 How are we going? Oh, how's your day been so far? Good. Oh amazing. That's nice. Cool. So this is a casual session today So yes, this is a big room and you're all spread out a bit if you want to participate and ask some questions You can move your seats closer to the front Or not just stay where you are Up to you This is the provocatively titled why Drupal why now session For those of you who weren't here this morning. I'm Dave Sparks the chair of Drupal South and a long-time Drupal at it we have here a wonderful panel of people from all walks of life coming here to talk about Drupal. I have some casual questions for them about their Relationship with Drupal what they like and what they don't like and we will be inviting questions from the audience as well It is a panel discussion so we have some Hentel microphones And I'll pass them along ask you guys to introduce yourselves Very briefly one or two sentences who you are what you do and your relationship with Drupal Hello, I'm Nicole Ritchie. I work from AZIO. I'm the client services lead and I have worked On the delivery side with Drupal for a long time. I used to work at catalysts. I've been in the Community a lot of you may know me. I've been around for the last maybe eight nine years Hi, everyone. My name is Josh. Why he I started my career in Drupal in 2007 at catalyst today. I work for Acquia and we're going up 10 years in January Hey guys, thanks for coming along to the session. I'm Dallas Ramsden I am a chief marketing officer of x equals and I've grown into that position from being a Developer of Drupal for about 10 years and it was when I realized the power of Data for creating personalized digital experiences is what kind of pushed me in the direction of marketing. Thank you Hi, my name is Marjorie Tong Wei. I work for annex, which is a Canberra based company So I've been involved with Drupal for just over 10 years now. I'm just developing I started off just doing plain normal Drupal man in 2017. I sort of switched over doing sort of govcms Sites mostly Hi, Alastair Neil. I'm the technical product owner for govcms, which is out of the Department of Finance in Australia Been going steady with Drupal for since about 2016 First started building govcms sites ironically at the time Yeah, and transitioned running teams running sites to well running product Thanks team and I'm gonna join you at the seats now my first question and looking for a volunteer to answer this one first is Positives about Drupal. Where do you think Drupal shines? What's your favorite type of work to do with Drupal? I'll start. I've got a microphone The big one for me and a big one I tell potential customers is flexibility There's more than one way to skin a cat with Drupal and I can say that I have two cats I don't skin my cats. I skin my Drupal sites. I Think the fact that you can get in there. You can change it to what you need. You can meld it You can mold it. That is a great thing Some of the challenges but that is then finding people who can do that I guess my favorite site sites to build would just be Just a non-decoupled site. I prefer just using Drupal as it is not doing sort of fancy stuff with it. I like Yeah similar to use like I like that you can do the same thing in 10 different ways and just as you progress throughout your career You can start off doing it sort of a simple way then you figure out better ways or more fancy ways of doing stuff So yeah, that's probably my favorite thing. It's just flexible. Well, thanks Yeah, so my my favorite element of Drupal is again, it's like I've alluded to earlier it's it's it's a it's an ability to work and model the data that you need when you need it and part of Part of the thing where I first was really Expanding my mind and the power of Drupal is I was in a in a position with Awkward I got to I got to train engineering teams of Awkward's partners Awkward's customers and and it was during a very Transformative phase of Drupal was going from Drupal 7 into Drupal 8 and I was getting to train people Drupal 8 and So I got to I got to work with a lot of individuals and and experience Their empowerment of using Drupal and then so and then they're you know the developer experience Was empowered and their team was empowered and that empowers the business but then interesting thing kind of happened is is COVID happened and so and I also happened to move from the US to to New Zealand here and Due to time differences and whatnot. I wasn't I was no longer It wasn't easy for me to continue in in-person training I'm sorry and COVID happened and then so I switched to a completely on-demand Learning experience powered powered by Drupal and that's what that's why I really got to see how Drupal is good at at creating learning digital experiences and powering those experiences of Drupal and so whether you're talking about a customer journey You know where you have to map these waypoints and the data to back up to make sure that they actually are progressing on along that journey or you know the ticketing experience or the You know educational. I think Drupal has a really awesome Is well suited to transform the digital experience of learning and that's that's what excites me about Drupal That's that's one of the reasons why I continue to to be a champion of Drupal. Thank you. I think Open source is a really big Character for for Drupal and a big reason to use it as a CMS You know and at aquee we compete with a lot of proprietary CMS vendors And so that open source license and the There is a way of saying, you know, you don't need to be paying massive amounts of money for a software license to be