I I mean I don't know about anyone else but I think it's super cool to install Drupal and then end up with something that looks like this. when we spent so many years. I love Volivo, but you know, um and then Haven is a new one that we've included in 2.1, which is

designed for a nonprofit use case. So, similarly, it's got a um it's got a Tailwind base theme that's forked off of Mercury. It's called Haven. It's got the same component library with a few extras. It's got some extra content types. Um, and it's also got something which I'll mention a little bit later called recommended recipes, which is um something that we're sort of only in the early

stages of, but I actually think is is going to be the key thing that makes site templates really killer. This is a little screenshot of Haven. That little animation at the beginning is um a work in progress, but it's coming soon. So, um, as I mentioned, these all of these site templates come included with a pretty fullfeatured canvas component library. It's not the most complicated component library

you've ever seen, but that's sort of on purpose. I think there are definitely ways to make a lot more sophisticated component library sort of frameworks, but what we've tried to do is make it flexible but simple enough that you don't need to learn like basically all of the front-end concepts in order to figure out how to lay out a page. Um, and then we've also used canvas

for node displays, which if you haven't used this yet, it's so freaking cool. So this is um the full page basically the the full page view mode for this person content type and you can see you drag the heading component in you you choose your styles and then you click on the little link icon and you link it to the field. So now that is how you

um can theme your nodes now. So again if you haven't seen this I highly recommend playing with it. It's so cool. maybe explain what the library component >> what's the library of components is oh SDZs do you mean >> no uh component of uh library of components not sure >> oh okay so the library of components just just for those who aren't familiar with the terminology these

are single directory components in Drupal speak but it's just basically a list of um semistructured I guess semiructured uh display options the heading has a heading like a text field, a heading level that you can choose from um from none all the way down to six. It has a size so you the the size and the heading level are decoupled. It has a color and it has

uh alignment and then it has a link option. But this heading component is created by Mercury for Mercury. So you can make your heading component whatever you want. You can have it have more more options less options. Um you know you can have it have 50 colors. We have three. All of these components are fully customizable by anyone anywhere. So you can start from scratch, but as

I said, if you install Canvas and you don't have a a theme that has components included, that list on the left sidebar there will be completely empty because Canvas doesn't ship with any components. So um by by using this, even if you're just trying to test out Canvas, I highly recommend you do that. And then if you find that the component library makes sense to you, then

you can tweak it and modify it to uh to suit your use case. And then the last sort of big reveal that is a little bit of a scoop of the uh the D notet later is that Drupal CMSs 2.1 includes all of these site templates. So this is a list of site templates that was um besides the the four that I spoke about, these are all

contributed by Drupal certified partners. So they're essentially contributed site templates. And this is something we um put out a call for after Vienna and then have been working closely with the partners since then. I think this is really exciting. I mean, it's only the beginning hopefully. Um, again, you know, I think for for so many years of minimal standard and then we got Umami like this is

just a completely different universe for someone that's trying out Drupal for the first time. And it's not just about the trial experience. It actually does enable you to build things in Drupal a lot faster um and just a lot more easily. Um I think I switched to Christina. Um yeah. Okay. So uh after a little bit of the summary uh in here um some of the things

that we're planning already and you will see some of them you will see them uh already on this uh D note and during this Drupal con um but also like some things that are coming uh in the future. So starting first with the marketplace. how many of you have actually heard about the marketplace before today? Okay, that's good. Okay, a lot of people. Great. So, it's not

new news for everyone then. >> Wait, how many people wondered is this really going to happen? >> Thank you. Thank you for like being >> clear. Uh, okay. So, a while back we started designing uh preparing uh thinking about how this should actually happen and we work on wireframes a while back. Um, we had several ideas and we defined like several phases like the MVP one where

you only have a list of a few templates and maybe I don't know five uh 10 site plates where people can actually choose from the marketplace and see if it's working actually the marketplace. Then a second release where you have I don't know maybe 50 100 uh site template and then when you're like reaching like this 100 then you will have like proper filter filters you would

see like as you can see in any other uh marketplace from any of the competitors you would have like a proper like search but of of course we define like the different phases and step by step what are the most important things and the first things that we need to make sure people can actually start using from day one. So basically um the marketplace is a reality.

