 Namihi mai ora, ki ha koutou katoa, a warm welcome to everyone and thank you for joining us here today and as part of that welcome I'd like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land in which we meet today and pay my respects to the elders past and present and to the whakapapa and ancestors of those of us who choose to make our place on the lands cared for by the Tangata Whenua and our First Nations people. My name's Dave Sparks and I'm part of the Drupal South Committee bringing you this event today. We've got a great program of talks and discussions coming up. The schedule is all online here in the platform and there should be plenty of time as we go through for you to look around and choose where to be. If you have any technical issues or get stuck at any stage, live support is the orange icon, whoops, other side near the top and we've got a great team here standing by and they're all ready to help. You all have an awesome experience today. As always, Drupal South is brought to you by a team of volunteers and supported by our fantastic industry sponsors and they are here online available to chat throughout the day. So feel free to get in touch and line up a discussion or follow up on our topics. You can do this through the meeting hub on the right hand side of your screen. And so, yeah, I would really like to just give a huge shout out to those sponsors. Thank you for your support from Accenture, Aquea, Amazie.io, Annex, Doghouse, Just After Midnight, Morft, Pantheon, Previous Next, Salsa Digital and Skipper. We really appreciate your contribution towards the community and making this conference happen today. To kick things off, I'd like to hand over to Abhishek Malaviya, managing director of Accenture Interactive, looking after commerce, content and MaTeC for Australia and New Zealand. Accenture have been great supporters for Drupal South and open source here in Australasia and they are here to introduce our keynote for today. Cool. Thank you, Dave. And good morning, good afternoon, good evening to all of you that are watching this live stream. My name is Abhishek Malaviya. At Accenture Interactive, we actually strongly believe in reimagining business through experience. And we drive sustainable growth by creating meaningful experiences that live at that intersection of purpose and innovation. And by connecting these deep human and business insights with the possibilities of technology, we would design, build, communicate and run these experiences that really make lives easier, more productive and more rewarding. I actually met Drace for the first time over lunch back in 2013 when he was in Sydney and I was really touched immediately by the fact that how humble he is and in what he's actually achieved with this Drupal community. It gives me great pleasure actually to introducing to you Drupal's project founder, Drace Bertaut. And he should actually need no introduction with this audience at least, but 20 years ago he actually wrote the first line of software in his college dorm room and that became the Drupal that we all know and love. It's a great honor to have Drace here with us today as we celebrate Drupal's 20th birthday in 2021 and look towards the future. Drace is joining us live from his home in Boston where he is based for his day job as Acquia's co-founder and CTO and by night Drace is still active as Drupal's open source project lead in his ongoing role on the Drupal Association Board to ensure that the global Drupal community is supported. I'm very pleased to present to you in conversation with Drace Bertaut brought to you by Accenture Interactive. Accenture Interactive is actually around the world's largest digital agency by ad age and has been named the most innovative company by fast company with a strong and growing capability in delivering large-scale Drupal and Acquia projects which you can find out more about by visiting www.accenture.com or actually connecting with me with a chat just feel free to reach out. So without further ado joining Drace today is Drupal South's event organizer Dave Sparks over to you Dave. Hello Drace, thanks so much for joining us. I hope you're doing very well yeah and also thanks for that introduction Abhishek. Our themes for the the conference today is looking back at 20 years of Drupal and looking forward to the future and as Abhishek I mentioned we last saw you in person down under at DrupalCon Sydney in 2013 and I think it's fair to say quite a bit has happened since then quite a bit has changed since then. Can we just start off by asking how things changed for you personally in the last year or so? The last year I mean I think despite COVID which obviously is a difficult time for a lot of people. I feel fortunate that I've done pretty well everything considered. You know I guess I've worked more. I've traveled less. I've probably watched more Netflix. That might be true for a lot of other people but in general I would say I've been very busy very busy at work and with Drupal you know Acquia continues to do well and so that's been it's been very nice that you know both Drupal and Acquia actually have been sort of stable and predictable and you know that everything is kind of stayed on track at least for me personally and as mentioned I feel very fortunate about that but I should probably work out a little bit more. I can't wait to travel more and you know come back to Australia and New Zealand for example. I really do miss the travel and meeting you know people in the Drupal community you know in person to be quite honest. That's been a bit hard for me to not be able to have those in-person interactions. Yeah we'd love to have you back down here hang out have a barbie and a beer and have a chat. Yeah very fond memories of the few times I've been there you know love to love to come back. Drupal itself has gone through some some big changes some major architectural changes starting with