 Hi everyone who's joining us We're gonna get started promptly at the top of the hour here, but we're really glad to have all of you with us We're gonna let some more attendees in and get started as I said right at the top of the hour It's great to be see such a good crowd. We've already got all 30 people in the first 30 seconds It's gonna be an awesome presentation Okay, I'm gonna kick things off today with a little bit of housekeeping and then introduce our topic and our speakers So, thank you all for joining us again. We're really glad to have you here You're welcome to use the chat function to chat amongst each other Or introduce yourselves at any time and we really strongly encourage you to use the Q&A tab in the zoom toolbar To ask any questions that you have as we go We are recording this presentation and the recording will be made available after the event and posted to the Drupal Association YouTube channel And with that I think we're just about ready to go So Today we're talking about an awesome case study for decoupled Drupal. This is the story of Penn State news long-time advocates for open source and users of open source software including Drupal or originally in Drupal 7 and now with a sort of new model of a content hub and brand management tool that forms the basis Of their decoupled Drupal installation. It's a really exciting story And I think you'll find a lot of compelling use cases regardless of your industry Let's introduce our speakers today So many of you May know me. I'm Tim Lennon. I'm the chief technology officer of the Drupal Association Hestanet on Drupal.org The Drupal Association is the 501c3 nonprofit that supports the Drupal project So if you participate as a Drupal member, thank you. If your organization is a supporting partner, thank you We do our best to foster the community and bring great stories like these to you We'll go ahead and hand it to Jim to introduce himself next Hi, I'm Jim Norse. I sit in the office of strategic communications at Penn State my My goal here is we're trying to bring a platform to Penn State that enables brand unity and establishes some development and hosting and DevOps and optimization standards guided by Digital and content strategies Fantastic and mark, please introduce yourself as well Yes, my name is mark Schrobscher and I am a senior director of development at media current and I'm excited today to be sharing a Good bit about the architecture and technical implementation of this great open-source platform at Penn State Which now supports 250 content editors and many content consumers Awesome. So let's get started So today we're gonna dig in to the opportunities facing Penn State news What brought us to this project originally? Jim's gonna kick that off and then we're gonna talk about what needed to be done What were those requirements and what were the problems we were trying to solve through the project process and Then we'll get a bit more technical Because I know we've got some technical folks on this webinar. They'd like to hear about it on the Penn State platform But don't worry. We'll talk about functionality at a high level also and then have plenty of time reserved for Q&A So just a bit about media current Media current we bring together Really just a great group of talented team members to provide world-class solutions for the web and We are really proud to focus on open-source solutions at media current like Drupal I'm excited to be here today sharing all these details about this Penn State web platform that we helped bring to life And I want to thank you Mark and the media current team for being supporting partners of the Drupal association Association and part of the ecosystem that builds Drupal as a platform and awesome sites like these Thank you, Tim Okay, so today's topic is about Penn State news which is one large decoupled implementation and migration But I wanted to set the stage a little bit with sort of just a Higher level view of what we're trying to accomplish and how this project fits into sort of a lot of larger and longer term strategy, so Open source has been embraced here at Penn State for really over a decade. There's a wide adoption of Drupal here and it's But there are a few Standards and there's no central service, right? So every unit is for themselves and frankly if you pulled our developers they would say that's that's fine by us So we have a decentralized landscape of development maintenance optimization And we want to we want to leverage those strengths so but that's resulted in a really Balkanized ecosystem and Sites that look very different and sites that are developed maintain and hosted in different ways By both internal resources and often many different vendors as well So most three factors are rebuilt occur in isolation and they often they often start from scratch So at the highest level this Penn State experiences this as the expensive. There's low governance. It's harder than it should be to align these things and to roll them up to larger university goals and strategies And So the present opportunity is to leverage this Commitment we have to Drupal as a platform and develop a series of digital playbooks not rule books But in service of executing on brand public-facing websites So what we're really trying to accomplish here is we're trying to introduce a design system for Penn State with Atomic components and patterns and some federated components that listen on web sockets as well Contest strategies that are tightly aligned to organisms and template groups and components an API first architecture and Really Penn State content as a service for multiple channels Right host and then we need to host this in the cloud assume constant optimization cycles dev-op standards predictable costs, etc So now to the current project My office owned a legacy D7 highly customized and highly Integrated Drupal 7 at a very large scale 100,000 plus pages quarter of a million various assets, etc. All told And we took advantage of the Drupal 7 end of life to reassess Everything and initiated an in-house total rediscovery of our functional or technical in our strategic requirements Awesome, I think one of the things that's interesting about your case here Jim is It feels like something that's going to be common to a lot of other folks in higher ed probably a lot of our attendees here This sort of decentralization and different departmental implementations and all of these sorts of things I mean when you looked at this project Holistically, what was it that kind of gave you the most heartburn about what you were about to undertake undergo? Yeah, well one of the things was jumping into a giant refactor on a forced march influenced by the end End of life so the heartburn was that we were going to use our current state as a functional spec and just try to rebuild it and deny and Avoiding avoiding the investment in