We have an MVP. Uh it's going to be properly revealed. Uh we don't want to put still like any link anywhere. In one hour you will know way more information about that but it actually happened. Sorry one hour on the D note you will see way more information. We are just giving you like the heads up but that's the reality. You can see Mercury and he haven

there, but there are other templates. There are a lot of other DPS that work hard to get them in here. So, uh that's a reality. We have a marketplace and we have a detail uh for all the site templates and there is a workflow that you can see. So that's actually something that happened and if you want to know more information about this um team is going

to uh actually talk uh for a whole session about that there it's going to uh he's going to explain how you can become a creator of uh site templates. What's the process? Is it paid? If is it not paid where uh what's the the different options that you have? What are the the minimum requirements to create a site template? So um we're going to see a second

release of site template soon. So if you want to be part of that um just go to that session and you will have way more information. Something else uh that is going to happen quite soon. It's on the still on the open. I'm not sure if you heard obviously I'm not a native English speaker and in my country it's not legal to actually publish a website that

only has one language and it's the a language that it's English. So sorry there is there are a lot of things out there. So we need other languages and probably multil- language sites. So basically we started working on this a while back and uh we have like uh we started working on uh the hypothesis that we had like two different uh road maps. The first one you

just install in another language uh French, Spanish, Chinese, whatever. Then you have another case where you actually want to have like two languages, English, Spanish, uh whatever 25 languages it doesn't matter. That's important because uh the things that you actually need to install it's different from one language that is not English to two languages. Well, you probably a lot of you already know that but um the

first thing that we needed to do is like to redesign the installer. I'm not sure if you've seen the uh Drupal CMS installer. we actually needed the installer to um allow you to start in start installing with another language by default because um as it happens here some people don't speak other languages in my country for example a lot of people don't speak English and if you

just put an installer in English people is going to say I can't use it right from the beginning so we needed to change it so um we started defining what is the actual workflow to actually enable uh Drupal in other languages. It was hard work. We needed to as you what you're seeing here is a user flow. Basically a user flow maps out the different steps that

you have to do and which are the the the decision points where uh somebody has to decide something meaning that there is like a knowledge gap in there. If somebody doesn't know enough, you have to explain things in there and there is also like a process and time that you have to invest on that. So what we actually try to do the green points on the top

one is what you actually have to the different uh decision points that you actually have to decide something and the one at the uh below we actually ended up redesigning the whole workflow. So you actually have only two decision points. So we already like decide a lot of things uh on the beginning. Um, so basically if you want to enable the multilingual uh site template, you will

have like um the option to decide. Okay, I'm going to mess with that again. I confuse confuse uh synchronous translations and >> symmetric >> symmetric. Okay, the word is symmetric. Thank you. I will I'm sorry. I'm gonna I mess her head. I'm I'm always confusing. I'm sorry for uh messing with yours now. So um anyway you can choose to have uh same language um sorry uh two

languages exactly the same menu in the different language or two languages each for example menu has different uh point. So exactly the same note is going to have one single translation or you're basically uh you have like a different menu and you have like only three menus. So the translation are not uh exactly the same on each language. So this is one of the the the points

where you would have to decide this because it actually changes a lot like the uh the models that you have to install and then the config is decided for you and uh it's enabled for you. This is work in progress because after designing uh developers started like trying okay what will do we have to do and this is Drupal. You open a box and surprise there's stuff

that you need to fix. So basically the installer right now works uh with another language uh or um yeah well basically you can install Drupal already with another language. Drupal core is already multilingual but what we're trying to work on and trying to solve is that recipes themselves are translatable and it turns out it's not a small thing. Next step after that is going to be config

actions and something that is also happening at the same time it's canvas uh being uh translatable and um it's also going to happen soon. Not want to promise uh anything but it's happening soon. So um I mentioned briefly earlier the idea of recommended recipes which um is something we actually have included in Drupal CMS 2.0. So this recommended we're calling it recommended add-ons. We won't get into