the release of Drupal 8 late 2015 the the transition to Drupal 9 mid last year overall what do you think the biggest changes have been that came with that and the implications for the platform and for the community? Yeah it's a good question I mean a lot of things have changed I would say in the last I don't know seven or so years that you're talking about I mean I think for me one of the biggest changes is probably our release model and our innovation model you know prior to Drupal 8 we would do these big releases every like four or five years and they would break the whole Drupal world you know meaning every module would need to be updated or even like rewritten right and with Drupal 8 we've adopted a new model a new model of sort of continuous innovation so we have more frequent releases versus a release every you know four or five years and maybe more importantly you know we maintain backwards compatibility you know at least for an extended period of time and to me that's been a complete game changer because it means we put more features in people's hands quicker and it just a lot less painful if you will to you know maintain and run Drupal sites and as well as maintain contributed modules so that that's pretty big change for our end users right for the end users the Drupal users but also actually for how we work together as a community we do release management etc and I think it's been a great change so far I think it's been very helpful I would say maybe another you know big change it's maybe more of a let's say like a market change is the you know the growth I guess of of headless and the coupled architectures as well as javascript frameworks probably one of the fastest trends in the market and you know and I think all in all we've anticipated that well as a Drupal community I mean we've been investing in that for many many years and we made it core initiatives or a core priority I think starting in 2015 actually you know with various initiatives we've since added json api to core we have great craft ql support in contributed modules and so that I think is a pretty big change in the markets and yeah I think we're navigating that pretty well you know I would consider Drupal a pretty strong player and even a leader in the headless or the coupled market especially compared to you know a lot of the traditional you know content management systems like I think we've managed that transition better than most these are kind of two big things that come to mind but as I mentioned there's been a lot of other changes but for me these kind of jump out as the two most important ones thanks for that I mean I think that from an agency owner perspective that the upgrade from eight to nine was you know a revelation you know the smoothness of that process the the new release process the changes this made has been fantastic for us and for the community looking back a little bit there's been quite a lot of talk about the the cliff coming up with Drupal 7 end of life in 2022 and our local industry and community there's a lot of Drupal 7 around still internationally maybe 60 of existing Drupal sites are still seven do you think this is an existential threat to Drupal do you think people will leave Drupal because of that or is there a different way that you look at it a different perspective yeah um I actually hadn't heard that term cliff that makes sense um I you know I don't think it's an existential threat for Drupal at all you know let me try and clarify that first of all I think I believe many many organizations most organizations you know wait and wait until the last minute to do software upgrades I mean I see this all the time you know companies organizations they often look at this as a form of kind of I don't know technical debt in a way just like maybe how they have to upgrade Linux or a mail server or something like that and they don't do that work that upgrade until they really have to because you know there's no other sometimes no other compelling events to do that kind of upgrade so what I think will happen is as we get closer to that sort of you know deadline for upgrades from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 or 9 I think we'll see an increase in upgrades and migrations and in fact you know in talking to different Drupal agencies Drupal shops many of them actually are reporting sort of record sales growth and you know a lot of projects going on I don't know if that is true in Australia and New Zealand but I was you know recently talking to various agencies in Europe and they're as busy as they have ever been and a lot of the work that they're doing is these kinds of upgrades so I think we'll see more organizations want to upgrade because you know they finally really have to and actually in fact they don't really have to because we'll have extended support for Drupal 7 as well various organizations have kind of raised their hand and said we're going to provide extended support you know which is great news which means that if you're not ready to upgrade you know you're still supported and you get security coverage but anyway having said all that Dave I do think we'll see a lot of people churn you know we'll see people move off Drupal as well like I'm not ignorant or blind to that I think a lot of them will upgrade and then a lot of them will move off to other technologies and to me that isn't necessarily a surprise if you think about it Drupal 7 is like what I even you know forgot it's not old but it's like 12 years old or something and a lot has changed in those you know 12 or so years and you know I think like you know let's say 12 years ago Drupal was a good fit for smaller simpler sites but today you know fast forward 10-12 years and there's a lot of alternatives for that low end of the market especially with the emergence of you know SaaS solutions again there might be local local solutions in Australia and New Zealand and Japan etc