 Welcome, everyone. All right, so my name is Angie Byron. I also go by web chick on the internet. And I'm here to talk to you a little bit about how our competitors are kind of kicking our ass a little bit and also what we're going to do about that. So this is going to be a talk where I run through, I think it's six of Drupal's competition in various aspects of what we do. We'll have some videos. We'll have some screenshots, stuff like that. And we can kind of get exposed to a bunch of these different technologies. Then I'll talk a little bit about why that matters and in comparison to how Drupal Core looks out of the box. And then we'll kind of end on a positive note and we'll talk about all the cool stuff that's happening out in the Drupal 8 world today that you can go ahead and get involved with or tier on or whatever you'd like to do. So does that sound good? Is that why everyone is in this room? Great. OK, so who the heck am I? I am a core committer for Drupal 8. I'm also a Drupal product manager. So part of my job is to do talks like this that helps expose the development community primarily to other things out in the field. I try and help prioritize features, get them on the roadmap for 8.2, 8.3, these kinds of things. And yeah, and I work for Acquia in the office of the CTO. So Dries is my boss. No pressure. So I want to start with a kind of a thought provoking question. I know it's not like lunchtime yet, but if I were to ask you, who is Drupal's end user? What would you guys say? Drupal consulting shops, OK? Content editors, site builders, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious? I didn't quite hear that one. Yeah, so a lot of different answers. A lot of people naturally answer it's people like us, right? By us, I mean typically at DrupalCon Europe in particular, there's a lot of heavy developer presence here, a lot of very technical site builders, people who don't even use the modules page because we use Dress for everything, that kind of thing. So someone like Neil Drum at the Drupal Association. And our job is to create and maintain sites, make sure they don't go down, make sure the features are getting deployed on the right schedule that the client needs. And Drupal is for people like us. But I would argue that Drupal's real end users are the people who are paying people like Neil Drum, the people who are in this like Megan Sannaki of the Drupal Association because they have a job that they have to do. And Drupal is not that job. Their job is selling products. Their job is getting memberships. Their job is accomplishing some kind of admission statement. And they need the technology to support them in that. And by and large, we're seeing more and more of these types of people making the decision on what CMS to choose rather than the technical people. Because people kind of figured out that whoever is going to be kind of the victim of the technology that you choose should probably have a say in what it's going to look like every day and feel like every day. And when we talk about content authors, some of the things that they value is they really, really value ease of use and simplicity. They want it to look easy. They want it to be easy. They want to be able to get up and running in a minute, not have to think about it. They really like it to be well-integrated so they don't want to have a separate login for this, a separate login for that. They want it all to kind of feel like one cohesive piece. They want flexibility. They really don't want to ever be told, no, we can't do something that sounds very reasonable, you know? And you got to remember that for content authors, Drupal is not their job. It's never going to be their job. They don't want to know the technology, they don't want to understand the technology. They want to get their job done. And whatever that job is, they want the tech to get out of the way and make it easy. People generally agree with that statement? Notting? Okay, sweet. All right, so with that background, let's get to the contenders. So there's a lot of different products that we could talk about here. I did some asking around at Aquia, my company, because we spent a lot of time selling Drupal against different things, and I tried to pick a mix of stuff that was sort of in a few different areas. So in the blue circle, I'm going to call this like small fry stuff. So this is stuff like Wix, Squarespace, Weebly, would be another one of these, Tumblr, stuff that is very downmarket from Drupal, stuff that we're not interested in every single cat blog using Drupal. Like that's great if they want to, but it's a little bit, you know, Drupal's more for ambitious projects, not so much your cat blog. On the enterprise side, you've got Sitecore and Adobe CQ5, those are sort of the two that, at least we at Aquia frequently go head to head with when we get into a competitive arena, so we'll talk about those. And then I wanted to highlight one backend as a service sort of competitor, which is called Contentful, work something completely different. It doesn't look or act like Drupal at all, but because Drupal ships with the REST API and because we're really trying to support decoupled and headless applications, we do end up in a competitive space with them as well. And then I threw WordPress in there because everyone knows WordPress, or most people know WordPress, and WordPress is an interesting thing in that it kind of straddles all three of those circles in how it positions itself. So let's start with WordPress. In each of these, I've kind of highlighted how these solutions market themselves to people on their websites. So WordPress touts itself as being web software you can use to create beautiful website, blog, or app. So they're actually trying to position themselves as a valid backend to create mobile applications and things like this. They currently power about 25% of the web, so that's sort of their key to finding feature. They're also the only of these competitors that I've listed that are open source. All the rest of them are proprietary, so that's a big win for them. They have a huge community. They tout a lot of really great advantages like their five minute install, media management, SEO out of the box, this kind of thing. So if people haven't seen WordPress, this is just a short video showing what this looks like. So you go to create your content. You just call it my blog post, you type blah, blah, blah. They have a WYSIWYG editor built in, that's pretty bog standard. When you want to add media, they have support for things like multiple file uploads. So I have a lot of pictures of elephants, because why not? And it has a nice little nicely designed thing and it shows me a progress bar as those go in. You can see at the top of the tabs, they also support documents, videos, audio, all out of the box, all integrated nicely. And then this is kind of cool. When you go to insert the images, you get kind of like a views light interface where you can choose to lay those out in columns or a grid or different types of shapes and stuff like that, so that's pretty cool. So image gallery support right out of the box. They support things as well, like putting categories and tags on blog posts. It automatically creates a nice pretty path that's SEO optimized, which is really cool. You can do things like schedule your post to say my post should come up in a different time. And then you can either save a draft of your thing or you can publish it directly. And so if you publish it directly, you can look at it on your site. And I'm using some really not cool looking theme, but they have a lot of really nicely designed themes as well that you can use. So that's WordPress. It's really simple if what you're doing is publishing content and that's sort of what it's there for. How many people have used WordPress? Just about everybody, yeah, okay. So that was a review, but just in case people watching the video haven't used it. The next one I want to highlight is Squarespace. Squarespace is definitely down market from Drupal. They're trying to get the people who want to just get a quick website up and running for their restaurants or that kind of a