the language question here, but um recommended add-ons is a new tab in the extend section that is currently it's a a hard-coded YAML file that each site template can provide that lists recipes or I mean it can list anything, but right now it's listing recipes that we think are useful for that site template. So, it's it's limited at the moment because um there are really limited number

of recipes that actually make this truly oneclick or as close to one click as we can get. But um in the um bite site template and in haven we have a Mailchimp recipe which um I think is extremely cool. Um but basically the Mailchimp module has really good integration because actually um in it pays a company called Thinkshout to uh maintain the integration. So as many of

you have I'm sure experienced you have a client that requests integration with a with a service. you go, you find there's a module, you see it hasn't had a release in three years, um, nothing works, you know, you're sort of starting from scratch. And then even if you have, even if you find a case like Mailchimp where the integration is actually really good, there are still always

a lot of steps and it's not always entirely clear what the steps are. So the first time you do it, you step through, you figure it out, there's a lot of sort of, okay, I've done that. Now what? Okay, now what? Okay, now what? And then you don't do that again for six months or a year and then you've forgotten everything. even though you already knew how

to do it once, you forgot how to do it. So, um, what we've done with the Mailchimp recipe is it's called MailChimp Signup Forms. You click install. What it does is behind the scenes, it installs all of the necessary modules and adds some configuration. It also adds an ECA template that does something even extra that saves you a bunch of steps. So, basically, anyway, the way the

Mailchimp module works, there's no more API keys. You just get prompted to authenticate with Mailchimp. So once you authenticate with Mailchimp, what the recipe actually does is um goes into your Mailchimp account and automatically creates a signup block for any audience that you have. Audience is is what they use they used to call list. So once you've done that, your integration is complete and literally all you

have to do is what I just showed. You click install on the recipe, you authenticate your site with Mailchimp and then once you go into Canvas, you will have a Mailchimp signup block that you can drop into any page. So, I'm not joking when I say that's all you have to do to integrate Mailchimp with a site now. And again, this is not to say it was

bad before, but it was certainly not that simple. And so, I think this is this is what I was saying is a huge opportunity where we have all of these really really great um wellsupported integrations with popular services, but they often just require that little bit of extra sort of confusing what do I do next thing that in many cases we can automate. And in the next

example, I'll show you sort of the the step the sort of next level of that, which um in the Haven site template, we've included a couple of recipes to help get donations up and running faster. There's one that's really simple. It just really um really simply integrates a web form with Stripe. Obviously, that's kind of limited. You can't do like recurring donations. It's um you know, you

have to use Stripe if you want to use a different payment gateway. We also have a recipe that has a full-on commerce web form integration that you can bring your own payment gateway, but that's obviously a little bit more complicated because you have to set up the payment gateway yourself. So, with the Stripe um module, again, this was a this was a module that has pretty good

integration out of the box, but it was so complicated to figure out exactly what I had to do just to get a web form that was sending the data into Stripe and and charging the the payment. So, the really I swear like I didn't list it all out, but there's a lot to figure out with this. Um, and so what we've got now is the Stripe donation

form add-on, which prompts you. So the the way the Stripe web form module works, it prompts you for your API keys. Um, you enter your API keys, then you have a web form that um accepts donations. That's it. Look, there's a credit card widget and everything. I mean what what's not mentioned there and I definitely want to mention is um the API key handling uh natively is

is just in your config so it's in your database it's probably not a great idea you also start with the test credentials you then have to switch to production mode I mean these are things that we can't possibly just like make go away completely stripe does now have a connection similar to the uh the Mailchimp version where you can just authenticate with Stripe >> as usual with

everything it's a little bit more complicated than that but anyway this is to say like this is definitely a new a new sort of frontier where we can make these things so easy and um I don't even necessarily see like I I obviously I work for a Drupal agency and I think that there's a probably a lot of maybe concern or just um not people aren't un

people are uncertain about what Drupal CMS means for agencies and I think for me I don't personally see this as a threat to my agency business whatsoever because I think two things I think just being able to you know how many times have you had a client ask you to do a demo of Drupal and you're just like, "Oh no, what are we going to do?" You