discovery So we made sure we didn't do that and we've thought this through Right taking the time to actually make sure it was a business driven redesigned and not just a technical motivation. Absolutely cool So our business situation right so the news website that we're talking about it's our it's our business system of record for news And our public relations editorial operation. So that's the CMS piece And it's the publication of record for all of our public relations stories and our news stories And it but it involves more than just my office involves the entire Commonwealth of Pennsylvania so it's a very we have a very decentralized marketing and communications business function here We have hundreds of authors. We say 250 or so the number churns 24 plus campuses 70 plus colleges divisions and units that are all accessing This platform getting their content and turning it through the workflow and extracting it back out into various channels And it also there's a piece of this. There's a there's an email blast campaign Including Penn State today, which is daily, you know flagship publication digital publication. The d7 was a monolith At AP an API that that executed content sync with 20 plus other d8 monoliths It was on on-premises hosting that had a lot of a lot of labor invested into into the hosting solution here on premises The site had thousands of taxonomy terms and corresponding RSS feeds that were really integration endpoints for our partners and In some it was a very effective business tool, but it was complicated and becoming fragile and quite brittle and all the parts many the parts were Into life like really down to the metal And when you say brittle, what do you what do you sort of mean about that implementation in what way was it brittle? Well, part of it is that if I can be if I can express a little self-awareness here I think part of it is that we weren't necessarily the most strategic of builders and possibly clients to Other vendors meaning that we The old site built in increments not according to sort of a rational plan digital and web strategy Was you know functional owners that made requests and those requests were Were bolted into the system and so it led it led to a lot of collisions It led to a lot of outdated modules a lot of technical debt and ultimately the multi-sightness of the platform There were pieces of the website that simply Uh were very difficult to execute changes on because of all of the regression testing the regressions that were induced by So a lot of words, but that's what brittle meant to me Cool that makes a lot of sense Uh a little bit of color around the scale and scope of this again This is a very very very big website, right? There's 250 offers your offers to more campuses um And each partnering communications office that is that's contributing to the content extracting it back out They have their own workflows and we support multiple content types And the legacy system had thousands of taxonomies um We integrated up and down with uh Downstream with a lot of unnecessary integrations like with flicker or went with academic tenure tracking software And psu.edu or flat the home the psus home page which had about like 75 pages versus the 100 000 that news had They're tethered as a multi-site. I like to say it was it was like a towing a jet ski from the back of a battleship so part of what we need to do is Segregate these services and handle them more similarly according to their own strategies And it's all bound by a single get flow And I should make it clear here that i know i'm a web developer By trade, but I sit in the comms unit. So i'm not in it So our our our perspective is on how to influence other people more like me rather than run this as a central service um So Our downstream partnering websites and our systems integrate so that They can reuse the content we use json For asset syncing and rss like per taxonomy for for our partnering websites And we use an old school listserv to integrate Off of the integration for our 50 plus like distinct newsletters and publications that generate dumb old You know our our our email blasts, right? So our pit we had this epiphany during discovery that we really are operating as A content hub, but we had no formal strategy around this so We needed to start building towards this overarching strategy of Penn State usable Like of developing a Penn State reusable content hub as a service That meant a universal api standard as a foundation for the platform going forward So we can deliver content agnostic Uh a content, you know deliver content that's agnostic to the receiving platform, right? There's a lot of Drupal here. There's plone. There's wordpress. There's expression engine There's things you've never heard of that are actually consuming our end point And we needed to deliver a little bit of information architecture in the api to um So those are our needs in conclusion We after our discovery we determined that we needed to streamline our product jettison unneeded boltons And go to market with the clean product vision. We needed to host Everything in the cloud to reduce system administration and overhead costs We needed to empower Penn State developers to own the front end into sets That's more critical to our business. So we want to separate front end from the back end get flow Um, we want to establish a Penn State standard for front end coding We want to onboard an atomic component design system Establish standards for the Penn State brand on the web And establish this design system in a pattern library and enable new Digital and SEO strategies with prune and content. We're reslugging everything we're moving from a strategy of single domains to Excuse me from sub-domains to a single domain off of psu.edu and Remove a lot of bloat. We needed instant alerting as a service We needed a content api as a service. We needed pixel perfect preview. Our authors would expect nothing less Uh an improved authoring experience And we needed to migrate and refactor this without disruption if you're from Boston, you'll know about the big dig This was a little bit of a big dig like project and uh, we thought that maybe we had a pretty good case for decoupled Fantastic, is that all jim? Is that all you needed? That sounds like a walk in the park Yeah, so I mean, you know after jim stepped back to get this holistic understanding You know, they went through their you know rfp process everything and found a partnership with media currents So mark, why don't you talk us through like how you took what needed to be done and made it happen? Yeah, thanks tim So we had to really start with the discovery process and lead into you know defining those site requirements And some of those included outsourcing of the hosting. It's something that was important for Jim and the team for cost predictability on the platform Let's focus on the