but at least in Europe and the US there is Wix and Squarespace and a lot of these other kind of solutions and honestly they're great solutions for simple sites right and so the fact that the market has evolved the fact that there is more kind of low end solutions you know it's not Drupal's fault or anything right it just it's just what it is and it's not something to be sad about it's not something to be to be worried about either I think what it has meant is that Drupal has you know a slightly different position in the markets than it had 10 or 12 years ago because it has matured a lot and I would say today Drupal has a really strong position in kind of that you know enterprise markets you know and that's a great place to be for Drupal because if you think about what Drupal is really good at it's the flexibility the extensibility you know all of the things that you don't get from these you know SaaS platforms like Wix and Squarespace so you know the market has evolved Drupal has evolved with it and it's very natural to see some of these simple websites originally built maybe in Drupal 7 you know consider alternatives but that's okay I think again if you take a few steps back if you look at the ecosystem that has grown quite a bit there's more Drupal companies if you look at the number of people contributing to Drupal every year that number has gone up every year I report on these you know metrics of my blog every year if you look at the number of organizations contributing to Drupal that has gone up so in many ways Drupal is stronger than it has ever been with more people contributing than have ever contributed and with a more clear position in the market than it ever has but it does mean at the same time that we're losing some of that low end of the market and we'll see that with Drupal 7 and you know it's it's it's it's what it is with this with this direction into the the enterprise space and kind of the focus away from trying to compete with those SaaS products those low-end products what do you think Drupal as a product and the Drupal community itself supporting that product what can we do or what do we need to do to remain competitive with your kind of your old traditional big iron enterprise CMSs like experienced manager or or site core or any of those things yeah well first of all I think that Drupal is super competitive in that market you know I think you know if you if you look at the enterprise I think in overall Drupal powers like what one out of 30 or one out of 40 websites in the world if you actually look at the enterprise market Drupal powers like one out of 10 websites in the enterprise and we actually see growth there and you know honestly if you took all of the Drupal site in the enterprise that is many more sites than Adobe Sitecore Optimize League have combined right so all of this to say is you know we're a leader in the enterprise you know and it's supported by analysts like Gartner and Forrester and we're winning we're constantly winning in the enterprise so it's not like we're losing market share in the enterprise or you know we're not competitive today we we absolutely are but anyway to answer your question what do we have to do to to stay a leader or extend our leadership even I know I think it comes down to a number of things I think in the enterprise it's really important to have integrations with other platforms right like I can't think of a single enterprise Drupal site that has it has not one integration whether it's an integration with I don't know an e-commerce platform or a marketing technology or a single sign-on solution or you know you name it there's a lot of possible integrations I think these integrations are really important in the enterprise and so I think we can keep building them and keep evolving our APIs to make that possible I do think the headless decoupled trend is important in the enterprise a lot of enterprise organizations are not just building sort of an html website if you will or a classic website they often have to integrate with different front end technologies whether it's a javascript framework whether it's a mobile application technology or even like things like a digital kiosk or you know you name it I think that's important um there's a big trend towards sort of omni channel or cross channel publishing not just a website but you know I have Drupal be a a content repository that can power a lot of different applications and then maybe last but not least I think we have incredible strengths around scale and performance and security right like when people think about Drupal they think about robust its scales it can support very big websites and it's secure we have a reputation of one being one of the most secure platforms and obviously all of these things are you know really important for any large organization and small too but in the enterprise that reputation is really important so these are just some ideas so from integrations to continuing to innovate with the headless and decoupled architecture to our you know strong focus on scalability performance and security I think are all key ingredients to be successful in the enterprise yes I mean certainly for us in the market we're seeing Drupal as a very competitive product and getting a lot of good feedback on those key issues particularly around security scalability and performance I think I guess what I'm taking from from your comments there are that you know that the industry in Australia and New Zealand is um you know largely made up of small to mid-sized agencies and there's no reason for us to be intimidated by the the enterprise CMS focus we could go in there and and compete um and deliver you know a Drupal product that's as good as anything out there right yeah I believe so I think when I talk to small agencies um where they need the most help often is around you know sales and marketing right like how do you actually in these enterprise