know, like building a site for them is obviously not possible because that's what the project is. You can't, you know, you don't necessarily want to show them someone else's site because it might not be configured properly for them. I think just having things like this that we can show people and that people can discover on their own is just going to make it a lot easier to

consider using Drupal. And I also think that people that are interested in doing this stuff themselves, at least from my perspective as an agency, we we have a lot of government clients. We have a lot of um nonprofit sort of education, these are people that are not going to ultimately want to do this stuff themselves, but I think um it's still really helpful to know that it's

possible to do these things yourselves. And I also think that by lowering the barrier to entry, we can just grow the pie. I mean, I know that's a bit of a cliche, but the more people that we can get to try Drupal and use Drupal on their own, I think the more that the um the more that the kind of the the community and the ecosystem and

the economy is going to benefit from So anyway, um, back to the integrations where I started. Um, I think that there's huge potential there. It's not a place that we as Drupal CMS, which is not as many people as you might think, um we haven't had a ton of time to spend on this, but we would love love love to find partners like Think Shout who are

um already doing some work around this and want to get involved and maybe want to um promote their integrations, promote their modules. If there are third parties, if there are third-party services that are keen to see their service on the Drupal CMS page, uh I'm sure that the Drupal Association would love to have a chat with them and see if there are any uh you know, opportunities

that can arise from that. So yeah, if there if this is sparking any interest in you, if you're just interested in learning more, please come find us. Um we'll we'll be around. Um yeah, anyway, come come to the contra day on Thursday. We'll we'll be there. Another just priority that I want to mention. I I did um I did talk up Canvas quite a bit and I

do really love it, but there are a few things that it's still missing. So, it's, you know, one pretty early days. It's it's um it does a lot, but it obviously it just doesn't do everything yet. So, these are just some of the things that from a Drupal CMS perspective we're interested in helping Canvas pursue. So multilingual as Christina already mentioned um I'm we're told that symmetric

translation is on the cards for Q2. So that's the next three months. Officially that will be uh rolled out in a in a road map that they're going to share in a session later. Support for entity references is a big one. So at the moment you can't display an enti another entity inside of a component unless you're using views. um exposed slots, which is basically if you

have a blog node, you can use canvas as a for the content template to essentially um to style the default blog layout, but you can't override the individual blog posts with components. Again, I think that's a pretty killer feature because most of the CMSs that we're looking at, you know, the sort of the web flows of the world, they have their CMS content and then they have

their landing page content. And I think having the ability to merge those two is is pretty cool. Then there's also just like general boring stuff like adding support uh for complex props like having address fields, telephone fields, maps, all of those kinds of things. So these are where we're that's these are where we're focused. These are the things we hear people ask about a lot like how

do I do that? Unfortunately, right now, I mean, there are ways of getting around these things with with custom modules and stuff like that, but from the Drupal CMS perspective, we're we're not we're trying specifically not to pursue things that you can't do easily. Because what we don't want is for somebody to install a site template, see all this cool stuff, and then go, "Oh, how do

I do this on my own?" And then you have to admit that you actually cheated, and it's um it's hacked together. We we we really want to avoid that. So, we're really trying to do not not just with Canvas, but with core as well. Um, we really try to take the the position that like we want to improve the we want to improve it for everybody, not

just for us. That's why our our Drupal CMS helper module is is strictly only basically shims for things that are going to be in core but just are not in core yet. We don't want to just be changing the Drupal CMS experience just for Drupal CMS so that you're getting a completely different experience if you started with Drupal CMS versus if you didn't. And then last but

certainly not least, um I think that all of this stuff is great around, you know, you can build a site quickly. Um then what? Right? So I've I've downloaded Drupal. I've built my site in DDEV. Now what do I do? I mean, I think for all of us in the room, it's not that big of a deal because there are ways of hosting your site relatively cheaply

on platforms like um Upon and you know, you can if you want to go see a panel, God, you know, God bless you. But um it's possible. However, it's not obvious and it's not easy. And that's definitely a challenge not just for Drupal CMS, but like even for something like the marketplace. Okay, I just paid $300 for a site template and I built the site I want.

