 Hi everybody and welcome back. Hope you had a good break. My name's Snow, I'm from Holley, I'm one of the sponsors for today's event. Next up we have Simon Collier Baker and Carl Frost from FlightCentre HQ in Brisbane. FlightCentre is a global brand at the top of its game at the moment. It services a growing range of sectors and recently acquired GoVolunturing. I have a personal interest in, as I've only got one name, in these guys personally fixing the ticketing system for booking flights. So I have high hopes, hopefully they're going to tell me how they're going to do it. So let's find out from Simon and Carl what it's like to migrate Australia's most popular travel site to Drupal. Put your hands together for Simon and Carl. Okay, can everyone hear me? Let's go. So FlightCentre is one of the world's lightest travel agencies. We've got over 2,000 leisure corporate and wholesale brands. We've got businesses in 11 countries and all that started 30 years ago with one shop. So we've had pretty remarkable growth. Currently our network extends throughout Australia, New Zealand, United States, Canada, United Kingdom, South Africa, Hong Kong, India, China, Singapore and UAE. And we try to provide travelers with a complete service. In the online space, we have 120 staff. That includes web developers, SEO guys, copywriters, SEM, back-end developers, online marketers. You name it, we've got a lot. A lot of days are distributed in different countries. So in the previous question and answer, one of those questions about global teams was from us. We're still trying to figure out how to actually manage that. The bulk of the work is done out of the Brisbane office where we have 30 web developers. But we also have teams in the UK and US and South Africa who manage their own local sites. Some of the sites have up to, and I think over 200,000 pages actually now. That's probably an old number. And the larger sites like FlightCentre Australia have around half a million views a day. There's also multiple booking engines for air, hotel, sea, insurance, car hire. Not all of those are in the scope of migrating to Drupal, but possibly some of them. And as far as infrastructure goes, it's based physically in Brisbane, but a lot of it's now moving to the cloud. And Karl will talk about later moving into arqueous hosting and things like that. There's just a few of the logos for a few of the brands and a few of the countries that we're in. So I guess I'm here to talk about why we decided that the way we currently build sites is bad and why we needed to change and then ultimately why we ended up picking Drupal. The current system is based on a pretty old IBM solution, WebSphere. If anyone's familiar with that, I'm not sure. But it's been completely hacked to death with a whole load of other in-house developed systems to the point where IBM don't really offer any support anymore for it. We can't really upgrade it and it really just isn't doing the job that we need to do. There's way too much technology and technical people needed for the most simple change to a website. Changing just simple content, you know, the business just engages with one of our developers rather than trying to do it themselves because it's just too hard. Because of that complexity it takes us at least a few months to get somebody up to speed on the system when we get a new starter and that learning curve is obviously just far too long. That's an overview of what it currently looks like. As you can see it's just lots of disparate systems that kind of in that diagram maybe look like they talk to each other nicely but in reality they don't. And you can sort of see out to this side here the content management system which is not really part of the whole system. It just sort of renders out flat content and that provides us with a lot of problems. So you can probably tell from that diagram why we need to change the business reasons to give the business back control of their site so they can make simple content changes themselves to increase the time to market to reduce that need for such highly trained technical people in order to make simple changes to really just make the whole process much less complex, less moving parts, remove all those multiple points of failure, increase the stability and ultimately reduce the cost for the business. So similar to SBS as I spoke earlier we went through a process of trying to figure out what we needed to change in order to get to where we wanted to be and it was sort of a bottom up approach. So we had to try and we as developers I mean had been screaming for a long time that this isn't the way that you should build websites. This isn't the best way to do this. So we really had to come up with a business case for why we should change and then push that up through all the different levels of management. So these are just some of the things we went through that a new CMS that we wanted had to achieve. The open source part was really preferable but we did look at non-open source CMSs as well. Obviously the large active user base that's been talked about already just the skills that are available in the market so we could bring in the people we needed to get where we needed to be. Acceptable to our global teams what I mean by that is that they're able to then take control of their own destiny in some respects and make the changes that they need to make for their particular websites and still have that support out of the global office back here in Australia. And obviously based on the previous diagram you can see we have quite a lot of different third party and other systems that any website we produce has to be able to integrate with. We probably didn't have as much of a buy-in as perhaps was spoken about by SBS. We didn't quite have the amount of time to go through all the different solutions in that much detail. So we really had to short list down to just a small few that we could concentrate on. We evaluated each of those based on its reach, its user base, whether it offered all the solution or the piece of functionality we needed and then it was just a case of okay we'll get each of these, we'll try and build sites on each of them and then we'll reconvene and go over the pluses and minuses of each. It also then came down obviously to the numbers so how much is it going to cost not only in license fees but in hiring the people we need to produce it. We had 30 developers that had a certain skill set which is mainly PHP based but not entirely. So if we were going to make the decision to move completely away from that were we going to have to get a whole new team or train everybody, all those costs it all adds up when you start going through it. Then with the 160 sites how are we going to migrate those and then again with the integration with other systems. So the winner out of all that was Drupal which is why we're at Drupal.com and really I guess just going over the same things I've been talked about today already so the strong active community, there is a module for that in a lot of cases. Kyle will talk in more detail about some of those modules where they may or may not quite fit exactly what you need but it's a good starting point. The price is obviously right, it's free in a lot of respects so that's always good when you're trying to sell that to upper management. The productivity benefits from our current system were just glaringly obvious so we were getting sites done, simple websites for sure but we were turning them around in such a short time compared to what