able to use Something that's free, you know, and all that capability is free and it all comes from a community of people That have you know, they they care about that, you know that CMS being produced in a particular way and so I really like that as well You know, you don't have a necessarily product managers. That's it At the top of an organization trying to envision What's the features that we need to be providing? I mean there's a little bit of that in the community But really it's like a duocracy right if you're willing to put the time in to create the feature fix the bug Produce the patch engage with the community you can get that change in there And so there's this huge empowerment to be able to have the CMS that you want for zero cost and the freedom to create the things And add the things to it for you know, and you're not sort of stuck behind You know trying to create support requests and get things prioritized to a roadmap and all of those those parts of it And so they creates from that, you know a lot of freedom and flexibility obviously ownership as well But there's also an entire community of people that are behind that and wanting you to build things in the right way and and Trying to solve things at a global scale, right? Like how do we implement standards and how do we do security so that when someone builds a form for example, you know Cross-site request forgery is just Solved it's a part of the framework You don't have to think about that as a developer because it's built into this to the framework if you're using it that way And there's so many other You know places where the CMS does that we just kind of take for granted a little bit and then finally, you know there's a lot of new CMS is today, especially built on language like in JavaScript and There's a real value to a CMS that has matured over time You know, I think it wasn't only six months ago that the Alt tag was added to the image attribute and the react system Now that was something we like felt like we'd be solved before 2010 You know and they're only just doing that into 2022. So there's you know, that maturity is not under the understated as well And that's what makes You know Drupal a really suitable CMS for those enterprise applications Oh, and for me, it's the community That's I feel like all you guys you don't just go to work You're not a number that goes to work and cooks a recipe just following on from Matias's talk this morning It's the passion that I see it's it's you guys coming to the conference giving talks about all the amazing projects all the problems you've solved You're adding to every recipe. You're not just taking it cooking it It's definitely the passion that I see in each one of you and that's what Gives me the passion to go to work every day Nice, thank you. I guess, you know, we're we're at a Drupal conference. This is a Drupal audience They're familiar with Drupal. They're no Drupal. They hopefully love Drupal But you know to be honest Drupal's over 20 years old We've all been doing it for a long time. You know, you've all be doing it for a long time Aren't you sick of it by now? What keeps you fresh Josh? So I don't do a whole lot of development with Drupal these days and do it You know sort of Advantagiously and so I'm kind of more like you know like the next time I go to work on a Drupal site I'm like, oh, it's I see it's moved the major version. I need to upgrade and oh Compose a hell and I'll just blow it away and start over or something like that So I kind of learned, you know through these snapshots of how far it's kind of moved There was a question again. I've got what keeps you fresh bro. Oh, it gives me fresh for Drupal That's a real weird question So I didn't tell you that So I think about I think it's a really good question in the sense that Drupal being mature is Can sometimes get stuck in some of the ways that we have done things in the web and They have just the ways that we've always done it And so we kind of recreate the wheel in the way that it's always been done Whereas, you know new CMS's can think about things Fresh like, you know, how do people want to do it today? And so a good example of that might be something like content type creation She watched a number of demos today where you know, we were looking at content type creation or something of the sort And it's actually a very Slow and painful experience compared to some of the ways of data modeling and other CMS's today But it's the way that we've always done it and like there's been a little conversation on how we kind of move on to something else And it's been a bit of a challenge But I think that also is you know the space for opportunity for Drupal And that's what you kind of go back to the point about being fresh is we can actually Take time to think about some of those things and ask some of those questions and have the community discussion And we're not sort of stuck yet to go back to my first point about being open We can you know have that freedom to continue to change So I think more broadly Obviously, I've been excited by web for a long time. There's always a lot of stuff that's happening There's always changed even if it's not Drupal Doing a sense 98 so a lot of things have changed. I don't use notepad too much anymore. Thankfully But I think because of well, it's my current position and also that I know that I like to solve problems Is I've got a bunch of customers that have problems that they wanted solve So is that based off my experience is that based off? Say limitations in my platform Or what other things are out there that could help move those things forward? I think