infrastructure internally and and more on the business processes And of course a great content author experience via Drupal is definitely key to the success of this project We knew that all along and we still know that we're still improving and working on that But that includes content moderation workflows through just being able to easily enter content And from near the beginning, I think we all felt like fully decoupled was the right choice And we confirmed that through discovery processes and strategy But that front end became just a requirement based on needs around security performance recruiting development teams that Penn State wants to build and even more Drupal is a content hub here and it allows Gatsby and Penn State campuses and and more to access those data via apis While development workflows are improved here by separate front end and back end get reposed That really allows the teams to focus and work independently You know on the front end or back end And different needs can be met at different times and we can release simultaneous or separately along the way When it comes to building for scale and reusability Really component based design is key to this project We'll talk more about that today, but we have a living style guide included in the project That's really important and that allows designers to be empowered To build new layouts from existing components and not everything has to be brand new, but you can start fresh Or use existing to build something that looks new, which is really neat Content authors also have the power of Drupal paragraphs paragraphs as a contributed module and set of modules To create content with pre-defined components that map back to the Gatsby front end And allow us to do layouts that way And I think that last component is just a really cool use case. It's really powerful to give editorial control within Drupal That um continues to provide visual control all the way through to a decoupled front end. That's really neat Most definitely Tim So we'll jump in a little bit here to why Drupal for Penn State overall and I'll start out here with wide Drupal in general Just for anyone who maybe is not familiar or if this may you know, this may reinforce pre-existing notions, but Drupal has a massive open source community providing not just the code Which it's known for but also support training and documentation Drupal has a commitment to web accessibility that's been there for for number of years I love the fact because I have a security focus that Drupal has a formal security team and mature security processes I heard Jim say yeah, that's that's always important to universities without a doubt. No, it's fine, Jim Like I love that and um, it's also fully customizable Through not just code But all of the thousands and thousands of contributed modules and other bits of source code that the community provides It you know, I just love the fact that as a developer Myself my team anybody involved in this project or working with Drupal projects Do not have to write every line of code to build something That is just a value that I really appreciate and Penn State University has been using Drupal and contributing to Drupal The Drupal open source community for many years, which I think is great. So But I'm I'm That's kind of that general view But I do want to hand it over to Jim because Jim's got some, you know, fantastic points and philosophies on like Why Drupal for Penn State specifically? Yeah, so why Drupal? Drupal is accepted here By and large not entirely but as a standard and there's a major commitment to open source more generally here So meeting meeting our workforce our developers where they are both in like skill and in spirit was Essential for this project. So what we're trying to do here is sort of reinvest our commitment to open source and and use Drupal In our sense sort of leverage it in the right spot in the right in the right ecosystem and platform To achieve like a more standardized vision of how to how to use Drupal. It's not all Drupal So there's other pieces now that we're sort of bolting on to give it structure And attach it to more, you know, larger strategies and sort of dev ops and hosting And preview experiences as well right So let's talk a minute here about Drupal as a content authoring tool and dig into that point a little bit more some things that media current Penn State really value through the process Using Drupal as a content authoring tool, which is very important Is that You know, you can make Drupal function in a way that works best for your organization It's highly customizable. Um, again, that's through, you know, custom code but also through all that contributed Open source source code With Drupal's content authoring experience, it's is critical to success to have a good authoring experience For this project And that's true for traditional websites, but it's also very important as Tim mentioned talking about that connection and mapping from Drupal To Gatsby on the front end It's important that the couple site editors can also create and see what they expect Through their content layout and the previews of the content Which we'll say pixel perfect previews a number of times Jim said it I'll say it a few times because that was really important to this project From an api first architecture I mean, I go back and I remember Dries talking about at a Drupal con How his vision for Drupal years ago was to be that content of And it it's like it's realized in this project You know, this project actually, uh, the single Drupal instance powers, uh, you know Many websites other than the new site throughout the campuses it can power additional signage It can power alert systems that can power native applications more in the future and that's really exciting for a content editor Imagine entering content once and it goes out everywhere. That's really the bottom line of that dream so We talked why Drupal let's talk why the couple just briefly because that that usually comes up in these projects for decoupled or headless projects So both traditional Drupal builds and a couple builds Our legitimate directions for architecting complex websites At media current we still build full, you know full Front end back end Drupal sites without a couple. There's reasons to do that It really depends on the project requirements and the organizational goals And and Jim's already outlined a you know, number of those goals that You know laid into why decoupled Gatsby was the right move for this um But also, um, you know having that content hub Gatsby is just one of the many consumers of the data from the Penn State news site. That's really important Um, and again putting my security hat on just a bit I love that security Is a focus and we have garter which is a Drupal security distribution With a combination of uh Drupal modules and configurations baked into this platform