it used to be that it was a no-brainer. And then obviously we started talking with Aquia and all their support that they've given us in terms of hosting and best practices and providing us with a lot of technical support as well. And also the other sites out there that use Drupal so your Algezeras, your Time Warner's if those guys can do it with the amount of traffic that they're getting then Flight Centre should be fine. So I'll hand you over now to Kyle who will talk to you about actually implementing Drupal and what we've learned. Hello, hello, okay. So can everyone hear me? So I probably just want to reiterate the actual business problem challenge so I was given the task of actually implementing Drupal into Flight Centre and using it as our current CMS going forward. So really we've got 160 websites so we've got a number of existing sites plus we've got a number of new sites that seem to be coming along each week. One of the main big projects will be the FCM corporate website which is a site that's going to be spread across the world in 69 different countries and each of these countries will want to manage their own content plus use content from a global perspective. So there's a global change that happens on the global FCM site then they want that to filter down through all the country sites and then how that can be translated for the different countries. So I think Simon said that we've got 30 developers so I think that number 25 developers is wrong so we've got 30 developers to train primarily with front-end development skills so HTML, CSS and JavaScript. We do have PHP developers so the choice was for PHP CMS. We have a lot of internal services that Flight Centre use so the product catalog which as I'll go through a bit more is the critical path to actually migrating these sites onto Drupal. We've got a number of external services that we use as well and as we just from the discussions before we were the people who asked about the global development teams and how best to manage that and to follow the Sun methodology and all that sort of thing so we obviously got a lot of questions and a lot of things we still need to try and answer so we don't have a lot of answers to some of these questions and issues that we've been coming up with lately. Change management. So when we go to the business now when the business come to us instead of just throwing us a Photoshop document with a nice pretty marketing website now we have to go back and tell them we have to think about this a bit more where's the content coming from what's this doing here and all that sort of stuff instead of saying okay we can just cut this up into static HTML and put it onto the site so going back to the business say let's have a think about it let's go through a normal process which is just us to time to market wise to achieve their goals so that's the challenge and where we are now so we're sort of still starting out a fair bit and Drupal's been in place for around two months now so when I say in place for two months I mean around two or three months ago we've launched our first site onto Acquia we have delivered about ten minor sites and myself and Simon and Lou are the other team that have been responsible for assisting with those sites being launched these sites although smaller they've been a great learning curve for our big sites that are going to be starting up really shortly we've trained ten developers so far who are running with these smaller sites and most of them seem to enjoy the change from the current architecture to Drupal the next goals are the major site conversion so the flight centres and the student flights so who get a large amount of traffic a large amount of tension not only externally but also internally we've got an optimistic goal of Q3 this year so I don't think at the moment we'll probably hit that quarter might be the next quarter so the approach after we chose Drupal was to identify what are we going to convert first or how are we going to go straight with the flight centre site start out big and then work our way small or start out small and work our way big and I guess at that particular time we had a number of businesses that were coming to us with brand new sites so we said to ourselves what's the point of putting them on to the current architecture where we know we can do it and we'll know we'll eventually do it on Drupal but charging them again twice to convert it onto Drupal again existing websites so we had a large website smaller websites and smaller websites that will integrate with the FC internal systems such as the same as the bigger brands do a couple of smaller sites that we've pushed up live at the moment is the Corporate Traveller website for Australia so that actually was a case of the business that proved that we could do this so we could integrate with the product catalogue we could integrate with things like Akamai and Google and Gmail and all those sorts of technologies QuickBeds which I just launched last week is our first responsive website it's more on the SEM side so it's not the actual booking engine website for responsive so they asked us to do an SEM component of Drupal and make it responsive and there was a number of static websites so the Flight Centre Travel Group which is like the global Flight Centre website that was more of a static website that we had to implement across so just to reiterate again after we identified these websites and we needed to go through all our current architecture and identify what we needed to still use in the Drupal world and the big part of it is the product catalogue so if you ever go on to a Flight Centre website you'll see a lot of products that comes from our product catalogue and that's an internal system where we have teams pushing constantly day and feeds coming from external suppliers into this product catalogue which consistently update every day on an ad hoc basis could be a small amount of products per site to a large volume of products so an example the escape travel will is a basis around 35,000 products the other thing that we ultimately needed to integrate with is obviously Flight Centre's online strategy where as you can see there's two approaches you can either book online with the domestic and international booking tool or if you can go to a product page you'll see mostly it's more of an inquiry based system so we need to hook into our internal so what basically happens is if a user comes to that product page they punch in the details and if they come from a certain postcode they'll get picked up by the internal system and routed to the correct consultant based on skill or even just location our external services so we're currently using Akamai on our existing architecture and we wanted to still utilize that service on for Drupal Google we use Google for everything internally in Flight Centre so our Gmail, our document sharing and all that sort of stuff so we wanted to solve the solution of a single sign on and Drupal assisted with that as well and for our corporate sites we integrate with Marketo and Salesforce for more of the brochure marketing and sort of conversion of new clients for the corporate travel sites the next thing we did at that same time as we've already mentioned about the skills we've performed a bit of a gap analysis of the current skills we have and what we actually needed to get the job done now we've got some pretty talented front-end developers we do have some talented back-end developers as well but what we actually needed was people