situations you're often going through there's a let me take a few steps back sorry like so often I would say five years ago 10 years ago there was a lot of inbound requests typically that agencies got like people said I want a Drupal site you're a Drupal company I'm going to work with you and the sales process was easy very light because the customer often had already decided on Drupal you know now in the enterprise it's often a little bit different um you know often a large organization will go through some sort of RFP process or once a um you know do a proof of concept or you have to really explain why Drupal is better um compared to other alternatives that they may be evaluating and that's very common I mean if you're an enterprise organization or you're going to spend um you know several hundred thousands of dollars or you know whatever local currency uh you want to use you want to you're going to make a big investment you know you want to make sure you know there's going to be um a due diligence process if you will making sure you pick the right uh horse um and so that is a little bit more complex uh sales situation where you have to understand your competitors you have to know their weaknesses and then you may have to do a little bit of a demo or a proof of concept and when I see smaller Drupal shops that's not something that they have historically done and that's a kind of a skill set that they have to to build and I think there's a big opportunity for agencies actually to collaborate and share knowledge and best practices on how to do that and in that science maybe a little bit kind of intuitive to share best practices on how to win deals but you know we're a global community and I think there's a lot of knowledge uh that can be shared so like in short you know Dave I don't think it's really about the technology that much I don't see any I mean sure we can always make the product and the technology better but I think where I see the most pain or learning and an evolution that needs to happen is around uh how do you convince these organizations to go with Drupal and how do you win these deals because you're up against uh you know large software vendors that have very well oiled sales machines you know I think that's a uh that's a very good stare for us as a Drupal South community look at how we collaborate and share learning and knowledge around that sales and marketing aspect as well. I think you talked a little bit about the the platform just at the end there in your April Drees note at DrupalCon North America you talk through some different initiatives that are on the table now for for driving Drupal forward over the next little period can you talk a little bit more about those? Yeah happy to um so you know we've we have quite a few initiatives going on I would say six or seven I think at the top of my head so maybe I can can walk through them real quick and give you kind of a very quick update would that be helpful um yeah so let's see the first one is is what we call the Drupal 10 readiness initiative I mean it's kind of a mouthful but what it really means is you know Drupal uses a bunch of third-party components as I'm sure most of you know um all the way from obviously PHP and MySQL and so like we want to do things like make sure Drupal works with PHP 8 but we also depend on symphony um you know and we have to upgrade to the next version of symphony right so symphony 5 or symphony 6 so that's work we have to do we use Composer when we released um you know Drupal 9 we were using Composer 1 if you will and now there's Composer 2 the next version and so we need to update Drupal to support all of these new versions of the different components that we work with and some of that is a lot of work you know like for example a CK editor which is our you know with the wig editor in Drupal they went to CK editor 5 which comes with a whole bunch of you know new improvements but it was a little bit like going from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 where it's like a complete rewrite with no backwards compatibility so one of the challenges that we have is like all right how do we bring every user of Drupal that uses CK editor you know for how do we migrate them to CK editor 5 right so anyway we're sorting all of these things out and we're actually making good progress you know Drupal already works or Drupal 10 um already works with PHP 8 you know symphony 5 works now Composer 2 don so we've kind of we've been checking off a lot of these things in general but we still have some work to do specifically around CK editor so that's a Drupal 10 readiness initiative it's kind of like all the things we need to do so that we keep using the latest and greatest components and especially upgrade those components that will become end of life so that we maintain Drupal's security um so that sounds maybe a little mechanical and maybe not that exciting but please do keep in mind that each of these new components or you know latest versions of these components they do come with all sorts of benefits right like PHP 8 has new features and it's faster CK editor 5 compared to CK editor 4 will have new bells and whistles too so there's actually an innovation element of that that is hopefully exciting to a lot of people so that's one of the initiatives um second one is um you know Claro which is a new admin theme so it's a new look and feel for Drupal's administration UI um that's um you know very close to being ready actually it looks a lot better which is a common complaint that we hear from people it's like it looks a little bit outdated and you know Claro really has upped the game there not only does it look better it works better has nicer animations it's also more accessible frankly so it's kind of better across the board um similarly we're also working on a new front end theme the name of that is called is a olivero it's kind of an out of the box