the fact that I'm thrown into a position to help facilitate something like that keeps me fresh Just happens to be wrapped in that Drupal space where a lot of creative things are happening Nice. Thank you. I got a jump for question for March there. I enjoyed you talk this morning about Getting a site done and dusted in three weeks On a six-week timeline. So is that do you often take that long to do a website? Wow No, I wouldn't normally do it in three weeks So even the six weeks it was definitely doable in six weeks But yeah, I guess the things that caused it to be three works three weeks weren't sort of a bit out of my control so yes I guess I love the fact that you can sort of build things quickly when you need to if assuming everything else around you was working Yeah, I guess Drupal does have a Reputation for doing big projects large-scale content long development time I Don't imagine you would have had a vast number of hours inside that three weeks to be doing Hard dev and coding so you must be able to work and put things together With site building and theming. Yeah. Yeah, definitely And we tried to reuse as many components as possible So we weren't like every time there's like some theming stuff was done We'd build it once and just make sure it would fit all purposes possibly could I Mean within the gov cms community you guys have been working with a distribution for a long time relatively long time I guess With the maturity of the Drupal product and the maturity of that distribution are you seeing lead times Speed up come down. You don't want to say yes to that you you want more time You're still thinking Look when Obviously, I've got visibility of when things are getting provisioned on our platform and then obviously the delivery point I'd say those who are already in the system already have the background with Drupal I think they're getting better return times For those that are new to the process It's the same old. Hey, I still need to feel like I know what I'm doing. Can we get the right people on board? All of those and of course also there's a scale thing there as well Of course larger sites will always take a larger amounts of time and of course the amount of resources you've got about available Existing customers are improving in my mind. I For other ones a bit of a mixed bag depending on that skill set Nice. Thank you for that Dallas Of course, thanks. So this is back to what keeps yeah, I mean, I guess you've worked across a number of different areas Yeah, I've worked with it with different end user groups and in different roles within the Drupal ecosystem So, you know, what keeps you fresh and looking so so young and spry despite your experience I mean things that keep me awake at night are like what what how can we push the envelope of? again coming back to digital experience like I had a recent No, I don't know if it's an epiphany, but it was it was the finding mode of my life where like I had accidentally Purchased my 17 month old kid a Happy Meal and in that Happy Meal was a Like a toy kit thing that you It's augmented reality of The just dance game. So if you're familiar with just dance, it's you have to follow this You know dance routine and whatnot, but what what this McDonald's Happy Meal toy was was You know showing, you know, whatever the target audience of Happy Meals are You know, like you scan it you QR code scan a thing and it takes you to this You know website and then you have to give it access to your camera and then from your camera You have like augmented reality in your browser like, you know, like, you know me shaking my wood, you know One of these shoulders the yeah, you know, it's like how can I how I want to I want to power this with Drupal? How can we how can we expand like this is where the internet is going? Right? We like I would encourage all of us to think about what's the next evolution past the website, right? Like the website is certainly needed and definitely is needed But what it well, how can how are how are you know kids that are reading? You know augmented really Happy Meals in five ten years time, right? Like they're well, how can we Power that and Drupal is built for the internet of tomorrow because of its data modeling and so anyway So that's just some random thoughts and that keeps me keeps me awake in it Nice. Thank you. Nicole. You've been away from from the commercial coal face for a wee while working on a different project Coming back Any thoughts or reflections on where Drupal has come to in that time that you were away from it on the day today? I guess sort of for me coming back from maternity leave and and trying to get up to speed again because so much has changed even in the hosting space and It's really interesting Maybe two or three years ago when we were talking to customers. We had lots of Customers asking us are you doing Lara well? Are you supporting? different CMSs and I feel like just recently all the Enquirers we're having everyone's going back or being drawn back to Drupal And it's really nice and for me having worked on the delivery side That's what I love about Drupal because it's not just a website build. It's not just a Cheap and cheerful website. It is I've worked on a on a big project with tourism New Zealand where it was really drilling into We were building a bit big platform. There was lots of data. There was a big thing for them was security It was just a complexity and seeing how powerful Drupal is to What you can can drive with Drupal is really amazing nice, I guess I've been working with Drupal for about 15 years and I Genuinely feel like you know is a maturity with the