who have converted Drupal sites before so then that just basically told us straight away that we needed to go to the Drupal market and hire people we also needed to have more of an expert skill so more of a senior type developer someone who's been in the community for a long time has been involved with more of the development side of building Drupal sites the next approach is more of the way that things sort of happen quite quickly for us in Flight Centre so we were asked to basically take away from the day-to-day business so another existing office opened up just down the road from our headquarters so that was an opportunity for us to take the Drupal team, the implementation team distracted away from the day-to-day business and we're actually quite lucky with that because that has assisted with the migration because we could just focus solely on building the sites in Drupal rather than getting hassled day-to-day with the current architecture and current businesses we identified the need to train in teams rather than train people individually and to do that and also keep our current day-to-day business going we looked at providing our developments with an incentive stretch and not only do they continue their day-to-day work but they worked out of time or they worked between hours in their day-to-day and they assist with migrating Drupal sites across then we're given an incentive incentive based on that another thing we identified was to give one person a accountability and that was me so that was great and one thing I had to ensure and one thing I definitely have learnt from being at Flight Centre is you've got to ensure that you keep everyone in the loop because you could wind up with the current mess that we have at the moment so if there's if there's a particular way or there's an idea or a solution that needs to be implemented I prefer to go and get everyone involved straight away just to make sure that we can cover off all the different parts of the problem rather than just going in implementing a solution based on what I know and then go ahead and fix into that and that's been working so far so what does work just flat out Drupal and Acquia have solved the complex host in an infrastructure problem as Simon's already showed you what our current infrastructure so basically now if there's a problem we know where to go and look now to fix it whereas we could take up to a day or two days in our current architecture to actually go and find what the problem is because it's so fragmented Acquia now assist with us pushing our sites live so instead of going through a formal internal process which could take a week to schedule internally with FlightCenter now we actually own the only destiny along for the business to push these sites live and managing that whole development to stage and production workflow Drupal itself has just reduced a lot of tedious and complex tasks that we currently do now this might sound a little bit weird but in order for me to push a banner live for the FlightCenter website or a student website I actually have to call me at a certain time of the night and say can you render this banner out I'm like shouldn't any CMS where the goal is to time to market to promote products is something that is controlled to the business so Drupal out of the box solved all these problems and as I could say from the current sites at the moment I have not seen one crazy request come through based on the existing architecture that we now see in Drupal that's already winning at the moment and in saying that the business now has more power I can see the tasks that we actually get assigned to or asked to redevelop on the sites are more development pro new features things that will assist with conversion rather than I need a new whole URL structure can you put a rewrite in to make this URL go like this so really the business is now in charge of controlling their own destiny the time to market I mean the guys that we've hired the developers the junior Drupal developers to get the static sites out I can see completely telling you right now that the time to market our sites have just increased dramatically and one thing that floats in a pride itself on is the brightness of future of our employees so where I foresee that there was only so far a developer could extend their knowledge in the front-end world but they wanted to go into the back-end world and I think implementing Drupal gave them that option it gives them both the option they can stay on the front-end world and work in that whole responsive design and working with the business and the user interface but if the people wanted to know what I want to go and see what the back-end world is like and we did have those people with those skills in the front-end then they have that choice as well so that was a big tip for us personally what's worked so hide skills not only from the Drupal community but also from Technocrat so first of all we went out to the Drupal community to see what was out there so there was meetups in Brisbane which is meetups all over the world for Drupal so we went there and assessed what skills were out there we actually hired three Drupal developers just straight out of the community and we were lucky enough to have developers who have implemented sites before but were willing to train our current developers as well which was a big tip for us Technocrat provided us with a highly skilled senior developer to assist us with the critical path of the project which is the product category import Aquius applied us with a technical account manager, Simon Lindsay who is absolutely fantastic and helps us solve more of the larger scale problems coming forth and is always there to make sure that we don't do anything stupid and just is providing them with that reassurance one of the other things that we looked at doing is how do we migrate our current proper developers straight into Drupal and how we do that over time one of the things we did realise straight away is going through guides and just learning off the internet is probably not going to assist for the flights in a way we want to build things so what we actually did was we engaged with Technocrat and said hey this is our problem we've already got a site up we've already got a lot of sites going up we've already got a number of modules installed that will be reused across the site because we have a multi site set up what we want to do is with the training of the team is go through the basics go through the views and the templates and the theme and all that sort of stuff but one I want it to be based on a site that they're going to convert across and two that they use the current modules that we've already gotten place so Technocrat came in they did an analysis on their modules got an understanding of how things work and they ran the training schedule so when the guys come out they were actually ready to go off and finish their site so to me that was a big tick another thing that has worked is just the smallest sites for a quick business when they wanted to see progress and just pushing sites out quicker and faster because like I said already we get hammered with new sites every week this is just a quick short slide what else has worked the developer rail separation so I'll explain to you what that looks like in the next diagram internal processes so I'll take you through what we've done for our module selection internally and code reviews so one of the problems or one of the challenges we had was we had a variety of skills now in