front end experience and it's kind of the same story as Claro where it's kind of modern good looking more accessible a better example of what Drupal can do and under the hood we've made a bunch of improvements too you may or may not be familiar with the starter kit work that we're doing uh which kind of replaces the Drupal 8 classy theme um you know anyway so basically shipping more modern html or more modern markup not just html but also uh css and and making it so that we can make changes to these html and css more easily so there's a whole bunch of innovation on sort of the look and feel the back and the front ends and you know all of these things are actually going pretty well I would say um olivero you know we're kind of down to the final issues that we need to resolve but lots of great momentum actually from people in the community so then we're also working so that was like Drupal 10 readiness Claro olivero we're also working on decoupled menus um I know that's science very specific but the idea is uh how do we advance Drupal's um you know headless or decoupled capabilities right we have a good base right now but we need to expand the api coverage to certain areas um and then also we want to have some official components you know a react component or an angle or a view component for Drupal and so we decided to start with menus because most applications have a menu and to use menus as a way to figure out how do we get in the game of building javascript components and making these official components that we distribute and make available to javascript developers all around the world uh and so that's one of the initiatives I would say that's that's making good progress uh as well and then there's maybe two more that I want to highlight um one is the project browser initiative and two is automated updates so they kind of go hand in hand a little bit I would say but the project browser the idea is that we make it a lot easier for people to discover modules to use and then also make it much easier to install them so it's really focused on more novice new users people new to Drupal maybe less technical people too um you know right now if you want to extend Drupal we've all done this you need to go to Drupal.org you have to find the module and then you need to kind of figure out a way to install it and very often that resolves um requires you to use git or composer and for a lot of people uh that's hard you know there's a lot of steps from going to Drupal.org to finding your module to then figuring out how to get it enabled right so the idea is um how can we make that a lot easier by leveraging or by building a in Drupal project browser so you know very similar to maybe WordPress where you can go and install a plugin right from within your WordPress sites and frankly how most software works today including your iPhone and uh Samsung smartphones they all allow you they all have some sort of app store that makes it really easy for anyone to install um you know apps or in our case module so that's a project browser module initiative we have um you know done done some good work on that we have a proof of concept that's that's working we're working with the Drupal association on making sure we have the right APIs etc and then the automated updates initiative and maybe the last one I'll highlight is all about obviously once you have installed the module how do you make it easier to keep them up to date and automated updates the goal is to um you know automatically update modules when new versions come come out and we're going to start with security updates but in the future we also want to do you know other kinds of upgrades minor feature releases etc and you know I think a lot of these features like the project browser and the automated updates they're kind of table stakes in the in the rest of the world and it's important that we have those two so um yeah these are some some of the key initiatives that's a that's a great range of stuff I mean from nuts and bolts activity through to kind of kind of hot right now modern front-end UXUI components that's all quite exciting stuff to deliver on those initiatives across the Drupal community is going to require some significant contribution and we've heard a little bit here about the Drupal certified partner program that the Drupal Association has in the process of rolling out what can we do here locally in Australia and New Zealand to play our part with that and play our part in the long-term success yeah I mean I think the long-term success of Drupal depends on Drupal being a great product right I think or you know I think everything depends on Drupal being great if Drupal isn't great nothing else matters right and so that's why it's really important that we keep innovating and keep making improvements to Drupal and so that's why code contributions as an example are very important and you know other kinds of contributions are important too don't get me wrong but making the product better is kind of the most important thing let's say and so that's what everybody can do to help you know find your way to contribute and if you can contribute code and help us innovate in a good long-term direction that's super valuable and so the idea of the you know Drupal certified partner program is to actually reward those organizations that contribute not just code but all kinds of contributions um and you know we believe that if we help these companies that contribute be successful that in turn you know Drupal will be successful so maybe to elaborate on that a little bit um you know there's a lot of great contributors um but let's say you know previous next to name one um you know let's say for every hundred thousand dollars that they earn or make from projects maybe you know ten thousand goes back to the Drupal projects or you know five thousand doesn't really matter versus maybe when a Drupal project of that size go to another