thing. Their whole stick is they are like, set your website apart and they really focus on well designed templates as a starting point for their solution. And so any Squarespace site you find looks really, really nice and that's sort of like the brand that they're building. So lots of duty to design templates to choose from. You can also make design changes directly in the UI. You can make the font bigger or smaller. You can change the colors of everything. And they are proprietary systems. You get a free trial, but then after that you have to pay. This is kind of a selection of the templates that they let you pick from. So you can use for different use cases, portfolios, blogs, musicians, et cetera. This is an area that Drupal struggles with because Drupal out of the box isn't for anything really. It's for whatever you want it to be and trying to design a really nicely designed container for whatever you want is not quite as easy as designing a really good portfolio site or a really good restaurant site and stuff like that. So this is something we struggle with a little bit. So here is the demo video from Squarespace. So they have lots of apps, they call them, that add on additional functionality just like modules in Drupal. So by default it gives you a site with sample content and then you go ahead and start editing it to fit your needs and it has live preview. You see that change right away. Have really nicely, slickly designed media galleries, things like that. Here's what an example blog post might look like and then you can go into design mode and start toggling different options so you can see they're making changes that you would normally have to ask a developer to make right in the interface. There's your site. But we're better than them because we're eight, right? No, I'm just kidding. But it's a really nice solution and a lot of people get up and running with it fast. They know that no matter what they do it's gonna look good so it's great for people who have not a lick of design talent in them such as myself. Wix is an interesting one. So Wix was around in like the 90s I think. I remember it having like a dorky little star icon or something and I think I played with it back then. It kind of got awesome like in the last 20 years. So Wix, their model is it starts with your stunning website. So they have a bunch of predefined templates as well. It's not quite as like crisply designed as Squarespace but it's pretty cool. They're also paid software between $9 to $26 a month for e-commerce event handling this kind of thing. They have drag and drop. They have tons of templates, tons of apps and they include hosting in their solution which most of these do. Here's a few example websites that were created using Wix. You can see that they all again look really nice. Very visually stunning like big freaking images this kind of thing going on. The coolest thing I found is this, what do they call it? Automatic, what is it? Ah, I don't remember what this is called. Anyway, it's like friggin' space age stuff here. So you answer some questions in this wizard and you're like what kind of site are you building? You're like ah, it's like a web portfolio, right? And I want it to have these features and you check it off. And then what it does is it creates the site for you showing you what it does. So it's sort of like both a showcase of what the product does and a tutorial at the same time. So what it does is it says okay you want sections like a welcome section, a photo gallery section and click those and then in the right hand side you see your homepage being built out right before you with all the sample content in there. It's pretty cool. This goes on for a while but they have things like forms, they have things like different aspects of things that you can do and so it's a really neat way I thought like more so than a tour because a tour you have to like manually click and it's super irritating. This it's just showing you something to look at while it's doing the process of building your site but in the process you actually learn what the software does and how to use it and this kind of thing. So I thought that was kind of interesting. All right, so let's get to the enterprise stuff. So the first one of these I wanted to highlight is one called Sitecore. By the way I forgot to ask my questions. How many people have used Squarespace before? A lot fewer, maybe 15 people. How about Wix? About the same? Different people though, interesting. And how many have heard of Sitecore or have used that? Quite a few, interesting. Because I didn't know what Sitecore was before I started working at Acquia. So Sitecore builds itself as the only integrated experience management platform, content, data and delivery in one. So I would like to give them kudos for squeezing so many buzzwords into a simple sentence that was really well done. So their whole stick is they're both a web content management platform just like Drupal is but they're also a marketing platform and they actually build themselves or they target themselves towards marketers. And I have a super creepy video in a second that will show you all about that. Another advantage that Sitecore has over Drupal in some areas is it's all .NET based and the whole thing really looks and feels like a Microsoft Office application almost. And that makes it really comfortable to people who are Microsoft shops or have a lot of people who know Microsoft technology or Microsoft applications, it fits in pretty well with their stack. And the price on that is one arm and one leg. I checked, that's, yeah. So let's take a look at what Sitecore does. This is done by selecting the home tab, then clicking insert page. So this is a long video, I'm not gonna show the whole thing. I select the traveler story item. I'm going to name the page Sitecore Cycling Holiday and click okay. A couple of things to highlight here is Sitecore, shush for a second, oops. Sitecore is a page centric CMS. So it talks a lot about pages and pages and Squarespace does the same thing. But something that's interesting about Squarespace is like us, they store their content as sort of like abstract objects. And so you can mix and match and reuse them in different contexts. Even though they're pages, they're pages are respectively containers for their content, so. This is done by selecting the home tab, then clicking insert page. Oh, dang, I'm gonna try that one more time, I'm very sorry. This is done by selecting the home tab, then clicking insert page. In the dialogue, I select the traveler story item. So I'm going to name the page Sitecore Cycling Holiday and click okay. Is effectively a content type? So it's a separate content type with different fields. One simple action, Sitecore has automatically created the new news item, assigned an SEO friendly URL, generated a relevant breadcrumb entry. And so it starts it off with eventually fake content. I can now modify the content of the new item using the on page and in line editing provided by the experience editor. So in place editing. When clicking the editable object for the text field, it activates a floating toolbar. I'm first going to show how to do in line editing. By simply entering, I can do in line editing. To do more advanced editing, I will need to use the text editor. This is done by clicking the page icon in the floating toolbar. Okay, and he goes on for a while about busy with editors. But, so the key things to take away here are, you know, Sitecore also uses structured content. They also ship with things like in place editing, which Drupal 8 does now as well, which is nice. You can edit things right immediately there. Here, he's going to insert a link and this is kind of interesting how it does that. I also want to insert an internal link. This is done by selecting text editor, then clicking the insert Sitecore link. For now, I'm just going to select the home page located at Sitecore, then content, and Sitecore, cycling holidays, then home. So just like a regular directory structure, it shows you a hierarchy and you can click in and find a page. So I click accept. That's opposed to copy and pasting node slash four. It's kind of a