the Drupal world we had a senior developer senior developer senior Drupal developers we also just had I say intermediate Drupal developers and junior Drupal developers and we've also had people who were just coming on board who only had front-end developers and they're creating new sites all the time actually implemented here was a sort of a release we identified two roles development team and then release managers so more of your senior developer people who understand what's going on in the Drupal core and all that sort of stuff so basically a workflow would be if one of the developers who are working on a new site go out and just for some reason don't follow process and just install a particular module and then they want to go push that up to the site so what we have now is with Github is sort of a code review before it actually gets migrated across into the production development so they push the module up they do a pull request in Github terminology that would notify the gate keeper or the release manager and they won't have control to push that until they actually go through and say you know what this module already exists you just didn't look hard enough or you've actually affected the core here so then they wouldn't be able to get further than that. If it was okay then the gate keeper would then go through do load testing and all that sort of stuff and then push it up to the Acrea Cloud so when they can start testing. The only issue we started this was great to start off with especially with the new developers but you could probably see there's a bit of a bottleneck here because once people started getting used to Drupal and knew what they were doing then they'd have to continually go through this pull request type of scenario so we're looking at a continuous integration system here so something that allows developers to push up modules but then run simple tests across it to allow to get to at least the development stage of Acrea so the business can test what they're doing and then we'd probably go through more of an interoration of what gets released into production but that's challenges to come. Drupal modules so I've heard a lot today and we all know there's just there's just about a module for everything so far and that's a good thing as well and it's a challenging thing some other times. What we've found a lot is because of the unique way Flight Center works a lot of the modules had to be customized for Flight Center for Flight Center specifically and I'll take you through three modules that I know the guys have worked on and then the different issues that they've come up with and some of the wins just because modules already exist so the first one which is more related to the critical path which is the product import now we're importing massive amounts of products we first identified there was a module out there that could help that and that was the feeds module which was great because we actually used that to push the Corporate Traveller worksite and integrate the products onto the site and that worked and that was great so we proved to the business that we could get those products on there but what we didn't realize to start off going further is how is that going to scale so then we looked at performance and looked at breaking it down in segmentations of the feed that was coming through and then we started to realize the actual size and the complexity not only on our internal infrastructure so what they were actually giving us but on the Drupal end so then what the developers started doing is they started going through the feeds modules and they started extracting each parts out what's taking longer what's actually slowing this down because once we started doing more and more load tests we noticed the type of load and what we're going to need it to scale for so the guys continually customized the feeds module until they realized and said you know what we're going to have to write something ourselves and that was fine because that was a journey that we had to go through the next module we wanted to talk about was the Acomy module so that already existed out in the Drupal community which was great however it didn't really integrate with our infrastructure on the Aqueous side which was fine so what the guys did then was grab the Acomy module they actually then extended it to integrate with Aqueous and then that fitted on and that was a real win for us because now we've got Acomy on our websites which was one of the main challenges the next part is the web form so the consultant inquiry email so the idea is at the moment they're all just that's all based on JavaScript so we needed a solution in the Drupal world and how we are going to look at managing the inquiry system and web forms did the trick to start off with so we didn't really have to extend too much there was a couple of custom fields but the time to market for that particular was great so going forward for Flight Centre to start contributing back to the Drupal community I think what we're doing because we're so early into the stages of the project is probably go through these modules and go through the current standards that the Drupal community asked for when contributing back and then make sure what we push up there in regards to patches actually meets those standards so it might be a bit of time before we start contributing back I just want to make sure we do it correctly and that it supports the Drupal community out there challenges so like we said before we were the people who asked the global team management problem that we've got so we've got a UK based team with one team leader and around five developers who are looking at going on to the Drupal world we've got a USA team who just gone out of the blocks and just went Drupal crazy and didn't wait for our solution to come through so trying to rein them in or if that's what I want to go that's the way they want to do it we've got developers in the South Africa who are currently happy with the architecture so we've got all these different types of global teams out there and the challenges is how we're going to use and reuse code across and follow the sun top of methodology and what support systems we're going to interact with the global development teams FCM is going to be a massive challenge so 69 sites that are going to be managed by 69 different countries which you probably have 69 different ways to do things on their site so it's going to be an interesting challenge and I'm just kicking off that project right now and how that's going to work with the multilingual and translational the product has still been our major challenge so the amount of volume of products and the duplication of products that each site uses so we need to come up with a solution on how best to store these products for our sites then once we've migrated at all how we're going to manage 160 different websites change management as we're seeing already we've gone to the business we've told them about Drupal already but because they got stuck back in their day to day business they sort of forgot so we need to keep on top of them and say look Drupal is coming you need to start thinking about designing and working with us and telling us what your common problems are and then how to best implement that going forward we're looking at implementing an FCL Drupal team for the core modules that we're looking at supporting across FlightCenter and then maybe working on more of an iteration agile type methodology there because as there's so many different