organization that doesn't contribute anything back to Drupal at all right the idea is like why would we as a Drupal project try and funnel business to these organizations that don't contribute back at all like we don't gain that much from it I mean we still gain some from that because it helps you know give visibility to Drupal but you know frankly we're better off writing the the projects to those organizations that contribute um or contribute more and so that's a little bit the idea of the certification program how can we recognize those organizations that contribute and then incentivize them to contribute more but also how do we incentivize organizations that don't contribute to actually start contributing and by sort of labeling organizations as certified we can raise their visibility we can encourage increase their competitiveness in in maybe sales situations and so we want to reward those organizations that contribute so that's a little bit the idea so um you know please do contribute or continue to contribute when you can not not everybody can but when you can please contribute and in return we will try and recognize those contribution and create visibility for you and help you be successful as an organization that's a little bit the idea that sounds great and I think just a quick shout out to the audience there if anyone is looking for a way to start their contribution journey or get involved we've got the virtual sprint tomorrow is a great opportunity to get some mentoring from people who are leading contributors and and get a start with that now I think we'll move on to the next section now before the event we we crowd sourced from the community from the audience that's here today some curly questions for you and I think we'll start with a hard one so you've got a time machine and you can go back in time and change one decision you've made in as your role as Drupal project lead what decision would that be and why well it's a great question um I would probably go back all the way to the beginning of Drupal and so when I started Drupal I built it for myself and I was a developer and in building Drupal for myself I didn't really care at all about the end user experience like I was my own end user and I was a very very technical end user and in doing so the early adopters of Drupal were kind of like-minded people there were other developers hardcore developers if you will that didn't really care about the sort of look and feel or user experience of Drupal and that cost a little bit of a flywheel or a snowball effect whatever you want to call it or for a long time we didn't really pay enough attention to user experience and I think starting in 2008 I've been really working hard to try and change that you know we launched many initiatives I even spent money bringing in third parties to help us do UX work and redesign the admin UI and all of these things and you know we have evolved quite a bit don't get me wrong I think it's many many many many times better than it used to be but looking back Dave to answer your question I wish I had created a culture of more focus on end user experience I think that would have served Drupal well and yeah well that's a that's a good answer to a hard question yeah while we've still got you in that time machine what does Drupal look like in in another 20 years 20 years down the road where are we oh well it's a great question too I'm not sure exactly what Drupal will look like obviously but I think and I've spoken about it is that address notes but I think I take some inspiration from Jeff Bezos the you know founder of Amazon and until recently the CEO of Amazon and I read an interview of him once and you know the journalist or the reporter asked this kind of question you know where will Amazon be in 10 years and Bezos responded and he said it's actually you know the wrong question to ask the way they do strategy at Amazon is not trying to predict the future or you know maybe to put it you know better not to to chase a shiny object or trying to be the next big thing whatever is kind of emerging and instead he said the way we approach this is we ask ourselves what hasn't changed in the last 10 years and will it's unlikely to change in the next 10 years I thought it was a great way to approach it and for and like in the case of Amazon it was customers will want faster shipping that was true 10 years ago it's true today and it's most likely through you know 10 years from today and so then you know Amazon has spent billions and billions of dollars trying to make shipping faster and in in their minds in Jeff Bezos's minds that's a very safe investment and similarly I've tried to apply that kind of thinking to Drupal and here's a few things that I know there's a few like long-term trends you know multi-decade trends I think one is the importance of user experiences and we talked a little bit about that in the previous question but it's the user experience of any product it's not a Drupal specific answer here has to become better and better and better right and users expect things to become easier faster and simpler and so I think that we're going to be investing 10 years from now we're going to still be talking about how we need to make Drupal easier to use because it's a never-ending goal similarly we do know that 10 years from today organizations will have more content like you know 10 years ago organizations had some content today they probably have a hundred times more content than 10 years ago and 10 years from today they probably have another hundred times more content than they have today and so we do know content management will will be a big problem 10 years from now that problem will not go away and because of that Drupal will most likely not go away assuming we keep you know up with the times but the fundamental problem that Drupal solves will not go away right in fact it will get worse and the need for Drupal will