 Hi, I'm Kelly from the Drupal Association, where I'm the Director of Development. And I'm Nathan Roche, the Marketing Director at Accelerant. We're your hosts here for the new show. We're calling it Beyond the Build, Stories of Drupal Impact, where we're highlighting incredible Drupal use cases by ambitious site builders and end users. Very exciting. We're happy to have our guests on today. Who's joining, Kelly? For this first one, I'm really excited. We got a little backstage preview, and I said, oh my gosh, that's so fascinating. We have Canopy Studios and their client, The Exploratorium. Hi. Hi, folks. How are we doing? Good, either. Doing very well. Thanks for joining us on our inaugural episode. Happy to be here. One of the thousands to come. Oh, that's a lot. Well, let me ask, I'll have you all introduce yourselves. Jim, do you mind starting? How long have you been at Canopy? Tell us a little bit about your role there. Sure. Hi, everybody. My name is Jim Burch. I'm an engineering manager here at Canopy Studios. Been with the company for about five years and work on the build team, so which these days is migrating wonderful existing sites to Drupal 8, 9, and 10 websites. At Canopy, we try to make the internet better one site at a time, and we work with great clients that try to make a positive impact as well. Awesome. Tim, I'll let you go ahead. How long have you been at Canopy? I have been at Canopy for five years as well. I think Jim and I started around the same time. And so just to introduce myself. So I'm Tim Tufts. I'm Canopy's director of project success. And what that means is I oversee all the builds here at Canopy. And I work very closely with Jim on many of those. So Jim oversees our Drupal projects, but we also have a number of WordPress projects as well. And I was also the project manager for the Exploratorium project. Thank you for joining us, Canopy, and George Perry from the Exploratorium. How are you doing today? Why don't you introduce yourself? I am doing wonderful today, Kelly. Thank you. My name is George Perry. I am the manager of the online media team, the online media group. We are part of the media studio department at the Exploratorium. I've been here for two years. I started during the pandemic and I have the pleasure of managing one of the oldest websites on the internet. What does that mean? Tell them what, that was the interesting factoid. Oh my gosh. So we were exploratorium.edu is a museum and we are one of the first 600 websites on the internet. Hence why we are a museum with the .edu extension because you can't get that anymore unless you're an educational institution. We have had so many iterations of content and we have a bounty, a wealth of pages from the past and present that we really care about maintaining. Yeah, it's a big challenge to manage all of that. I can say that the first webmaster is still involved with the exploratorium and a lot of the people that were there, some of the people that were there at the beginning, it's very impressive to be able to traverse the online legacy of the exploratorium and all the craft that we've built along the years and somehow kept around, which was a treasure trove of opportunity. Can you tell us a little bit, George, about the mission of the exploratorium? Okay, so how can I say? The exploratorium is a, how do we say, a public learning laboratory for exploring the world. There's science and art and human perception. And we really, it's actually right in front of me oddly enough, deal with creating inquiry-based experiences to transform the learning experience. How that drives traffic to the web is historically learning materials for teachers, for students, a fair amount of interactive. Long time ago, we invested heavily in flash of our actives. Now, what we have are still some of those around, which we kind of bootstrapped with some of the, one of the open source programs, Ruffle, that is making a flash interpreter and a lot of, you know, JS interactives. We really are all about inquiry, all about experiential learning and we love that we can embody that on the floor and in the website and things like science snacks, tinkering, a historic one, science of food. Yeah, and we have events and programming throughout the year. So it's not just a static once and done website, it's forever changing. People host events here. Wonderful place. Completely ever-changing. So then Tim, tell us about how, I mean, you didn't come in from the beginning, from the long time ago, about when did you all start your relationship with the Exploratorium? No, we did not start our relationship in the 90s. So it was a little over two years ago, the Exploratorium was looking for a partner to help them transition from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 at the time. And the challenges that come along with that. So as George sort of alluded to, there was a lot of cruft that had occurred over the years. I'm sure we'll probably get into a little more detail as far as like some of the challenges and some of what that cruft looked like. But yeah, the Exploratorium was looking for a partner to help them create a blueprint and roadmap for transitioning to Drupal 8 at the time. And of course, we're now on Drupal 9. So big, big difference from when we started this project two and a half years ago. Great. And what before Drupal 7 was the site on Drupal 6 or a previous platform? We were static HTML. So it was created with, I mean, can I say, I'll say like random tools like front page and just, you know, hand coded. Initially the website was obviously hand coded because, you know, it's beginning of the internet. I didn't even think of IDs or anything like that. But it was pretty much hand coded until