brands there's so many different requests to do things so if we have we're looking at building that FCDrupal core team to assist with that lessons to share it's right people right skills so I think we've been lucky with the guys that we've hired from Brisbane at the moment they've helped us tremendously especially with Vladimir from Technocrat they've assisted with the kickoff of the product import but it just goes to show I know people are saying it's really hard to find good people but I guess it's horses for courses because initially we wanted just to get sites up there set some standards in place and then start looking at the heavy lifting of the websites there's a module for everything and I think I've just skipped the module process that we've implemented at FlightCenter so I took the process that's currently out there in the Drupal community and basically integrated into the FlightCenter way of doing things so because we're set up with the multi-site website if I was a junior developer and I wanted I wanted you to implement a feature but they couldn't figure out how to do it so what's the process we don't want to just go out there and do the whole you know and look for the modules themselves and come back and go hey I've got a module and then the senior developer comes in and goes well you've actually got a module that does that for you so what we do is we've got a process first thing to do is go and look on our sites is there a module that will do what you need if there isn't go and ask someone first and if there isn't from that then go out and search for it or do we need to look at extending or creating it and this is all happens before they actually go out into the Drupal community and start looking for modules and we're going to actually look at KPIing them on this particular process because I think it's critically important on how many modules we start installing on these websites because that becomes an issue going forward so if we find developers are starting to push up all these new modules without going through these processes then we've got a bit of an issue and then we need to manage that issue business requires quick climates gathering so this has completely changed the way that I work with my customers at the moment so no more come into us you know no more of the business coming in with all these fancy Photoshop documents we go I've got a responsive side here I'm like okay have you thought about this it's a whole new different process so just be aware that it's hard to change the mindset of something that's been already involved so you've got to be patient with the customers change in project processes so at the moment we do work in an agile type of methodology but it's more based on a priority management system because we get a number of priorities from all different types of angles and that's making sure that you manage that in a way that it doesn't affect all the day-to-day business as well as with the developers as well going forward in the core team is what I'm trying to say consistently review work so I'm rigorously making sure we review the code any types it doesn't have to be the code itself it could be the modules the way someone's created someone so we get there in the team each once a week and I go in there and go this is a good idea or have you thought about this and this is actually feedback that we get from all angles and it's actually assisted a lot of removal of unnecessary modules and another thing to think about is there will be resistance to change so flights in a pride itself on people retaining the best people and ensuring that these people grow and all that sort of stuff and once some developers who stay in the system might enjoy it so there's going to be resistance to change and it's all about how you manage that is this the career path that they want to go they want to stay on the front end side and just look at different ways that you can help a system with that career and I think that's it questions the building small teams away from day-to-day business developers resistance to change so I guess I'll probably answer one part of it and Simon could assist with the other part like I said before we had a different challenge at our office where we were outgrowing the number of seats so we had to move anyway there was an office available so we thought it was a good idea to help with the migration that we move the Drupal team that way but in saying that how do we keep the buy-in so that actually happened after we got the buy-in from the business and Simon could probably mention a bit more about that but how I've seen that we've managed it so far so I'm the lead of the project development team and probably of the corporate side so I work with the corporate business Simon's the lead of the booking engine side of things and at the mobile development side of things and we've also got a third team leader who is assisting with the Drupal migration so looking after the day-to-day business with the existing websites and in that case because that took me out of that role we actually had to temporarily promote someone as an assistant team leader to take away from my day-to-day day-to-day work so within that because we're all on the same page with how Drupal worked just because we were away and keeping everyone across how everything works on a week-to-week basis and these guys being so close to the business that was one way we managed the buy-in Just to add to the moving of the team as well for the guys that knew Drupal and advanced in Drupal to iron out a lot of the bugs that we were going to have just in terms of our infrastructure as well inside FlightCenter anyone who's worked in big corporations probably knows that the IT infrastructure can be a challenge in terms of proxies and all sorts of other things so had we just got like the junior guys to be involved straight away they would have just been hitting brick walls constantly and also Kyle's team sort of in a lot of cases went in the same direction and went oh hold on this isn't working let's do something else so if we had got a lot of people who weren't familiar with Drupal to all be combined and involved in the conversation and everything at the very beginning they probably would have been a bit frustrated with that and some people still are frustrated with that happening sometimes so that's another thing that we have to manage in terms of like buying from the business and getting Drupal off the ground I think I mean initially there was like a core team of us that just knew that the way we're doing things was wrong so we had to change and we got buying the change had to happen so we did have that from the top down like everyone was agreed that we had to change something so then it was just a case of okay well what are we going to choose and I guess it's just management having confidence in us to choose the right solutions based on other projects we've had successes in but also just demonstrating that well here's a site we've built within Flight Center we have a concept of you can earn extra money by doing projects on the site so we just factored that in to build a site in Drupal and say well look here's what we did in a couple of days look how good it is and then probably the thing that tipped it over the edge was engaging with Arquea and having that enterprise level support and saying well look at these other big sites that use it will be fine in terms of it falling over and someone will be there to answer your phone call all those things that always need to