little bit nicer. Before I save my page, I want to insert a page image. This is done by clicking the page image icon. In the floating toolbar, select choose an image. This is the media library. I'm going to change to a tree view as I find it easier to navigate. So once again, they're very focused on files, folders, things that make sense to end users. Media library, base core, widgets and summary images, Battle of the Hills 01. Click select. I'm now verifying my changes. I'm going to save my page by clicking save icon. Before moving away from my page, I want to add a component in the right column, which is one of the designing functionalities. When clicking the gray area in the right column, a little floating toolbar will appear. That floating toolbar thing comes from Microsoft Word, effectively. What will also appear is a little placeholder saying add here. I'm going to click the placeholder. In the select a rendering dialog, we are presented with all the different components that we can add to this specific placeholder. Again, content types. I'm going to select the travel a quote component, then click the select button. In the next dialog, I have the option to reuse some content by selecting an existing quote. Search for content or create new content. For this demonstration, I'm going to select the Amanda Jones item and click okay. So effectively an entity reference? Note how the quote is appearing on the page and the toolbar looks slightly different. The toolbar will allow me to move or associate a content item with this component. Test or delete the component or do a couple of other things. This is all related to design mode. Right. So when I saw this demo, I was kind of like, why is SiteCore a competitor? Because it's like, that kind of looks awful to me. I don't know, like it's like, it's cool that you see your whole site the way it's meant to look and the toolbar is up here, but it's like, but Drupal can do all of that. And I didn't really understand what the big deal was with SiteCore. And the big deal it turns out is this thing. Sorry. Oh, come back. Moment here, go to page. So that's a CMS, like a lot of CMSs you've probably seen, but this is what is on the homepage of SiteCore and how they market themselves, which I thought was pretty interesting. The SiteCore Experience Platform, empowering you to market in context. Hi. Oh, that was short lived. The SiteCore Experience Platform, empowering you to market in context. Hi, I'm Brian, head of marketing at Azure Apparel. In our business, as in any business, the way you treat your customers says a lot about your brand. So our marketing team uses the SiteCore Experience Platform to manage all of our customers' digital interactions. With SiteCore, we market in context to each of our customers' individual behaviors, so their experience is more personal and relevant. So a lot of analytic stuff. This is Kim. Two weeks ago, we only knew her as an anonymous visitor to our website, but her online activity matched our profile for an active mother. That's context. When we put an online app for a new line of shoes, we gathered even more contextual intelligence on her. And when Kim signed up for our email alerts last week, we finally learned her name and email address, and more importantly, a beginning to build a profile for her. Meanwhile, we tested three different email promotions, featuring belts to those customers who might like them. Kim received one of those emails and couldn't resist clicking through and making a purchase. Laterally. When Kim is near one of our stores, SiteCore presents her a location-based offer for an in-store discount. That offer features a new line of boots we are pretty confident she will like because of her past actions. And when Azure's retail clerk scans the coupon on Kim's mobile phone, SiteCore enables her to recommend another product, a child's backpack, based on Kim's active mother profile. Kim is impressed. Azure clearly understands her specific interests because SiteCore tracks the paths of her interaction. So she joins our loyalty program to get sneak peeks of upcoming products. Tomorrow we will continue Kim's journey, inviting her to download our new mobile app since we've learned she accesses our site most often through her smartphone. Using SiteCore to mark it in context, Azure Apparel gains a deeper understanding of our customer. And that makes their experience pretty awesome. With over 4,500 satisfied customers, SiteCore empowers marketers to own the experience by marketing in context. So that's creepy. And I'm so sure Karen really appreciates being sold other crap that she didn't go in there to buy, but apparently in marketing land you do. So that's why people like SiteCore a lot because it lets marketing people do their jobs really well. I mean that's what marketing people are for, they're to try and analyze the behavior of people and figure out how it all goes together. So they have a lot of personalization features so they can do things like track what search engine query you came in with and adjust the page accordingly. They can track what products you're clicking on and then say, oh, you seem to like, you know, toast a lot, we're gonna make the whole homepage about bread or whatever, this kind of thing. So, and so when Driz is pushing things like, you know the CCI initiative and things like that, it's to help balance out things like this because right now these platforms exist and it's not like they're not without use, they're kind of creepy when used in a, you know, like a e-commerce transaction kind of thing, but if it were used in a conversion to donate to the ACLU or something, for example, you know, maybe that's different, but right now they're all proprietary and it would be cool if there was at least an open source option, I think is the thinking there. So that's SiteCore, Adobe. So Adobe, its price is your firstborn, so not just an arm and a leg, now you're gonna need to give the whole thing. So Adobe's thing is make delivering great digital experiences look easy. Adobe's whole shtick is they have, they own all the things, they own Photoshop and Premiere and PDF and all this kind of stuff and so their CMS integrates really, really well with all of that and it's great for teams that have like a lot of artists and, you know, digital artists, that kind of thing on the team. It is good and bad for them. We definitely heard the complaint from people that Adobe basically wants you to be all on this stuff so they want you to use their analytics package and their creepy targeting thing and their this, this, this, this, this, versus one of the key advantages of Drupal is that you can use our CMS and somebody else's analytics software and somebody else's this and it all integrates together into one platform. So that's kind of a key differentiator that Drupal has but, but yeah, so they have a whole bunch of stuff here. There's a lot of videos I could show but I picked this one because it talks about the asset handling stuff and it gets into some cool interactions that you can do because of the creative cloud thing. So, sorry, let's do that again. Go to page. AEM assets is a very friendly environment for non-technical marketers. They rather spend their time marketing than figuring out how to make interfaces work. The intuitive interface we've brought forth with AEM assets, checkboxes, drop-down menus, dragging and dropping, make it easier for you to get the job done as fast as possible. AEM assets is a part of the Adobe Experience Manager solution which is a part of the marketing cloud. It allows our customers to have best-in-breed digital asset management system with rich media delivery as well as workflows for creatives, meaning internal departments, external agencies, providing a seamless workflow for moving assets from the creative concept into marketing campaigns. We're able to connect the workflow of a creative professional right into the appropriate project directory of the enterprise-class assets so that the marketer can start getting those assets out in front of the customers in campaigns much more quickly than before. Assets are never standalone. You need to be able to deliver those