So that's on the Drupal side and also, uh, we're leveraging Penn State's authentication system using SAML To provide authentication for all of those content editors now this gives a lot of power As you might imagine you've got 250 approximate content editors accessing a system and New people come in and some people maybe aren't content editors any longer It's great to be able to manage that through an existing Penn State system Um, and I'm I don't have to manage it. Uh, Jim and others manage it, but I I'm I'm hearing from him that that helps And on the Gatsby front-end side of things, um from a security standpoint, you've got static You've got a static site. We don't have any type of authentication. Um at this point on the front end That definitely helps And also just the separation of development roles So front-end developers have access to their systems to work on the front end back end developers in Drupal have access to work and develop in their system. So Um, so yeah security is something that's a big part Of this decision So jumping into Gatsby You know Gatsby's framework, which is what developers experience on the command line and when they're building Gatsby sites It's a react-based framework and that means that working with Gatsby is readily accessible to a world of javascript developers Um, my experience personally with Gatsby is it makes things easy for me as a developer Versus coding those common needs from scratch. I'm using Gatsby plugins and Themes and things like that to help and and I'll just say this briefly From years of being a Drupal developer and coming from that experience Um Gatsby felt very comfortable for me because the plugin System and the theme system like there's a lot of parallels. Um You know that I can see from how Drupal looks at modules and themes So while it's different in a lot of ways, I found that the parallels helped me a lot You know, if I need to install an SEO module, there's similar plugins in Gatsby as there are in Drupal And speaking of developer experience, I think it's key to maintain and improve websites and applications efficiently I think we all agree on that Gatsby standardizes how all contents pulled into the front end and displayed. It's using GraphQL to do that This improves the speed of maintenance and new feature work For the front end code base Which is just really beneficial and we'll talk more about Gatsby cloud In this talk today, but it really is fast and reliable and it helps us get those published sites and preview sites working We've spent a lot of time building and improving the speed with Gatsby as a partner But but really Gatsby cloud builds They're deployed to a best in class edge network, which Helps a lot when it comes to making the site accessible to users who want to access the content and I love that It's always improving as a service That's great to see Fantastic. All right, so let's dive into this sort of storytelling system that that you built with all these components We've got we got tons of questions and I want to make sure we have time for those So let's let's get into some of these details and and and run on through Sounds good Tim. Um, so really a key to telling stories for Penn State And and allowing Penn State designers to be able to efficiently translate their designs into component based Systems is the living style guide. It's a great way to test design work In a web context and find issues ahead of actual front end development While front end designs work is happening Drupal developers are able to work On adding in content authoring needs to support new designs And it's great to have teams working in parallel while they're communicating and collaborating So I mentioned living style guide and I'm really excited about this part. Um Throughout the build We were able to leverage and continue to a living style guide to help designers and developers understand how applications would look and feel And when it comes to accessibility support that is also tied back to the living style guide So that guide which gives us those component level pieces and lets us see everything like in the smallest atomic point before it's all put together and Made into a page It gives us the ability to test accessibility at the component level It lets us find those problems with accessibility before they even make it to a page Uh, and it's really critical for pin state to get the news out to anyone who needs it or wants to consume it So i'm going to talk just briefly here about gatsby preview, but this is important You know, we've mentioned that pixel perfect Previews and content editors. They just need to be able to preview content. It's very important So gatsby cloud and the gatsby drupal module, which is open source allow viewing of full pixel perfect previews in drupal It's in an offering And you can see an animation there that shows how you can view that there's um, and these can be These views can actually be unpublished. These previews can be unpublished revisions of drupal or published But the team also worked here to add an instant preview which has made it into the gatsby module. I believe and that That is neat because it actually shows us quickly Exactly what drupal has stored as far as data and you can contrast that as a content editor against the pixel perfect preview All right. So content moderation is just an important aspect of storytelling here for this project so content authoring at scale Requires a robust system to handle those 250 plus content contributors with different access levels and and we have to have this editorial process that is secure and structured Well, drupal comes out of the box to handle users permissions and roles and that's a piece of content moderation That's important in the planning. So we spent a great deal of time really managing and planning that But it also has uh, drupal has content moderation built in Used to be add-on modules and things and that made it into core drupal eventually But that allows us to actually have things in draft and go through a process to schedule Content to go out and then to publish it But all of these groups and roles Can and systems overall have been and can be enhanced with custom code to match any of the requirements All right, so we are going to jump into A part that a lot of us look forward to and it's digging into the tech a little bit This is a diagram of the tech stack involved with this project So i'm going to hit some highlights Briefly here. So drupal be in the content hub It's driving all those api endpoints and it drives them right now Overall for the pin state campus sites that are consuming news content It's drive. It's providing api support for gatsby cloud To build the publish and preview sites It's also pushing out to firebase to handle the campus alert system Which appears at the top of the pages on the campus news site We do leverage aws s3 The pin