product and a maturity with our developer team and our audience and our clients understand so much more than they did 10 or 15 years ago our clients are upskilling our clients are you know aggressive and ambitious and they want digital experiences and You know we're at this moment of change where Drupal 10 is out We're talking about the the Internet of tomorrow the Drupal of the future Are any of you have anything special or you know a either you're looking forward to from the next few releases of Drupal or Be something that's on your wish list that you really want to see a challenge You want to throw out to the community to to bring you some magic? so one thing that I think has a huge amount of potential and I don't know that it's quite realized yet is Drupal's recipes initiative So that initiative I think was kind of born out of replacing the install profile issue Install profiles, you know give you a way to pre-define how you install Drupal come with like a Drupal distribution of sorts But there's a lot of problems with that like you know the way that you ship updates and the dependency that it had on installation profiles Created a lot of lock-in for people who used a install profile of a particular type see a lot of not he's nodding like you brother so Install recipes are really cool because there would be ways of essentially shipping two main things one is Config and two would be dependency like composer files or things sounds a little bit like a module, right? But you would be able to do this for your config across multiple modules So you can kind of say this is how you would configure this collection of modules together To create this type of feature right so you can think about features if you're a Drupal 7 Person so that kind of thing then becomes shippable and then deployable. I think at the moment They're thinking about the point that through code like Drupal's always done But the other kind of big thought that I don't think we've yet kind of explored is like you know I'll say this before we've always done things always, you know, we do things where we've always done them Well back in like 2002 or wherever we started building Drupal. It was like the the way that you would do Extensibility was through distribution of code in modules And so that's what where the module system came from today But if you think about how extensibility works in a sass Platform today, like if you're using Slack or if you're using zoom and you want to turn on an app You don't download code. In fact, it's a huge security risk because you give all these other companies that are producing those integrations You don't want to deploy their code on your servers But that is still the way that Drupal fundamentally works today And so I think what is really potentially powerful about this recipes initiative is that we could deploy them because they're just Declarations, they're just YAML files and JSON content We could actually be deploying those over at the cloud over HTTP and not have to deploy them through the file system And if we have the underlying PHP so Drupal core or framework that can run those recipes Then we can have those features installed without the need for adding additional code. I think there's still you know the need to also then create a Cloud-like Extensibility framework just like these sass companies have that allow Drupal to become extensible in that way, but you know before we kind of get there I think this is where recipes could potentially go and be quite an exciting thing for our future Thanks. Um, so again, I think Josh made a Comment, you know, we've done things that were the way we've always have and I said to me If we do want to get new innovation like new thinking into into the Drupal Ecosystem here. We have to make it easy. We need to make it easier for people new to Drupal to get into Drupal And so what recipes certainly our way could be a way to do that Another way that I would really like to see is how can we improve the documentation of Drupal because that's one of the biggest Barriers to learning Drupal is it's there's so many different versions, you know, there's so many different ways of doing things that are just no longer applicable and it's it's really hard and discouraging for Learner and people that are trying to learn to become experts in Drupal is really really challenging and So what I would like to see is how can we how can we make it easier for for new thinking and new people to bring in and Cross-pollinate their ideas and although there's been this has been a wonderful Conference because there's so many, you know innovative ideas that are coming out of this and it's because of the cross-pollination And so so anyway, I would like to see Drupal documentation or ways that people can learn Drupal to be to be improved I'd echo that. Yeah Documentation is important documentation is hard to keep on top of Probably having some I don't know better version controls around those sort of things But the big one for me is also just that perception a lot of the conversations I have with people who are thinking about CMS and of course Drupal underneath is It sounds very hard or that sounds very technical for a lot of the things that people are doing. It's not If you're just doing those sort of more basic or simpler sites as module saying earlier It's a bit of familiarity. A lot of people want to see the UI behind the scenes It's relatively simple in my mind granted. I've been looking at it for a long time now But it's otherwise a CMS for people in that space. It can be a lot more But that perception and understanding of what it is is far off from where