assets in multiple environments, maybe for just your apps or for use on mobile web. So you have to be very agile. If you're dealing with a hundred images from one photographer, 200 from another, and you're planning campaigns around spring, summer, fall, you need to be able to manage that content in batch mode. So if you have a system that can handle this through simple tagging, powerful searches, access to certain groups, to certain collections, it saves time for everyone involved. These are the types of things that are very, very important when you're dealing with assets at an enterprise scale. This is crazy. Video today is as important, if not more, than images. Shoppable media is a very exciting new capability that allows for our marketers to put hotspots on top of video so somebody shopping on the website can see a model wearing a specific sweater, click on that, and immediately see the product it refers to, the skew, the price, the colors and sizes it comes in. Very exciting, very engaging. Because the experience you provide to your customers reflects so strongly on your brand, you need to ensure you provide engaging assets and content at the right time on the right device. So you notice in their marketing, they have a lot of screens, or a lot of shots of tablets and mobile phones and all this kind of stuff. This is a big area of differentiation for them. They also had the ability to create responsive grid layouts right in the UI without any code. The fact that they can do hotspots in video means at some point you could download Game of Thrones and buy the crown that Daenerys is wearing, why not? Just click it. Anyway, but I thought that was kind of interesting how they can do those kinds of things. But yeah, so Adobe Experience Manager, that's another one. That one at least is really nicely designed. It's easy to see why that would be really nice to work with. It looks really cool, it feels nice. So yeah, so that's kind of the comparison we're going to run through. And then for something completely different than that, back end as a service. So let's talk about this one. This one's called Contentful. There's a bunch of these. There's Prismic IO, there's some other ones. Their motto is it's like a CMS, but without the bad bits. And so what does that mean? Essentially they focus only on the content, creation and modeling. So they have a CCK-like thing where they can create different fields and this kind of thing. And then the only display of that information is via an API that comes out in JSON, which is great if you want to completely throw out anything that a CMS would do for you regarding templating or I don't know accessibility, things like that. And you want to write your whole application from scratch in React or whatever solution that you're looking for. So people really like it for building decoupled applications basically. And this one is free for a limited plan and then you need to pay between $99 and $200 a month for extra users or content. I think the initial one only gets you like three admins and like maybe a thousand queries or something like that. It's pretty limited, but it's useful for getting started. So this is what it looks like. So we're in the content modeling view at the moment. I'm just looking at their sample products. You can see it has a bunch of different fields like size, type, color. You can add a new field. So they have things like location, numbers, this kind of stuff. And then if you actually look at a piece of content and go in there to edit it, it's nice, but it's very bare bones. Their WYSIWYG editor actually generates markdown. Like it's very bare bones. And when you view it, it just looks like a list of properties effectively. And so you're like, well, great. We don't have to worry about them because we have an actual WYSIWYG editor in place editing and wee, all this stuff. But the reason they're building it like that is because the real thing they want you to interact with is the command line. So here they're writing a curl request to the Contentful API, pulling back all the content types of book. And then you see like a list of JSON where it says there's a total of two. And it's really nicely pruned JSON, like Drupal right now kind of just barfs everything you could possibly want to know about an entity, including that it's called an entity out in your face. And so they've done a really good job of curating that and having just the content that you need and not more kind of thing. And they also have SDKs for pretty much any language under the sun. So it's nice if you're a Ruby developer or you're a God-forded, a Pearl developer, I'm just kidding, but different mobile apps, this kind of thing, all have SDKs to just walk right into their APIs. And this is something that Drupal doesn't have today at the moment. So that's what I wanted to say about our competitors. I'm gonna pause here to see if people have questions or comments or things of that nature. And I want to constantly, like I'm giving you a really broad overview. I'm hoping I can do a talk kind of like this a different time, maybe go through each of the initiatives and do like a really detailed comparison of media solutions in each one and stuff like that. But I kind of wanted to just expose people to what these competitors do and what they're generally good at. Yes, what kind of people are using Contentful? Hipster, JavaScript developers, predominantly? People in there, like millennials, damn it, no. But yeah, it's typically, it's definitely a developer-centric audience. So it's a situation where an organization has an IT department and the marketers don't care how it gets built, they just want it to work to this specification. So they build the completely custom front-end and whatever JavaScript framework of the week is popular and then they go to the back-end in order to retrieve and push content. So it's written for people who wanna write completely custom bespoke applications that do exactly what they want. And then they just use the CMS part as like a basic data entry for, basically the point of Contentful, they offer UI for it, but the point of it is the API to work back and forth with it. So that's a good question. Yeah, oh. So he said, he asked, is it more larger organizations or smaller organizations that we use something like Contentful versus something like Squarespace? I think it would be much larger organizations because even the monthly price is much higher. It's like, I think Squarespace starts at 11 bucks a month or something like that and Wix is free if you want ads, versus Contentful, their first real package is about 99 a month. So it's really for organizations like, we work with a lot of large media companies and large media companies have their own development teams. It's for that kind of a situation where you have a development team and they wanna build something that they know how to maintain and they don't have the patience to be debugging why views did that error that it did. Cause I don't need views, I can write my own, you know, like that kind of thing. So it's more for that. You could if you're a scrappy nonprofit with one developer also do it, but typically a scrappy nonprofit's gonna choose some off the shelf thing or an open source solution like Drupal because it, you know, it handles so much for them and they usually don't have the resources to pay a development team to maintain their CMS effectively, their custom and CMS. I saw a hand back, yeah. Yeah, so the question is, how is Drupal doing against those enterprise software? Correct? Drupal, it's interesting. Drupal actually has a lot more market share of the like Fortune 1000 kind of sites than these do and they're like all the site core stuff is all like open source is so terrible, the total cost of ownership. I mean, they're, yeah, they don't like open source. Like that's a huge threat to them. In the Gartner Magic Quadrant and the Forrester Wave and those kinds of things which people who pay ridiculous amounts of money for software care about, Adobe is usually listed as the leader, like they're far and ahead of the pack just because of like them being, and then I think Acquia is listed as up and