state already had aws, which is great and it was already a partner with them So we were able to use that to Drive image styles and save those when they're first accessed And then they're available to subsequent users The headline's email system is also exciting and driven all from drupal Those are plain text and html emails that are sent by the millions per year that jim mentioned earlier and That that drupal handles building those plain text and html rich emails It sends it to a listserv and that listserv disseminates it to the list And Yeah, so, you know, I noted earlier about the separate get repos. You can see those for the drupal and gatsby instances there And just one last note on the apis that drupal provides campus systems. There's there's already requests coming in apparently You know to hat to add more capabilities for this more access really to this new system, which is great So I think that's exciting Of all the things that i'm excited about Well, there's about 30 things i'm really excited about but I wanted to call out The fire-based integration to support real-time alerting is Super powerful for us and that we can decouple the site yet still have real-time listening To to drupal on a static on a static component It gives us the opportunity to think about federated sort of nav bars and alerting across the university And we're piloting that right now psu.edu and news, but it's uh, it's a that's a That's a big idea for us That's awesome jim. I I agree completely. Um So we'll jump here into content authoring experience. Um, we've talked a bit about that and um You can see an animation here showing all the many taxonomies that was a big part of this Drupal has some of the baked-in features that we used to make this platform successful user roles permissions content moderation, which we've talked about but taxonomy was really huge in this project. Um, and Um, that's a part of you know, all the things you get with Drupal core But there's also a lot of contributed modules that supported this project along the way as you might imagine in the drupal community and also some custom code and and those factored into our schedule publishing system Things like fill character limits and character counts in the ui We were able to focus on really clear Field labels and descriptions to make it easy for content editors to know what a field does It's amazing how important that is It may not be the most exciting thing for a developer, but it is really important for an editor to have that Um, and then those drupal paragraphs based layouts I have to say pin state Having already a partnership with aquia and that continuing That's been able to ensure drupal runs well for all of these editors and those api and points and that's that's really been fantastical on the way to have that support Um, and again gatsby preview for those pixel perfect previews is is just critical for these um content authors all right So when it comes to um gatsby and and what's made that really successful for this project Um, I have to just say gatsby cloud and the gatsby framework Um, and the related open source components that just allows gatsby to integrate Well with drupal and during this project a great deal of time was spent by all parties involved On the development side improving performance, uh throughout the platform Really end-to-end and making sure that builds were speedy and that they exceed stakeholder expectations and Just really excited to continue that along the way an advantageous realize with gatsby cloud along here on this project that pin states platform benefits from those continuous improvements in gatsby cloud And and gatsby I think owning that process end-to-end in gatsby cloud from the builds through deployment is is a benefit So it's it's uh, you know, we really have that partnership with gatsby and that partnership with aquia to really make those things work well And um, and I just love that gatsby is rapidly improving and building new features into the framework that developers use and those cloud services Uh, and c-pen state benefiting uh on that from years to come So today is we kind of wrap up and we get ready to move into some q and a I I couldn't Really all three of us here tim and tim and I we we wanted to end on a just the great story of pen state news and the open source story aspect here because open source is really what many of us are excited about It's important for the business and um, you know as as we talked earlier a bit pen state university Just has a history of heavy involvement in open source communities. Not just drupal, but drupal being one of those The new pen state news platform Benefits from open source with drupal and gatsby The drupal community provided the core drupal code and many contributing modules And some other ways that it's drupal's open source community has helped us Really just the community support Along the way in the issue cues and the patches that are provided to help this platform launch Yes, we have patches from drupal That's in the open source community in the project as many other drupal sites do That's great. The gatsby community Was also heavily involved in improving the gatsby source plugin for drupal And providing necessary plugins to ensure that front end is fast accessible and has good seo results Well, it makes good business sense to utilize open source as it can be seen in all these examples We've talked about Pen state media current and gatsby have also been committed to contributing back to open source via the gatsby plugin and drupal module patches and improvements and one example of this that i'm really excited about is that media current and gatsby partnered To dedicate resources and to pull in improvements from this project and contribute that back to the open source community And again that carries through what you know Jim talked about the importance that pen state had puts on open source and that new two dot Zero zero release is in beta. I think it's beta one right now And it's listed as the gatsby integration module, but check that out. That should be coming to a stable release near you very soon And to me, this is really open source working. I mean, this is what You know, not not every project works this way. We're using open source and we give back But this is amazing how this is what I think of open source working through and through And I and I just couldn't leave without saying As a community member if you'd like to help and get involved with the drupal integration module Please reach out to some of the maintainers of the project in drupal slash gatsby channel You can also get involved directly in the gatsby integration modules issue q Fantastic. Thank you very much mark. Thank you, Jim for the conversation today and for sharing this case study We're going to go into q and a now There's tons of questions and tons of engagement in chat, which is