it should be Yeah, I guess from my my personal perspective, you know, I'm not a developer. I don't come from a dev background I'm a I'm a content person. I like publishing stuff on the internet, you know Websites they'll catch on I reckon And I think that that The Drupal editorial experience, you know the admin experience Getting content up online is Can be easy and I say that after working with it for 15 years But for people coming in you it can be a little bit Intimidating and not quite as much fun as it could be So I think that's that's probably my big work on you know documentation guides making things easy And bringing a bit of joy back into it, you know, I am I got button-holded a barbecue a few weeks months ago Now I guess it wasn't raining. So it must have been maybe a year ago And so I said, what do you do and I say I make websites He's like, oh, I've got a website. I need to replace some hand-built hand-built HTML he'd had for 12 years and so He didn't have any money He did he did give me a beer and so I was like, okay, I set him off to a Sass product a non-Drupal product. I won't say the name because I promised I wouldn't swear at this conference, but And we helped him on board him into that and it was just a really different experience to eat someone else's dog food you know and and and see how they do it and It was really easy It was really easy to do horrible horrible things it was really easy to make a terrible terrible web page and It was it was really sobering to view source and see what that output was and See just how slow a six-page brochure site could be so, you know As I think there's an opportunity for Drupal to bring that power and that speed net deployment, you know with a fun Experience that that civilians the barbecue goers can can can get engaged with We've got about two minutes left. So Any last remarks from anyone that would ask the question why Drupal why now Look, I think Josh said it earlier open source big thing about it if there is an issue Someone's usually already found it or you can report it. It is visible somewhere. It can be worked on It's frustrating that things land in roadmaps and you know if a Q3 2030 but At least if it's open source, you can see the issue you can track it You can help it you can push it along that alone means you've got more control in my mind Go in the last minute. We have left any questions from anyone. Oh, yeah So the question is what do we think about Dries's keynote statement Drupal is for ambitious site builders. Oh Well, are you looking at me to answer that one quickly? So, you know, we've always been site builder focused as a as a company That's kind of been driven by the people we've had on the team And by you know my love of publishing stuff on the internet with with ignorance of code So I think that the the power of site building has always been Drupal super power and I think that it should continue to be so I Think when you think about the Drupal community the majority especially the majority of people that contribute to Drupal core They're probably wouldn't associate themselves as site builders might start as a site border. Yeah, it's true. I Think site building There's a lot of like low-code CMS build, you know around today and so that space I think is quite competitive and a term ambitious might not be a Accurate enough word to capture the people that really fit into the Drupal space that might become contributors Which are really coders is what we're really saying like people coders who don't want to write coders of the people that we want Target right because there are people who are site builders that don't know how to code But in Drupal, it's sort of like if you're a developer It's really easy to build a site without having to write a line of code And then when you need to you can and that's pretty awesome too. So like you get example. I built a Maintain a Drupal site and I wanted to do Jira integration and there was a module for it But I looked at it and it didn't have the style of integration or the way I wanted to set it up in there and I was like, you know what? There's a there's a composer framework for Jira PHP So I just composed a require that custom module and you know the bespoke form and I could integrate it really clearly Somebody might set me on the risk for writing something custom to summit contribute. I didn't contribute to it. That's true but The point being right was that like I can get most of the functionality I needed when I wanted it and in the moment that I couldn't I was very easy for me to Adopt a development and be able to do that which is not true for people who are typical low-code site builders Or an associate in a SAS based hosting platform. Yeah there's site builder have a Term that resonates with the wider Industry right rather than just Drupal because it has a specific one I think so although I think the the term site might be too limiting Because content hosting I think is much broader than a website, you know So it's more like experience builder or just a low-code developer One of those words probably more better. I think I think we're out of time people I will Let you go There's a short break now before we head into the the next award session so if you know you want to ask us questions or have some discussion amongst yourselves around this issue, I think it's a Within the Drupal South Committee Within the conference speakers. It's a it's a conversation. We often have about how do we advocate for Drupal more? How do we get people to experience the the joy and the power that we do from Drupal? So thanks for your time Thanks for sharing your thoughts