comer, I don't remember exactly, I could figure this out. There's a new one of those gonna come out like next week or something. But yeah, so it's basically those three that end up in all the deals. It's like Adobe, SiteCore and more frequently lately is Drupal. A lot of times the trick to get in there though is you have to get in through the agencies because agencies like huge system integrators are who's working with these large companies and they're just gonna work with whoever their agency partner is. If it's like Cap Gemini or it's whoever, if they don't use Drupal, then these companies are not gonna use Drupal. So there's been a lot of work to try and get Drupal infiltrated into these large agencies so that these customers that consult purely with large agencies can have Drupal on the table as an option. But yeah, it's definitely, I'd say over the past like three years, it's definitely changed dramatically. And I don't know if you heard that in the SiteCore video, but they said we have 3,500 customers or something like that. It's like Drupal has way more than 3,500 customers. So market share wise, we do really well. But when those things get set in there, and Adobe just demos really, really well. And so that's a lot of times kind of the struggle that Drupal has is especially out of the box it doesn't look super awesome, which is what the next part of the talk is about. So maybe I'll jump into that and then we'll have more time for questions at the end. So I just showed you a bunch of really pretty things and like, ooh, wow, that was sick. So let's look at how Drupal, and I emphasize this is Drupal core because I'm comparing apples to apples out of the box experiences of each one of these things. So let's take a look at how Drupal core fares against these other competitors. So our sample content is screw you. So there's nothing that would guide you to what Drupal is, how it works, what it's capable of, anything like that. An image who uses images, ah, you know. And there's a good reason for this. I mean, we developed Drupal as a generic framework that could do anything, right? And so we didn't want to be opinionated about, well, Drupal out of the box is for blogs because that would kind of shoehorn it and being a blogging platform is definitely not that. And so we've gone back and forth a lot of this to try and figure out how we can solve this problem because a lot of people, we've seen this in the field, they go into Drupal and they're putting it up against WordPress or what I have you, and they come away with the impression that Drupal's limited in functionality and not flexible, which is like the exact opposite of what Drupal actually is. That's bad when people aren't picking Drupal because they can't figure it out in five minutes like they can the other things. Here's our media experience. So you get a little dialogue that lets you upload an image from your hard drive. You can't add an external image. You can't pick from an image you already uploaded. Can't multi-upload images, any of that stuff. And then if you want a media library, we have one out of the box that looks like this. It's just a view that lists the file name, there's no thumbnails, there's nothing like that. Again, this is all out of the box. There's lots of awesome modules, media module, file entity, file browser, all these kinds of things. They're great, they're fantastic, but you have to know that they exist. If you don't know they exist, then this is the impression you get of Drupal. Here's our theme selector. So Drupal ships with a whopping three themes, one of which is blank and doesn't look like anything. It was just cool. And then if you want to add a new one, you get this screen where you're asked to go copy a URL from somewhere and paste it into a box. So there's no visual, nice, like, wow, look at these super cool themes and that's so pretty and I could totally see my restaurant looking like that. None of that. So it's a really big barrier to entry for design-oriented people because they don't want their website to look like crap. And they see Squarespace and they see Wix and they're like, wow, my website kind of looks like that. I could have that cool Thai restaurant with the flaming things, yeah, I want that. And then at least in core again, our layouts are hard-coded. So the theme determines what regions you have available and what layout that they go in. There's nothing like drag and drop of any content. You notice that in just about all of these, it's like taking an image from the sidebar, popping it over here, that's just standard fare in these things now. The ability to grab the boundary of a region and drag it out two inches, make it wider, content reflowing, that's all pretty much expected functionality. Again, in Contrib, there's panels, there's DisplaySuite, there's all these options. Panel's IPE creates a really nice experience, very similar to what we see on the videos, but you gotta know it exists first. So don't panic, right? It's like Drupal looks a little bit, it was built by developers, for developers, that's our history, you know? But we do need to do some more work on the design side of this so that, because what's really frustrating to me is when people choose something like WordPress over Drupal because of these hurdles. Because they look at it and they can't figure out what it does, and it appears limited and they don't know where to begin with the 35,000 contributed modules. So they pick WordPress or whatever they pick. And they use it forever until they find a project that they can't do the thing they wanna do with because it finally got too complex or the functionality wasn't there or whatever the reason is. And then they begrudgingly come back to Drupal like four years later and they're forced to learn it. And then they're like, oh my God, Drupal's amazing, wow! It's like, yes, I would love them to feel that in the first 30 seconds of using the thing instead of like four years later and only after like really resenting their life, right? Like is that a good goal we can get behind? So I wanna re-emphasize, again, Contrib closes most of the gaps that we see. We've got Contrib solutions for all kinds of this stuff, media, layouts, all of it. But we wanna try and get a lot of that stuff into core so it's out of the box, expected as people want. So what are we doing about all of that? So there's some stuff that we've already done so I wanna talk about that. The first is that Drees announced new initiatives in DrupalCon New Orleans a couple months ago. And you'll notice the boxes here pretty much map one to one with some of these gaps that we see between the Drupal out of the box experience and what our competitors are doing. So blocks and layout, media, workflow, cross-channel orchestration, API first, data modeling, all of that very closely aligns with stuff that our competitors are doing really, really well out of the box and we don't do well out of the box right now. We also made changes to the Drupal release cycle as a Drupal aid. So I don't know if everyone knows about this, it was interesting, we had a trivia thing that we did at the booth last night and people didn't believe me when I told them that Drupal 8.2 has a release date and that we're gonna hit it. People did not believe me on that at all. So I just wanna talk about this for a second cause this is kind of new. So Drupal 8.0 had a when it's ready kind of thing going about it, right? And we worked on it, we worked on it, we worked on it, we worked on it, and the deal was we would ship it when we got to zero critical bugs and that unfortunately took about four and a half years. And everyone universally said that sucked. Let's never do that again and everyone was like great idea. So we've adopted this thing called semantic versioning in Drupal 8. So we use three digits instead of two digits and you're like you're a nerd, why do I care about that? Well, you care about that because when the middle number goes up you get backwards compatible features. So when we ship an 8.1 after six months that's gonna have things like big pipe in it and migrate and things like this. When we ship an 8.2 that's gonna have the stuff