What do I do next? That is a huge problem and we need to have an answer for it. Fortunately, uh we do have a few people in the Drupal community that have been working away over the last few months on um ideas and and and companies that may make announcements at some point during Drupal Con. Just that basically this is a I think a problem space that

has a lot of opportunity and just simply by creating Drupal CMS, we've seen people pursuing this and investing a lot of money and time into it to basically try to solve this problem. So I personally think that um having a kind of a SAS SAS e kind of a platform that's managing your updates and um just kind of smooths the smooths the ground is is again like

a really useful and beneficial thing for everybody because it's not to say that all of well again I'm speaking for myself but I have no fear that my clients are going to go switch to a SAS provider but the more people that we can get to start using Drupal for smaller ends sites and just make that a viable option, I think the better it is for everybody.

The way I the way I like to think about the target for Drupal CMS right now is um rather than sort of direct to consumer, I think if there are agencies that maybe used to use Drupal and switch to WordPress because Drupal was too hard, I think we can start maybe winning those people back if we have these kinds of options for um especially for hosting. So

anyway, we have project browser, we have automatic updates, we have these tools that are workingish, but like there are a lot of challenges because especially on shared hosting, we ran into all kinds of weird things where we were getting blocked because the composer stager was copying too many files at once. And then of course on platforms like Ups and Aquia, the um file system is not writable.

So anyway, a lot of challenges were we're working on it. Once again, if you have thoughts or ideas about this, please come talk to us. Um, another another obviously ongoing pain point for Drupal is updates. And we have automatic updates, but currently that does only patch releases. It doesn't do minor releases and it certainly doesn't do major releases. So, I mean, I don't necessarily think we have

to to make it so that you can really easily update Drupal major versions. I think if that's the only hurdle that we have and somebody has a Drupal site that every three years they have to pay somebody to help them for a few hours to do, I don't really see that as a huge problem. But I do think there's a there's a lot of room between where

we are now and and that that um that we can work on. So these obviously these are not strictly Drupal CMS things. This is all going to have to have have to be stuff that happens in core. It's core release management. It's like a core development cycle thing. But it's definitely something that as Drupal CMS um sort of team that we're thinking a lot about and and

hoping to spend some time on. And then of course the launcher app which was the um mad science brainchild of our our dear architecture lead Adam. So I don't know if has anybody who in here has never heard of this. The launcher app. Okay. Not many people. That's good. So what the launcher app is is it's a downloadable um package that you can install and run Drupal

CMS locally without anything else. Literally all you have to do is download the app. You you open it. You it it all runs all the composer. it it downloads all the dependencies and then you click launch and it opens in the browser and you can run through the installer. So right now it's um it's not strictly speaking throwaway because there is a way to migrate. Basically the

problem is that the launcher uses SQLite and so you can't just copy your database from SQLite to my SQL. what you can do and what we've actually added in the last day. It's still a work in progress, but what we what we're going to add is an export button that will generate the uh it'll generate a basically a zip file with your composer JSON, your composer lock,

your content um your exported content, and your exported config. And then what you can do with that is take that to a hosting provider. We've done it successfully with Upson. So, if anyone here is from Upsson or knows someone from Upsson, I want to talk to them because I think we can um whip up some documentation really quickly that can you that can show you how to

do this. So, basically um you can export from the launcher and then follow a few steps and have your site up and running on um on one of the existing hosting providers. Shared hosting is a whole other story. I won't even go into it. Um we've kind of we we did a lot of exploration and we kind of decided that shared hosting was just not really a

productive pathway for us at the moment. So again, anybody is really interested in that, feel free to come talk to us, but at the moment, it's just not something we felt we could pursue. So, as I've mentioned a number of times, um, we would love your help. I'll hand back to Christina to give you some words of inspiration. You trust me before? >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I

do. >> Wow. Good luck. >> Okay. Uh so um the road map that you've seen and uh the things that we're working uh it's something that we need to do for the next years. It's not done. We still have a lot of work and uh Pam hasn't said that but the team is actually a two people team two and a half uh probably adding up all the