increase and so we need to think about how do we manage a hundredfold increase in content and how do we help kind of make that easier to manage and maintain I think security will become a bigger issue again 10 years ago you know security was important compliance was important or maybe actually to back up from that like risk management wasn't that big of a deal and it could be you know data risks compliance risks security risks all these kinds of risks privacy related risks weren't not all of those were a big deal 10 years ago today a lot of them are a big deal if you just privacy and data security has become a big topic and I can tell you I feel a hundred percent confident I don't have a crystal ball or time machine but I can I feel very very confident that 10 years from now that's an even bigger problem than it is today and so again Drupal is in a great position for those things today we're as we spoke about a great reputation around these things but we also have to keep thinking about how do we make it even better right and so I hope 10 years from now Drupal will be an even better content management system focused on managing many more types of content and much larger volumes of content and I think we'll be even more sort of robust I guess in terms of security and privacy and and all of these things and I think it's entirely doable you know we've all the ingredients to make that happen I think that's a that that's a great way of framing up the thinking in that space as well if I you know listen to what you're saying there yes security is is front and center for us now and five years ago probably was a tick box and now it is where we're spending a lot of our time and that that exponential growth in content volume and variety is a really that's a that's a gnarly problem to try and get in and solve as well is there a feature development or initiatives for Drupal 10 and then Drupal 11 that are on the road map for dealing specifically with that is that something you could talk to now or is is that too too big a picture to cover we haven't we haven't formalized any Drupal 11 initiatives I would say um but you know just a few ideas you know one is I think I'd love to see us kind of evolve our entity system and views especially from a user experience point of view I think we have real real strengths in content modeling content types and and those kinds of things but it's still a bit hard to use you know and we haven't really tried and improve the user experience of that like how do we make it super easy to build content models and then to you know you kind of use views on top of that and I think that's important because it touches all of these things that I just mentioned like how do we improve the user experience and also how do we help organizations manage content you know better and we did a lot of work on that I think it was Drupal 7 but like the last time we really kind of revamped a lot of these things I would say it was you know 10 plus years ago especially on the user experience side and so I'd love to see us innovate there and then one of the attendees Alex Alexer I'm not sure how to best pronounce it but he or she mentions you know artificial intelligence you know maybe becoming influential or important in this and I do agree with that you know I think in the future we'll have so much content that machine learning can help with a lot of kind of automation so whether it's classification of content etc but also content creation you know or maybe not like creates the content 100% but maybe like think about it as assistive writing or something as you're writing an article or you know a piece of content maybe machine learning algorithm can help you write it better you know it's kind of think about it like a spell checker but you know many times more powerful maybe help you pick the right words depending on who you're writing for because you use different language and words when maybe talking to you know a kid versus an adult or you know a specialist in a certain domain you know I think these assistive technologies I think will come into the forefront we don't have initiatives around this for Drupal right now but I would encourage people to experiment with those things maybe in contributed modules etc I think that's pretty pretty cool stuff to kind of anticipate these these new technologies approaches do you think there's a case or a contemplation of a radical re-architecting of Drupal I mean example one of the questions I have here is would we ever see Drupal core being decoupled from the CMS features so that it's purely a development framework and then you're working on that that content management from an integration point of view it's a good question I'm not sure I'm not sure I have a good answer to that right now to be quite honest I think I can see the pros and cons of that you know but I do think the strength of Drupal is that we're actually like sort of an integrated solution where you know yes we're great for developers but we also have great UIs for like less technical people and I actually think it makes things maybe a little bit harder in some ways but it also gives us a really unique advantage compared to the sort of you know like just plain frameworks I mean if you want to use a framework you know there's probably great frameworks you can use today so I don't know I have to think a little bit more about that question I'm not opposed to that kind of decoupling but I'm also nervous about maybe losing our editorial capabilities because I think that's why a lot of people use Drupal it's because they get the best of both worlds in a way yes I I mean I think I agree with you on that one there that our you know our love of Drupal within our organization of team is because developers and site builders and and content editors are all sharing the same language and and that's really the special source for us that's where the magic happens I think over