I'm gonna talk about in a second here but like new features coming out the pipe every six months and we have a much shorter innovation cycle than we ever did. And the other great thing about this is that the really smart, awesome core developers are working in the same code base that all of our end users are using. And so we're all playing in the same sandbox together and fixing the same bugs and this kind of thing it is. It's beautiful, it's glorious, wonderful thing. So you'll see Drupal 8.2.0 ship October 5th of 2016 and then we've got until the end of January to get all the features we want into 8.3 and that's gonna ship in April right before DrupalCon Baltimore. And then one final thing we've done sort of like a governance process wise is we've created a new innovation tool for ourselves called experimental modules. So in the past the rule was when something got into core it was like stuck there forever. Drupal 7.0 still ships with jQuery one point dusty graveyard. I don't know what version it is but it's really old. And in Drupal 8.0 because of semantic versioning and things like we can change stuff like that. This is another sort of like little knob we have to tweak with innovation. So this effectively creates sort of a sandbox kind of like beta versions of stuff. But in core so you don't have to go on Drupal.org and try and find the special module out of the 35,000 modules there are that does what you want. Instead there's like 10 of them that we know this is a feature we want in core. This is not quite ready yet but let's get it out there in front of people so that they can test it and see how it works. It also lets us make changes to it based on real world feedback as opposed to usually what happened is we'd make some user facing improvement we get to 300 comments everyone would be like oh let's just get it and then everyone would walk away because they never wanted to touch that again. Now things are getting in after only like 100 comments. So that's better and we make iterative improvements to them over time and then the idea is that after we've iterated on them a few times we make them into official core modules and then they do become locked down and stable. This is a really cool thing that we're experimenting with. So in 8.2 we actually made good use of this. So 8.2 is just with an experimental module to do content moderation. So the ability to define arbitrary workflow states like draft or pending legal review assign which roles or permissions have the access to move content back and forth and actually do that. So it's essentially the workbench moderation module in core which is awesome. Placebox is an experimental module. Hey, go back. Which lets you add blocks right from the front end of your site as opposed to having to go to that weird back end with the weird table and the draggy dropy rows and this kind of thing. You just go oh I want to block right here. Place block, click it and then boom it's in. It's really really nice. Settings tray is another one of these that we've done and so this is sort of like an in place configuration type of thing. So you go into edit mode, you click on any block on your site and you can change it right there, hit save and it's done. You don't have to go to the back end of your site, go under appearance settings, go under the site name all these kind of nonsense that you would have had to do before. It's just I see it, I click it, it's done. So we're trying to get a lot more into this outside end pattern so that we can give end users the ability to make changes right from the front end of their site without having to know all the places that Drupal decided to stick stuff which is really nice. And then I briefly want to talk because I know I'm running low on time about stuff that is coming soon, question mark. So this is stuff that people are working on. Hopefully we'll make it into these versions that I've targeted but we'll have to see what happens and the more people who help out, the better chances are so. Whoops, this is drag and drop image downloads. So kind of doing quick edit on images so you can just go drag a picture of Newman onto your picture of your lane. I don't think that was an improvement really. And then you go ahead and just save and it's done. So same type of thing we saw for blocks but now we have it for images. So that's a patch and it got to RTBC at one point so hopefully that's either in there now or it will be shortly. Media library, this is a lot more sci-fi like we wish it would work like this but this is some designing work that Kevin O'Leary has done. So this is starting to look a lot more like what we saw in WordPress and Squarespace and those other kinds of solutions where you have a grid, you can see all the images that you have on your site already. There's an advanced view if you wanna see all the properties and things like that. Excuse me. Drag and drop supports, multi-upload support. So I don't think we'll get all of this in 8.3 at all but there's a lot of this that I think we can get. And then the ability when you go to add an image instead of just getting one file upload field you can select from existing images that you've already uploaded. You can choose to upload your own. You can add metadata. So fieldable images, this kind of thing. This would be kind of nice, right? Like that would look pretty cool. And then if we wanted to get really crazy we could do like Photoshop and Drupal and we could like let you crop stuff and like add a page curl. I'm sure we would put that in core because that's an 80% case if I ever saw one. And yeah, and then the ability to do all that on mobile as well. So that issue down there that's currently where we're all discussing like what should the media library look like in 8.3? And we're trying to pick a point that's like pretty simple starting point because again it's going in as experimental so we can start with just the basics and then iterate on it from there. But that's sort of the discussion that we're having because we really want to try and get a media library solution to 8.3. That would be awesome. On the API side of things one of the things that's being explored is using the JSON API specification instead of the weird bleh that Drupal does. So this would make it a lot more possible to use a common standard that JavaScript developers are used to working with in order to do JSON. To solve the default content problem there's a snowman initiative that was around back in 2011, 2012, that area and kind of got stymied because basically anything they wanted to do with default content involved having views and there was no views in core so it was like what can we do? But now there is views in core and there's workflows and there's all kinds of cool stuff and so there's a lot of people trying to dust this initiative off and actually start it up again. And this time probably building off the work that the documentation team has done to create their curated set of documentations based around like a farmer's market use case because it doesn't really matter what the use case is it's just give it one out of the box so you can kind of see what Drupal does. We also have some folks working on swappable layouts. I don't have a nice video for this one but the ability to click different layouts and have it automatically using the outside-in pattern or the settings tray it's called now flip back and forth between your different things and there's a patch in this issue down there that is actually allowing you to switch layouts on a per content type basis so you can make your pages one column your, you know excuse me, your blog post two column, this kind of thing. One more thing on the API side of things there's this library that AQUI developed called Waterwheel which creates like a JavaScript SDK wrapper around Drupal's like raw PHP REST API so that we're hoping we'll be a really friendly introduction to Drupal for people who live and breathe JavaScript because they can work in their native language and they don't have to work on PHP because PHP just, you know it doesn't shine quite like it used to with the kids these days and then the last thing that's pretty cool is something