be answered okay so the question is what's happening with the product catalog moving forward and how that integrates with the booking system well I look after the booking system on a day-to-day basis and the way that that's set up is it's really not any content that needs to be managed so it's completely bespoke and the long-term plan for that there is actually a project right now that we're running with to rewrite it in Symphony which is kind of we've chosen Symphony because Drupal 8 is coming so let's get the guys skilled up in that we'll have some skill in that area by the time my team that runs the booking engine is PHP based so we're fine with running that in terms of the product catalog we don't know there's a bit of a question mark at the moment they are replacing that and that's kind of a separate stream of work that's happening and we're kind of waiting to see how that pans out and then they'll let us know I guess how that's going to integrate with Drupal we're keen to talk to SBS actually and see what they're planning as well and see if we can clean anything from them at the moment we're simply exporting all the products from the current product catalog and into Drupal does that scale long-term that's something that we need to answer as well the question was summary correct me if I'm wrong is how do we manage content as we go through the development life cycle for particular sites and that is that was one of our very first questions that we actually had when we're implementing our first site or even migrating a site across at the moment what we do is when we push a site live if it's an existing site then really we've got to tell that existing site to put a freeze on for the content and that's something that you need to work with the business they need to actually run with that particular problem themselves and then come back to us with a time range and just say look this is what we're going to do this is the amount of time we can give you because next week we've got a massive distributed mail that we want to send out we want our site to be up and ready and all the bugs are out so some of the solutions to this is it's one of them you think they're obvious but they're really not because what if the site goes live it's fine but then there's a bug and the CDM goes out how do you how do you stop this how do you stop the content developers or people signing up to things as we're trying to push patches out so we actually haven't come up with that particular problem yet with the migration of the sites across from the existing yeah it's all about just freezing the content making sure this is signed off and then with the developer workflow because of the way Acquia is actually set up it's quite easy to manage you know moving databases across to different different environments so basically a drag and drop and so we're not too worried about that but you're right if a developer want to work against the latest content or loaded content on the site so then what's the workflow from that so there's a couple of different things we've done at the moment one with Acquia we can actually drag down databases to different environments and the developers we're using a vagrant provisioning solution for the technical people out there so that just enables them just to choose whatever database they actually want to download and then put onto their local development environment and start building against that question will probably pop up a bit more as the bigger sites start coming along with the core modules and the core modules for FlightCenter as we start rolling them out how we're going to manage that so yep yep sure I don't have a the question was can I elaborate a bit more on our single sign on solution yep so this was a bit of a process in itself so like I've said before we use Google for a lot of our systems so our emails our Google docs and all that sort of stuff and a lot of our documentation is actually on the Google Wiki sites internally so we identified that we already have a heap of passwords that we need to log into all different types of systems and I think one of the key wins was what actually is available externally for us to integrate with Drupal and that people currently use in day to day in FlightCenter and that was the Gmail login so going into the internal FlightCenter security team and the people who manage the email internally they let us know that there was a SAML solution or simple SAML implementation available and obviously there's a module for that for Drupal so we had to work rigorously with the FC internal system so now basically if someone wants to log into the Drupal system what they see now is if you know if they go into forward slash whatever the login URL is won't tell you at the moment and they just punch in the same logins that they would for their email they actually get redirected to the FlightCenter Google mail login screen where they will punch those details in and then once that's been authenticated they'll actually log them into the Drupal system as a particular role or permission. Sure so the question is we're doing some work in Symphony 2 already and how are we planning on migrating to Drupal 8 or have we put any thought? Sure, sure to be honest we probably haven't thought that far ahead in terms of how we migrate to Drupal 8 in my personal opinion Symphony 2 is a great framework so it ticked all the boxes we needed for the other piece of work that we were doing so why not kill two birds with one stone and instead of having the guys use Laravel or something else may as well use Symphony and then when the time comes we'll have a team that can then help with the other guys but we really need to get everything into Drupal 7 I think first I don't know when's Drupal 8 going to be production ready and ready and surprise ready and then we can go from there Alright that's pretty much the end of the day except for I've organised three special surprises for you and the first is that the bar will open early before that happens I've got three special guest stars Dries is here to just quickly give us a kind of overview of where he's at with Drupal 8 and you know he's the founder of Drupal so it's fantastic to have him here and we also have Holly who is the new executive director of the Drupal Association and she'll say a few quick words as well so let's welcome Dries and Holly So I was actually just pulled in like I was walking by so I'm not actually wearing my pants attire but I hope that's fine I don't know how many minutes do I have roughly you know ten minutes is fine so how many people are new to Drupal here okay quite a few people how many people have been to a Drupal con before okay not that many people so basically let me talk a little bit about Drupal 8 before I talk about Drupal 8 let me give you the 30 second history you know I guess so I started to Drupal project 13 years ago roughly out of my dorm room kind of by accident that's actually a long story which I can tell in only a few minutes but worked on Drupal in my spare time for seven and a half years and then created a company called Aquia which is where I work today and then also co-founded the Drupal Association and still today I'm the project lead of Drupal I do a lot of different things but quite a bit of my time is spent working on Drupal 8 which is the next major version of Drupal and so I want to talk a little bit about that without slides without preparation so please bear with me so if I think about Drupal 8 then there is a number of big themes that we're