the last five years we've been on a journey kind of with decoupled I think five years ago I was probably a decoupled skeptic and now I'm a firm fan I guess I think things have come along in that space you've talked a little bit about decoupled being part of the roadmap for the future do you think that Drupal will settle on a front in a preferred front-end framework for that or will you leave that to other people and provide an integration layer I don't I don't think we'll settle on a single front-end framework I think there's lots of different frameworks out there they all have their pros and cons and there's a lot of innovation happening in the front-end framework space it feels like every six months there is another favorite framework of a lot of people so in a way there's it's it's moving too fast so to that extent I think it's more beneficial for us to keep an open mind if you will and work with different front-end technologies and for me that's especially true for people that want to build a custom front-end to Drupal now as it relates to Drupal's own backends you know I think if we wanted to modernize our backends using JavaScript so we get more of that interactivity etc obviously we would need to pick one technology right we would have to say you do whatever you want on the front-end to build your own front-end application on top of Drupal but Drupal itself Drupal's own backends where you create content you know obviously if you were to modernize that with JavaScript you would have to pick one yeah I think it's a it's a real strength of Drupal that we can kind of choose our dance partners for that for that decapable front-end depending on whatever music the client wants I think we've got time for maybe two more questions here's maybe a little bit of a less technical one for you I think everyone everyone knows that that Drupal 9.2.4 is the best version of Drupal that is there a version of Drupal that's that's a personal favorite maybe from some simpler times past have you got a pet Drupal that you've got a fondness for back in the day hmm let's see um I would say the that's hard but I would say there's a couple of big ones you know I think maybe was Drupal 2 or Drupal 3 introduced the module system um and that I think was a big deal obviously you know that was kind of one of these um you know moments I guess in Drupal's history that changed the game right because today we have what like you know tens of thousands or you know of modules and that's been a game changer so I don't know what version that is but it was very very early on in the in the lifetime of Drupal and I think I made a three major versions in one year like one two and three we're all like within one year um and a lot of it was inspired by Linux actually the modular architecture uh so that was one I think the other one might be where we moved cck into Drupal one again I don't recall maybe it was Drupal 5 maybe 6 I'm not sure but obviously cck has been a game changer for Drupal as well um so yeah whatever that version was oh it's pretty pretty special especially looking back it's always it's hard sometimes to say in the moment um but it's not until like several years later that you actually understand sort of the impact that something had great yeah and I've just got one last question for you this one might be from Owen uh quite a technical question um to to finish on a Belgian note waffles waffles or fries for you fries fries fries nice yes I like waffles too but uh I had to choose I would pick fries over waffles yeah yeah why not very good you know yeah why not both if you can do both uh I think that is that is us for time are there any other closing comments that that you'd like to make or well just want to say thank you you know thank you for having me obviously but more importantly thank you for um you know using Drupal and contributing to Drupal and you know it's great to see that despite you know COVID you know you're you're organizing uh this event virtually and that it's attended by people from all over the place and that you have a sprint tomorrow so it's very very I don't know it just gives me a lot of positive energy and it's very exciting to see so thank you for that you know uh it's what makes Drupal what it is so nice one thanks so much for that I mean uh plenty to think about um really appreciate how much kind of technical detail you're able to pack into to kind of those those quick questions you're welcome I think you know for me and for us one of the great things about about Drupal apart from its amazing ability to adapt and evolve is really how open and engaged you've stayed as founder throughout the 20 years we've had so far and I just want to say a personal thank you for that leadership and that service it's great work and it's inspiring work to us out here in the global community working on Drupal so on behalf of the community here in Australia and New Zealand massive thanks cheers mate really appreciate your time and all the best for the next 20 years of of Drupal yeah awesome well thank you for saying that um you know Drupal is the work of many people it's not just me obviously so while I while I appreciate the recognition I think it's important to point out that there is many many people including people here you know in this event that have made huge huge huge contributions to Drupal so it's it's truly the work of many people so together we we can make Drupal better wonderful thanks so much awesome see you next time thanks for that and thanks to Accenture for their support support for this keynote and making it possible for us we are heading off into the next session and the next couple of minutes so for those of you carrying on into the panel you'll need to exit out of this session go back to the schedule and jump into that one just a bit of housekeeping there for you thanks everyone thanks again Dries and we'll see you all at the panel awesome thank you all