really fantastic Love to see it. I'm going to take them largely in the order. They came in. I made group a couple of these things together Just really quickly to cover some of the ones answered by text Won't go into super detailed We were asked sort of what search function is kind of used or recommended. Jim mentions using You know the larger edu system using google search, but using apache solar for the psu news local search An index a little searchable by site users Aaron asked if graduate schools were part of the project or it's just psu.edu Jim, I think this is worth actually dwelling on a little bit yourself to talk about how this is a beginning a sort of a start for Addressing that that original problem we talked about about all the different brands being balkanized, right? So Yeah, I mean in short so This project right now this phase of our roadmap is about It was around building building out this flagship Platform, right penn state news. Certainly the graduate schools are consumers. They're marketing commuter commuter Communicator team they contribute to the system and they extract their you know segments of content back out But phase one they were they were not part of our pilot for actually adopting the entire standard, but Stay tuned Awesome. Very cool We have another quick question here, which is There was mentioned I think along the way of integrating with a sort of an academic tenure management tool Someone's just curious what that tool is if you're able to share it Yeah, sure. I mean and we're no longer integrating It was the old system it was digital measures and there is still there There is still some drupal integrations with digital measures happening at penn state if that's if that's of interest You can contact me offline at this platform. We jettisoned that Awesome, okay Another question here for you jim was um, you know, we've talked about we talked about requirements and the choice of drupal But but stepping back a little bit Had you looked at other headless specific cms options? Whether open source or proprietary like content as a service providers like content stack met the fly contentful And what made you decide that staying with drupal was the right track? So that's a pretty good question I don't have any sort of prepared notes. I'm going to shoot off the hip hip a little bit Sure. Yeah, um, like I've talked about penn states already leveraged in drupal So we we didn't go to this we didn't go to market with an rfp that said do it in drupal, but we described we we very Much tried to write our rfp not prescriptively right just describe the need and the needs only We were open to hearing A recommendation for something other than drupal, but ultimately we were convinced that especially with our migration needs That drupal was in fact In fact, the right tool at the cms level Uh, but you know, we're using drupal just for content management api in in workflow security, etc Etc. So it sort of led to this the architecture that you've seen when you saw our you saw our Our our map it's it's a it's a pretty broad architecture. So we looked so content fill We kind of ruled that out. We looked at other hosting providers ultimately Landed on what I shouldn't say we landed on gasby for a certain reason what we were looking for was integrated integrated dev ops hosting hosting at predictable costs and uh and it's sort And like an in the pixel perfect decoupled preview option. There's very few Maybe no other alternatives in the market that do that right now So it ultimately became just the most cost-effective solution to go with that, but we're always open to to more, you know something different and I think, you know, um The capabilities just match so much the needs of your use case and especially that architecture of making it this sort of The center of the content hub with multiple sort of levels of integration points. I think Yes, some of those other headless options have some of those capabilities But I think the breadth of the different integrations or whether it's, you know, the fire brace alerts continues to be like magic, right continues to be like uh, real-time alerting together with sort of this Decoupled front-end publishing together with all these other components you're integrating with other campus sites consuming the apis from different platforms Yeah, I think it's a cool a cool choice Um, this might be a question for you mark. Uh, any reason you that you used uh paragraphs overlay outbuilder And I'm not sure if that's exactly the right way to understand the question, but Oh, no, I I I get the spirit of that. Um Yeah, you know, um I think from a con from a situation, uh, where you have news stories and The way articles are structured Paragraphs and the way you can order those components in order kind of laid out really well in that story model where I think, um We didn't really need to use layout builder for that. Um But I think, you know, it's one of those things where is layout builder continues to to improve as paragraphs continue to improve I mean, it's it's kind of that whole Story like Jim was just talking like you're always evaluating new things um But I think there's also There needs to be a bit more work and there's work in the community going on for layout builder and decoupled integration That kind of needs to be continued to work on and improve to get there Cool, that makes a lot of sense Um, we got several questions from from jason here that are all in a related area And it has to do with a sort of living style guide and pattern library architecture Maybe getting into the details a little bit more First of all, let me step back for a second. Can you elaborate on your definition of what a living style guide means? Yeah, um, so when it comes to a living style guide, I mean, uh, to me, that's a style guide where Well, I'll contrast it to a print style guide where it's in a book Old school style. Um, they're still out there where you can see like print versions of components or p You know typography and colors and all that living style guide is actually, um, you know, web based so you get to actually Test the accessibility of components. You actually have working components that are running java script and things like that Processing the css as it would on the site um, and that allows Stakeholders it allows qa to actually experience all those components as they are and evaluate them before they The work's done to integrate them into a front end website And allow you to kind of like go back and make changes and that it's there And hopefully it speeds things up along the way Awesome. And so when you talk about sort of the software stack involved, you mentioned storybook Of course as being a kind of a part of this Can you can you maybe walk through the architecture of like How something even post deployment how how some new element or adjustment to a component would go