the, oops, is something the workflow team is working on towards which is the ability to stage content so you can see this is the live site it has no content, the staging content and it's not just like the ability to preview an individual node but actually see menu changes and taxonomy changes and block changes and everything and view that in its own sandbox environment to verify that it looks okay before you deploy it and that would be really handy for example this election that's coming up in the United States because you would be able to kind of map your whole side out for if Trump wins the election or Hillary wins the election I tried to find like a less depressing example of that but it's a pretty good one so all right, so if you want to help we would love to help this is a lot of work but there's a lot of really great people who are very passionate and working on it actively and so please join us so the URL at the bottom of this page I'll post my slide to Twitter after but the URL on this page links off to the listing of the strategic initiatives all the ones that I covered earlier from Jesus Kino and they all have jumping off points to whatever issues that things are going on and a lot of these teams have meetings that happen once a week or every couple of weeks almost all of them are gonna have sprints on Friday so if you are here on Friday which you totally should be there will be a contribution sprint and that's for anybody you don't have to be a coder you don't have to be an expert you can come and say I have content authors and I know what they hate about media right that would be useful information I have internet explorer that would be amazing because none of us have internet explorer like this kind of thing so please come down find a table to join up with we would love to have you if you're totally brand new to the contribution process there's actually mentored sprints happening so they'll pair you up with someone to learn all about the Git process and the issue Q and how it all works it's a really really fantastic opportunity to network and just share with other people so I hope you take it up and that's what I got so thank you everybody so I think we have like three minutes for questions yes Larry yeah so his statement was you know some of these like contentful weebly or sorry Wix and Squarespace are all self-hosted or you know they they host it for you the opposite of self-hosted they're managed services so you don't really have to worry about deploying stuff back and forth do the other solutions have a deployment thing and how does it compare to CMI I don't know because literally impossible to install Sitecore or Adobe without talking to a freaking salesperson so I haven't been able to dig in and find that out but I know that they do have the same concept like I showed in the video of the workflow stuff of the idea of staging content elsewhere than the production site and then moving it over in terms of configuration I'm not sure sorry does anyone else know the answer there's a couple hands Joel okay so the way Sitecore handles it I guess is they have a completely separate site for staging for XML right on party like it's 1999 you're good so they use XML to transfer the configuration and the content from one site to another cool yes in the back and all of the use cases and they're more or less infrastructure that at this point is just expected functionality of CMSs that are modern today in terms of the distributions though I totally agree and the more we do to get rid of the monkey work you have to do to make a distribution usable by a pharmaceutical company the more that you could focus on making sure the default content is pills and doctor appointments and stuff like that because that's what you want to build in a distribution you don't want to build your own custom bespoke media library like nobody wants to do that you know so you can use other distributions that are more general like say the lightning distribution does a lot of them you know heavy elbow work for you to like get the workflow and the layouts and the stuff working but you have to know again you have to know that lightning exist and that's the thing you can use and it would just be better if the default product just worked that way because that's what people who don't know Drupal at all are going to be comparing it and I think people also get freaked out about the idea of like oh my God causing it to get so big why you know all this stuff to maintain but at the same time what we've also done is we've also effectively outsourced a lot of the really low level stuff like you know our entire bootstrap process all run through symphony now the routing has run through symphony we use like YAML things from other lives but we've done a lot to incorporate third-party libraries to do stuff that honestly we don't really care about I don't care how our YAML parser works as long as it works what I care about is that the user interface and the interactions that people have are really pleasant when they use Drupal so they fall in love with it the same way that I have and the same way that you have so I feel like we are definitely growing the size of core but in terms of the size of code that we have to maintain we're starting to lose a lot of the stuff we weren't really good at maintaining in the first place and we're instead adopting things at our core to what we are as a product and I think that that's a fair trade and so I actually feel pretty good about that but that's a little bit of a contentious statement so yes way in the back and then we'll have to cut I think but I'm available to talk after so yes yeah that's fair so the statement was that a lot of the people that use CMSs are kind of like done with CMSs every three years whether they need it or not they switch to something else and they go for this big loop it's like WordPress and then to Drupal and then to Adobe and then back to Drupal and then back to WordPress or whatever it ends up being and then after a while they're just kind of done with it and some of the disadvantages that CMSs get bad rap for is being you know very monolithic and inflexible and these kinds of things there's a lot of code that you didn't write that you have to like debug and this kind of thing and this is why services like Contentful are worth watching because if that ends up being the trend that happens you know that's something that you know that that's people voting with their feet or whatever I think the selling point for Drupal especially Drupal 8 is that it can be it can kind of play any of those roles that you needed to play so if you need like I don't want to think I just want it to do everything for me you can do that right like that's the out of the box experience plus 30 contributed modules kind of thing and you can set Drupal up that way if you just want to use Drupal as a content store and you just want to interact with the APIs just like Contentful or something like that you can also do that but you can provide a much nicer authoring experience for the people working in the back end than something like Contentful offers at least today if you want to go really bespoke and you just want to do it all from scratch then Drupal is built on symphony so you can even do that so you could build a completely custom application that hardly uses Drupal at all or maybe doesn't use anything of Drupal except for one or two things and that's also fine so I feel like Drupal 8 is in a really good position because it can span the gamut of whatever level of fatigue they have and whatever budget they have to handle that fatigue there's a lot of different options and ways that you can go so I guess that would be my question or answer I don't know that answers your question but does that help? Yeah, thanks for that right before lunch I appreciate that we can talk more after though that was a great question yeah, it's a funny thing where if people pay a million dollars for a piece of software they expect it's going to be good if you tell them the software is free they're like, well it must be junk because they're selling theirs for a million dollars what, you know, like yeah we still