working on I would say the biggest team by far is mobile you know obviously mobile is a big trend and mobile means many different things to many different people but when I talk about mobile I talk about a number of these different things one is building great mobile web experiences experiences for mobile browsers that run on your smart phones and so that means things like HTML5 out of the box in Drupal 8 responsive design so we're converting all of the Drupal themes to responsive design we're doing a lot of other smart optimizations and these are for people to not only visit Drupal sites but also to administer content from mobile devices whether it's tablets or smart phones sort of the other side of mobile is native mobile applications applications that run on iOS or Android devices things like that and to do so we basically adopted a framework called symphony which is an open source PHP framework into Drupal 8 core which enabled us to do a lot of work around web services and so every piece of content which we call an entity in Drupal will automatically have restful web service APIs associated with it which will make it very easy for people to build native mobile applications so I can go into a lot more detail but I would say that's one major area of improvement in Drupal 8 another big thing is improving the altering experience like if Drupal is being criticized today it's often because it's a little hard to use for end users meaning people that create content on the website and so it's been a major area of work for us we've done a lot of different things in that area and we continue to do more things but these are things that include a better tool bar a responsive tool bar that works on multiple devices so people can actually navigate the Drupal administrative pages from a mobile device it also includes something called in-place editing if you haven't seen it there's some videos online of what that means but it basically means that on every page you can go into an in-place editing mode and then you know you click on a title, you click on a body you click on an author name you click on a midterm and you can basically quickly make changes in line which will make it very easy for people to edit content we're also redesigning the content creation page or the content edit page we're adding WYSIWYG to Core which is something which we never had in Drupal so we're adding that to the Core platform and so forth so lots and lots of improvements there as well so I would say that's probably the biggest second section of work we're doing a lot of work to make it easier for developers and so one of the biggest challenges I don't want to say a lot of negative things about Drupal but I just want to be honest but one of our challenges is because we're growing so fast it can be a challenge to find Drupal developers that's something that the Drupal Association is also working really hard on to make this better and that's why we have these projects like the one we're at but from a technical point of view what we've chosen to do is, as I mentioned we've adopted Symphony and so while Drupal is a modern framework and it's a good framework we want to make sure we build it for the future and so we've adopted Symphony to Drupal 8 Core which brings new design patterns to Drupal 8 which are becoming common practice in our industry we hope that we'll actually attract a lot of people to Drupal it will make it easier for professionally trained developers engineers and developers if you will to come into the Drupal community because it removes some Drupal as we call them from the Drupal code base so I think these are sort of the big three things if you can group them into categories that we've been working on many many other things we've already accepted over 3,700 patches from over a thousand different people into Drupal 8 Core and we're not quite done yet so I guess to wrap it up let me talk a little bit about the timing because it's going to be the first question when is it ready and so right now we are still in the development cycle on February 18th so in only a few weeks we will enter a kind of a new face which we call the feature freeze and that means we shift focus from adding new features to polishing the features that we have added so that allows us to make user interface improvements user experience improvements but also for developers so we call the developer experience so we'll be working on refining what we've added after that we switch to code freeze which means we stop refining things polishing things and we focus on fixing bugs with the goal to get Drupal 8 out of the door by the end of this year so we're still quite a while away from the official Drupal 8 release but we're also getting closer and closer by the day so it's kind of the short version if you want to learn more there is a longer version tomorrow in my keynote and then I'm also around to all of this week if you want to talk more about that I'll give the floor to Holly unless we want to do questions or it's up to you guys there's a question the question is what do I foresee as the biggest struggle for Drupal is that the question it's a good question well it depends a little bit on who that person is like if it's companies trying to build a Drupal site sometimes it's finding Drupal talent to be honest if it's a developer it is the technical learning curve of Drupal it's a complex system and it takes a little bit of time to wrap your arms around that and so that's why we try to grow the ecosystem so there is more Drupal shops available to help organizations adopt Drupal I think that's a real barrier and then for developers adopting Drupal that's why we try to make it easier for them to learn adopting these new code patterns and things like that but I would say the biggest hurdle holding back Drupal as a whole is the lack of Drupal talent in my opinion and that's a very hard one to solve and we're trying to solve that in many different ways from organizing these events to encouraging people to write books from companies that organize professional training to talking to universities and schools to try and get Drupal into their curriculum so it's not an easy one but we try to to address it from all fronts with more questions alright alright so in Drupal 8 I didn't really talk about that but we refactored the configuration management stuff it's quite technical to explain but in essence the challenge that we had is that we mixed configuration content in the database and so it makes it really hard to push configuration changes from a staging website to a production website because on the production website the content keeps changing because people are editing it or you know visitors are adding comments and all of these things so you have this challenge where things are moving here and then your developers are making configuration changes there and then you need to just push the configuration changes so that was a challenge and then we did that by creating clear separation between configuration and content and then we've also we've basically decided to store configuration in files instead of the database which is a big design decision and that's a great thing because it allows us to manage configuration as if it were a code meaning we can create a system like git or subversion which means we can do diffs on them we can see what configuration changes are made by whom we can roll back to a previous configuration of a Drupal site and hopefully we'll also be able to lock down configuration so that nobody