You know to design to storybook and the the like living style guide and then to deployment like does it just run through a Sort of chain like that Yeah, that's that's pretty close tim to to what happens and so You know, we want to start with design and actually looking at the actual need and like what the change is about and And design will relay that to Um, uh, usually a front end developer that will then integrate that into storybook Um, and one thing that I really like about that that point is when that is integrating storybook We'll actually run it through a qa and uat process So that everybody signs off and says yes, what is in the living style guide in storybook is exactly what we expect to be on the site um, and from there Once that passes those levels we can go ahead and start to integrate and write into uh The needs that need to happen in Drupal because there may need to be new fields added They're named new structure or module changes in Drupal and then of course on the front end Those components need to be updated on the front end and we'll cycle through then That full end to end suite through qa and uat before it's deployed And um, I want to make sure I have room for the additional questions here But I think this was just a great set of questions from Jason. So still related to that style guide and publishing process Is the are the sort of real style components? Um, do they get you know, obviously you're using a decoupled front end, right? So you're not necessarily using twig templating engine But could they publish directly your twig templates or in this case whatever your sort of Gatsby visual components are Or is that sort of a separate step that that's slightly different in terms of the the back end rendering of those components Yeah, I you know, we've really on this on this platform. It's it's highly Um, it's highly separate separated, you know between Drupal. Um, and there's not any twig involved in the story book and that front end Um, however along the way, there were some evaluation and and media current We we still looked at the possibilities when it's needed Um to actually take twig And actually have that drive storybook or some other living style guide I think there's some ways to do that now. Um, I've been hearing from some of our front end team and um, So that is of interest. I I don't think it would fit on this platform right now the way I see it but for this particular but but yeah I can see why it's something that Jason would ask because it definitely is a need that we've seen on some other projects And yeah, and certainly, you know, even in this case, Jason As you can see it can be used in both Drupal and non Drupal environments Both just the concept of a living storybook. Excuse me of a living style guide and the storybook tool specifically Um Next question here is from out. Gosh, we had so many questions. I want to hope we can get through them all We'll go quickly on this one. Uh, it's for you, Jim Hosting options. What did you consider Before you settled on what you talked about which was using a partner a managed services partner like aquia And what kind of were the main challenges or the main reason to make a particular decision for you? So I don't think this is strictly a question for me to answer And I'm hesitant I'm actually a little bit hesitant to sort of talk about other About other services and our reasons for going with it I think that cost predictability was really important to us being able to plan Year over year with flat fees for like I say a whole bunch the whole bundle of services We did we are using aws for a piece of this architecture It is what's underneath psu.edu or highly invested in aws wasn't the right choice for this project We looked at netlify we and we landed ultimately gatsby cloud is partners with fastly So this the cdn is fastly at the at the at the root of this That's the right decision for this project And I'd be more comfortable answering more details sort of offline if the user would like to contact me Sure, of course. Yeah, but I think that I think that gives a good picture into sort of Just your governing decision tree and in particular the importance of that cost predictability component Which I think many people will Will resonate There was a series of questions in chat Um that folks were going back and forth on for a little while And I think mark you can address this a little bit. Uh, medhi asked, um You I'd previously used Drupal and gatsby but had issues with having basically to rebuild the entire content to do the whole build Um, and that made it slow and kind of put a delay You talked about working with the gatsby folks on improvements on the incremental build options in gatsby cloud I mean, is that more or less how you solve that sort of issue? Something people should revisit There is so much to unpack with that and uh and and jim and I hope to dig into more of that at Drupal con during our talk Um, we'll be digging but I will say and jim I want you to feel free to of course comment where you want to add to if I miss something But at a high level Yes, we are highly familiar with having to rebuild all the content and 65 000 plus stories to rebuild Take some time and uh with the help of Gatsby and other team members at media current we were able to reduce the time to do full full builds like in in hours to a point now where full builds are only needed when we Jim and I really wanted them to be needed and that's more like during code deploys where you have to Or you know certain changes like that and and so we've moved so anybody familiar with gatsby I'll just mention this we we're moving more with the new gatsby module improvements that's the community has been working on we're using fast builds Versus the The more traditional gatsby incremental builds that folks may be familiar with so they perform incremental builds But Drupal provides like this is the only things that have changed back to gatsby and then that's what they run with right, okay, so yeah, so the Part of the sort of publishing payload that goes to gatsby tells it what changed and what didn't and what they need Yeah, yeah, and that was huge I can imagine. Yeah, it's a big topic So we got less than 10 minutes is still at least 12 questions. So it's going to be lightning round. We'll try and go quick here So mastafa asks any idea about paragraph module Without using sort of traditional wissy wigg or ck editor. I guess this is a question about did you look at alternatives for the actual like Interface you're using together with paragraphs I'm not sure I fully understand the question, but Yeah, I mean I I think Well, what I'm hearing from that is Is really, you know, because you have so many options with paragraphs how to build and even with layout builder because that was brought up earlier You have so many options of what goes into those the paragraph or the the