have a lot to do to educate people on open source and this kind of thing maybe what we just need to do is start charging $300,000 for copy of Drupal I'm just kidding just kidding I didn't say that nope anyway, but yeah it's a tricky problem I see more hands I'm going to say people can go ahead and go I think lunch is happening now so if you want lunch you can feel free to go otherwise I'm happy to stay and answer a few more questions so, yes that's a great question yes yeah yeah so his statement was we're competing on the technical area in the feature level and that's great but we don't have a little creepy two-minute video that talks about all the stuff that Drupal's going to do to your visitors or your site and why don't we have that, right? it's interesting because we did have that when Drupal 7 was released Lullabot donated like their time to make a really slick video and we didn't quite get that together for Drupal 8 we should it would be great I think the reason that hasn't been done is like the Drupal Association has a really small team and so they don't really have the manpower for that at the moment and then I think there's lots of people within the community who could do that but you know it's a duocracy and so no one said I'll do that you know everyone was kind of like oh yeah we should tell them a video but I agree it's like when you go to these sites and they have just like a really slick I'm going to tell you how this works in a minute and a half it's like yeah I wish we had that and I wish we had that in the default installation right so people get that immediately and they're like oh that's how it works I got it now I know what a frigging node and a block is I don't have to like bash my head against that right are you volunteering? yay that would be so cool yeah I would love to see something like that happen I don't immediately know how we would work that out well we could totally work that out and that would be great sorry I thought I was being followed by someone trying to usher me out of the room yes so Lauri's statement was like we just really? oh I know why sorry it's important to start up your local development environment before you try and go to it it turns out that's the whole thing he said that we just redesigned the Drupal.org homepage it actually looks really nice like look at that yeah it looks like we're an actual thing wow we're a thing like people use us look at that we have people they use us that's great we have a conference that some of you might be attending yeah so that looks really good but then your default first impression of Drupal looks like ugh really it's really hard to type when I can't see wait x dd there uh except without the pretty mountain but yeah it looks like that right it's pretty plain there's not a lot of like really impressive stuff I heard that through yeah and I actually think the solution to this is both of a default theme and also fixing the sample content problem because it's really hard once again to just find a theme for nothing right it's a lot easier to design a default theme for something so I'd like I'd love to see those two things captured in parallel what's the issue do you know the issue idea off the top of your head otherwise I can probably find it loury shame so alright I don't have my two factor authentication stuff anyway there's an issue called create a new user facing theme for Drupal and this is where there's discussion happening on this community initiative around creating a new default theme which would be awesome because Bartik is a little 2009 at this point you know so so the question is is one default theme like so if we make a new default theme that's great that solves the Bartik problem is that actually enough because you look at these other ones and they can do amazing things I actually think one in core is fine as long as the browser looked decent right and it actually escalated nice looking themes to the top of the list and not all the frameworky themes so it requires some work on the Drupal.org side I would say let's start with one if we can do one great and then we could you know do more of that if we needed to yes yeah it's a really good idea and that's been talked about to the idea of asking some generic questions at the beginning of the installation process which is like what are you building are you building a blog are you building a portfolio website like some of the same stuff that Wix does I think I'm being kicked out um so that you kind of have an idea of what what sample content what default blocks what default modules you might want to enable that kind of thing and I think that's great as a goal to get to I would like to do one first like we don't have one let's start with one and if we do a good job with that yeah I would love to expand out no totally because you know then what we don't want is the opposite problem are great now people think that Drupal is a great uh platform for farmers market websites like we don't want that impression either right so we have to strike some kind of a middle ground but I think I think let's start with one that actually gets you some idea of what Drupal does out of the box so that you can learn within more like five minutes instead of like five weeks and then um and then yeah I would love to do that because in theory that's pretty easy installation profiles are like this default content this default configuration boop boop done you know um and then that might also drive more than one default or more than one default core theme depending on you know the thing but I feel like there's a symbiotic relationship between those two initiatives so Lauri when is your core conversation? five to six today so if you're a designer or a design like person you should totally come to the core conversation that Lauri is holding from five to six and that's oh one more okay and then we really got to go because people are hungry yes yeah I think so yeah so his statement was yeah one thing I want to okay so his statement was geez now that I saw all these videos of all these things that people could do I'm kind of scared and like what is the compelling argument for choosing Drupal after seeing all that um and I think the one thing I want to re-emphasize again is like I'm own I'm making fun of Drupal a little bit because I'm making fun of a default installation but nobody sets up a Drupal site with a default installation right and there's tons of modules that do everything that I showed you in this video like if you want personalization stuff you can download the lift if you want cool media stuff happening you can download like 30 media modules like n80 browser and whatever whatever whatever if you want layout to use panels panels IBE if you want this this this so all of those have solutions you can totally set Drupal up to look a lot like Adobe Experience Manager in fact we do that all the time at Aquia we have a thing called demo framework which automatically sets up a really nice looking Drupal site that you can take into a competitive situation and it looks really good we have lightning as a distribution which already sets up all the layouts and workflow and all that kind of stuff so you don't have to monkey with that and then that you could use that as a starting point for example so I want to emphasize Drupal can do all of that stuff we just want Drupal core to do a lot of that stuff because right now it just looks kind of you know it doesn't look great the compelling reason to use Drupal over those solutions is one it's free two it's open source three it has a much much larger community than any of those other than WordPress and we innovate a lot faster than they do so for example when a new service gets announced like Pinterest was new at one point you had to wait like nine months for Pinterest integration to get on their roadmap but in Drupal someone wrote that in a weekend right and it's there and you can just use it we have to leave anyway so yes so that flexibility developer experience all that stuff Drupal is way more technically flexible than any of these and it can bend to fit any need so lots of different compelling reasons thank you for coming everybody yay