can make unexpected changes so there's a couple of advantages to their architecture and that's pretty much done still have a little bit of work to do on that but it's mostly there I'll do one more question the floor to Holly before I answer your question let me ask a follow up question so what specifically was the problem in your mind so the readiness of the contributed modules so I think it's a great question so a couple of things so the way Drupal development works is we release Drupal core and then a lot of the contributed modules still need to be updated and particularly in Drupal 7 it was a challenge because once we released Drupal 7 core the views module decided to basically refactor I mean they decided to refactor views which is the most popular module in Drupal 7 and there's a lot of other modules depending on views and so it kind of created this cascading effect of modules waiting and you know not being ready it's not just views but views was a big part of that now to some extent we'll always have this problem because some developers they won't start upgrading their modules until they find a customer that's willing to pay for these modules to be upgraded however we try to fix the views problem by actually adding views to Drupal 8 core and you know refactoring it as we added it to Drupal core and so that's something that we do in general meaning as soon as some of these contributed modules become what I call infrastructure meaning every developer tends to use them or almost every developer tends to use them we really seriously consider adding them to Drupal core to remove exactly those challenges that you faced and so we've added a number of key contributed modules to Drupal 8 core which will hopefully take away a lot of the pain but they can take away all of the pain because you know some modules won't be instantly ready. The other thing I'll add is that in Drupal 7 we added a test framework like in Drupal 6 we didn't have any unit testing which sounds shocking but we've added unit testing and test frameworks to Drupal 7 and now in Drupal 8 we really start to see the benefits because we've now over I think it's 40,000 tests and today all of these tests pass and so I firmly believe that Drupal 8 is while there's a lot of work to be done we have a lot of infrastructure in place to make sure that it will be very solid these are two elements to the answer but there will always be that part I think a lot of it also comes down to using best practices and being very careful about what modules you use and I would encourage you or if there's end users here to work with experienced Drupal companies or experts to help them to help you pick your modules because if you use a module which is not commonly used chances are slim that that module will be one of the modules that will be available for Drupal 8 today Drupal 8 is released but if you stick with the well-known modules your ability to upgrade will be much higher these are just a few elements to that question we can talk about your question for an hour it's a very tough one and there are other things we want to consider doing in Drupal 9 alright I'll try and find you and we can talk about your question online alright, thank you Hi guys, I know I'm standing between you and beer I won't take too long my name is Holly Ross and I'm the new Executive Director of the Drupal Association I'm so new in fact this is my fourth day on the job but I'm American so it's actually my third because I'm in the future so thank you so much for having me here I'm really excited to be here it's been a really great way to start the job and I want to thank all the speakers today and Zena for helping to organize this we had a lot of great sponsors and cross functional and technocrat Owen, our lead here in making the whole event happen has been fantastic and I also want to thank two of the Drupal Association staff members you may have seen Neil running around like a crazy person Hi Neil, or Stephanie over at registration they have been really wonderful at making this whole thing go which is exactly what the DA is all about right, we exist to help Drupal community gather and that is true whether you eat Drupal code for breakfast whether you own a shop or you're just getting started so we help bring people together around the Drupal project but we're also responsible for keeping the project up and running we do that by paying for the servers and the hosting and keeping D.o up and running so that's our responsibility to make the project work and that is that technical side of that community side and the community of course is the fun stuff and that's where you come in so there are lots of ways for you to be engaged in the Drupal Association besides contributing to the code or the modules and contributing to the project as Drew said there is a desperate need to make more Drupalistas out there right, so we help do that in a number of ways right now very concretely one is global training days so we will organize the first in the middle of March and that's a day to get folks to train other folks in Drupal code and we have a variety of curriculum that we can get to you so if you're interested in that you can come on over to association.drupal.org there's some information up on our site you can also of course get engaged in the Drupal cons around the world the next one happens to be in Portland where it is currently gray as it should be, I don't know what you guys do with all the sunshine it's coming up in Portland in May session submissions if you're interested in speaking and helping to share what you know about Drupal with the community you can still submit sessions through February 15th so you can look that up and of course we have camps all around the world as well it's a great place to get engaged as well finally there are two other ways that you can help support the work of the DA and the project in general one is to become a Drupal Association member right becoming a member obviously gives us some of the support we need to keep the project going also helps us build that strong community but the other thing that you can do especially because I'm new is really make sure that you share your opinions with us and with me the project is really supported by a very diverse community and that diversity opinions is really messy you may run across that once or twice but it does make the project stronger in the end and I really hope that you'll contribute to that messiness that fun messiness by sharing all your thoughts with us and the community and it helped make that happen I hope that you will join us over in the bar if Dries is still out there he needs to plug his ears you'll join us over in the bar where we'll pick up the first round for you tonight so come on over to the bar and thanks for being here and thanks for listening about the DA Thanks everyone and thanks Holly welcome to the job and Holly's got her first week on the job and her birthday all in one week in Sydney so you thanked everyone so just by way of introduction my name is Owen Lansbury I've been working with the Drupal Association and the local organizing team over the past year to make DrupalCon happen and thank you all for coming to the business day we kind of put it in quite at the last minute and weren't sure what the response would be and obviously it's been fantastic so very appreciative of the attendance that you've made and obviously to all the people that you thanked the speakers the sponsors and Zena especially for organizing this day and we're going to