block and layup builder And and yeah, I think we tried to stay focused on that content authoring experience And like were the fields were the things we were adding Into the paragraph was that the right thing for the user That's editing the content and not not just so that they were happy and satisfied with it But also for the governance of the system itself like that whole content architecture piece It you know, we want to stay away from just having like we do have wizzy wigs in some places But we want we don't want to just wizzy wig everything we want to make sure that there's content architecture And you feel the things that need to be fielded Um, and that does impact things like gatsby and apis that need to consume the content Okay, cool With this is with respect to what you described in terms of the image publishing going pushing up to s3 on aws Is that sort of comprise your digital asset management tool? Or is there are there any other components to how you do digital asset management? So i'll answer the question when we went to market in the rp saying thinking that we needed a dam And we asked for one and we ended up not needing a dam. And so i'll leave it disrupt to describe like how how uh, how s3 is involved in this and sort of what it's it's a surrogate for Yeah, so um, so it's pretty simple. Um, when you when you upload the content inter uploads a new image, let's say to uh piece of content That image is uploaded through triple And when bill tappin and gatsby let's say an end user hits that story for the first time it's published And the first time they access that image. Um, those those images are then Uh, the image styles are then generated and pushed out uh to s3 So if it doesn't are exist exist in s3, then drupal handles pushing all those styles out to s3 And that's that subsequent part. So any future users then already have you know drupal's aware that those images exist And it's checking for those and it doesn't have to you know, try to rebuild those every time. So We're still letting drupal manage Image styles if that helps for drupal drupal folks awesome Um, the questions keep coming in. So i'm afraid everyone i'm just gonna have to ask one or two more and then wrap us up here If you want to grab your questions, um in the chat Dave terry of media current has put his email address where you could reach out with some additional questions there You can certainly also reach out to us at the drupal association. We'll pass things on as well um I think this question is a good one it might wind up being the last one we can answer which is just You've you've talked about working collaboratively with two major open source projects both gatsby and drupal Um, that's a lot of contributors to work with and and working in an environment That's uh, that has a lot of volunteer driven work and things like that So how do you how did you manage staff working together with sort of open source contributors? To get what you needed out of these tools So i jim you want me to i can say start. Yeah, it's a sharp question. I can just say sharp. You kick us off brother Yeah, i'll just say from a from a media current standpoint, and this is something that um, i've seen over the years damian mckinna who is a prolific contributor to drupal Um, and he's a mentor of uh, he he's definitely mentored me in this Um at media current we value trying to work in the open source community in the project itself like like The work and when you have partners like penn state that value open source it becomes easy We don't try to like nights and weekends do open source work. I mean we may But we like to actually work and when we need have a need like it's part of the project work So if I have a ticket internal at media current and it has open source needs and someone works on it like That work happens right inside in the community from there and um, we're we just follow You know drupal.org protocols if if I don't know or a develop press questions So we'll ask damian or someone in our internal contrib channel But I will say to the question in general. Yeah, it is it is challenging But we think the reward is uh, is greater You know than the effort put in But it is it is an effort it is a different way of working than proprietary software without a doubt Yeah, and as dave points out in the chat There's also if you look back in the association youtube channel at past drupal cons You'll be able to probably find some how to create a contribution culture Sessions that have some really good tips along this front as well um I think we need to make sure we have enough time to sort of uh wrap up and conclude here So i'm afraid i'm i'm gonna not take any further questions at this time Please do grab your questions if you want to send them on to other folks Jim let me hand it over to you so that you can uh wrap up your portion then you mark and then i'll close us out I I have no great words of wisdom here. Thank you for your time and attention And i'm I encourage you to reach out to me if you have uh individual questions offline linkedin or my or jnorsetpenstate.edu Thank you. Awesome fantastic mark. How about you any last words? Yeah, uh Just really enjoyed uh presenting here today and and it's just exciting to see So many questions and and that there's so many other technical ways to solve these same challenges and as we continue to Grow those areas It'll continue to improve. You know the story's not over when you launch you still have Uh years of maintenance and exciting feature improvements to go from there So we're excited to do that and uh again just like jim just feel free to reach out to us If you have questions and we can we'd love to carry the discussions forward Awesome. Again, I want to thank everybody for attending today. There is going to be uh, there's an accepted session Also on this subject and on this project for Drupal con in portland at the end of april You can find more information at events dot drupal.org slash portland 2022 So that might be a good place for even further technical deep dive Um We encourage you to join us there We encourage you to support the drupal association if you go to drupal.org slash association You can find ways to support us as a nonprofit organization both as individuals or as organizations and keep the drupal ecosystem and the drupal community strong Um, I want to thank jim for joining us and telling an amazing story about penn state I want to thank mark for joining us and talking about how media current helped Realize the vision of these requirements and sort of advance the concept of drupal as the center of content And again, I want to thank all of you in our audience for your attendance today Um, uh for your fantastic questions and engagement and we look forward to talking to you again in another upcoming webinar Yes, there's a lot of great questions. Bye. Thank you everybody. Bye. Bye for now