rest of the people. It's basically she and Adam that has has been developing that. So if you think that Drupal CMS is that big huge team out there, it's it's not. So at the beginning Drupal CMS one, there was a lot of motivation. People wanted to help, but it's not anymore. So that's not going to happen by itself. Uh this has proven that Drupal CMS can actually

change the community, can actually give the community a chance to go out there and say, "Hey, look what we've done, but we need help. We really need help. If you're, as she said, if you have a module that can be integrated, if you want to help with novice issues, if you want to help on the third site template, that is going to happen or you want to

help improve haven or bite, whatever. We need help. So that's seriously, we need help. It's not going to be built by uh just Pam and Adam there. Probably need like rest or like still working, but some help. So we really need help. Please, if you have some time, if you know somebody that can have some time in the on an agency, just let us know because we

do have uh novice issues, not novice issues. And um as there there is like design stuff, UX stuff, the back end stuff, front end stuff. There is no excuse if you want to help. So please, we need you. >> Does it count? >> I knew you could do it. >> Yeah, let's see. Yeah, come on. Help. We need help. Okay, this is the way uh Drupal C

Drupal Slack uh you have all these ways. Uh if you're like a AI fan, you also can help on the AI initiative and integrating stuff. So those are the channels or you can actually DM us or um there are a lot of ways just uh uh send us a contact form on drupal.org on on LinkedIn. there are ways we will find a way for you to help

uh somehow. So uh those are the um the different sessions if you want to go deeper in any of the topic the topics uh the Drupal canvas one I really recommend that uh the site templates as we've already seen um site templates and recipes and uh >> site templates site templates site >> yeah seriously this is the the way to build Drupal uh this is going to

save you so much time so there is no excuse use in the future to say is Drupal is first super expensive there is a way just copy someone else's site template build on top of that no seriously we are here for that open source so uh there is also I think there is Ted's uh session about canvas building site building >> tomorrow 9:30 >> also tomorrow so

there are a lot of sessions to follow up on all these uh so that's it thank Thank you. >> Any questions? >> Can you go back this slide? >> Oh, can you go back? >> That last one. What day is that? >> Oh, does it not say >> it's tomorrow? >> Oh, oops. Yeah, that's tomorrow. Sorry. >> Oh, okay. Well, if you find Oh, go ahead. >>

So, the question is how all this relates to accessibility. Um, Drupal Drupal, it's already like using Drupal core. So, it already has like all Drupal core accessibility uh stuff already built in. And also uh haven and um bite uh has has already been built with with that. We haven't mentioned that as like a highlight because we just give that for granted. >> But also if you so

if you go I I we don't have to go back but um the uh in the recommended add-ons I didn't mention it specifically but edit editorially is um is one of the recommended add-ons in all of our Drupal Drupal CMS sites. So that's um I think that's a really awesome tool because we don't install it out of the box because I think for beginners it's a little

bit confusing because if you don't even know what accessibility is then it sort of adds all these things to the page and it it's it can be a little overwhelming. So I think it's really important that it be an opt-in thing but you can opt into enabling editorially and what that does is um it has you know an inpage checker that I don't know are you familiar

with the module? >> Yeah. Okay. So for those who aren't, it provides real-time checking of all of your content. It it does it on the front end and it also does it while you're editing and it highlights the problems and then also makes suggestions on how to fix them. So um we we had an accessibility track in the original um inclus 1.0 and we incorporated a lot

of the well all of the recommend recommendations that they made and they're the ones that actually designed the access the um accessibility tools recipe that is there in the recommended >> Yeah. Yeah. Well, anything about like LOPD like cookies and like all these like things that take you time uh for building a Drupal site like they are already there. Yeah, we completely Yeah, we we used to

have that highlighted because it was a big deal but because we've been adding more stuff like we don't have them on the on the on the presentation but like accessibility, LOD >> a bunch of other things. >> privacy. Exactly. like all these things that they built install Drupal and you have either enabled or in there. >> All right to the Dre note everyone.