then. And one of our team members was part of the people that brought it into Drupal. And so they've shared a lot of history with us of it. And some of the cruft like, oh my God, this is a test page we created long ago. I'm like, wow, it's still published. Okay, we're gonna sunset this wonderful treasure. But it's such bitterness. It's endearing bitterness. Because like we have a lot of things where it is like, wow, what is this doing here? And you know, like practices. So it was one of those like, you know, pingable pages where it's like, ah, your site is up and it's like, okay, this is the ping test page that nobody ever knew existed. So it's a lot of like this wow discovery still, you know. Hidden treasures. Hidden treasures, exactly. So Jim, then you came on and you've been working with Exploratorium for two years as well, or when did you join the project? Yeah, so I helped co-developer Blanca Eskido work on the transition plan at the initial. So we basically looked at the Drupal 7 site and kind of did our technical planning from a high level, you know, in a small, you know, bite-sized project, you know, from that, you know, Exploratorium decided to work with us further to actually implement the plan. But, you know, we took a look at what they had, you know, from inside of Drupal 7 to the 300 micro sites or folders of the site that they had, you know, the static HTML sites and came up with a phase one, phase two, phase three approach. You know, when we kicked off phase one, you know, we decided to tackle the events section, the calendar section of the site because Exploratorium is a wonderful digital platform, but is it actually an even cooler, you know, in-person event platform? You know, so we looked at 41 content types in Drupal 7 and figured out that maybe we don't need so many, you know, things like exhibits, exhibitions, galleries, things that have very minutia differences to the Exploratorium team, but to the outside world, we came up with the term experiences. So we kind of merged all these things into one experience that could be displayed at a calendar, whether that be an exhibit, not going exhibit or just a one-time event. So yeah, we were able to come up with a migration plan that was executed by my incredible co-workers Dan Bonham and Andy Sipple and George's amazing team of developers also. So, you know, Canopy and Exploratorium worked hand in hand with design and development. Coming up with an architecture, did the experiences section, the calendar section first and then move out to the rest of the migration? Can you tell us about the journey through those three phases? Were there any, you know, really significant challenges or things that sort of stick out for any of you when you're going on that journey? Can you tell us a little bit about some of those hiccups or some of those challenges or hills that you had to climb? I think if I can start it off, it's, you know, George and his team have a lot of different stakeholders. So, you know, he leads the online media group, but he has marketing, he has fundraising, he has, you know, the tinkering team, which makes these great tutorials for educators. Oh, I want to be on that team. Cool. Yeah, it's really cool. I mean, online and in person, you know, the Eclipse project where they partnered with NASA, you know, they were one of the first peoples to live stream on the internet. You know, it's just like the amount of stakeholders that, you know, the exploratorium had was, you know, very important to make sure that we satisfied all of them in a timeframe where we could. We actually ended up launching the site partially using some domain masking where the Eclipse project needed to launch before the full site was launched a couple of weeks ago. We actually, you know, sent part of the traffic to the Drupal 9 instance and the rest of the traffic to the Drupal 7 instance. So we could, you know, make the stakeholder goals in that project a reality while we're still working on the rest of the team too. That's pretty amazing. That sounds very, that sounds like a good solution. Sorry, George, were you gonna say something? Oh, yes, definitely it was for us too. Like there was just so much unknown and churn through our team. Like when I got here, there were, it was me and two other, two other people and somebody who was a contractor. And really that, and one of those people had was for a while was the only person on the team. And they were a designer and we were working through a lot of discovery of the unknown within our content. None of them really knew Drupal, not intimately, like knew how to use Drupal, but deep in the guts of it, there was reservation to get in there. I came in and I wanted to train people like, okay, we own this, we have to have the knowledge of the system, like develop that deep knowledge, not just so we can do it ourselves, but so we can make the decisions of what we can't do ourselves and no one to ask for advice. And in the hunt for a partner with that, like Canopy was definitely the best folks that we found. We learned a lot from them and it was a definitely a together journey. I think the hands probably the biggest challenge in summary is just like, there was just so much randomness to be found. And there were so many ways that with the limited knowledge we had, we, sometimes we got things right, sometimes we got things wrong. And with Drupal, there's a lot of ways to do things differently. So having expertise and experts to help us through that was like, okay. But Drupal pulled through to be a very handy tool for creating the products. And let's go into that because Kelly and I are super interested to understand why Drupal. We understand that you were on seven prior, but why does Drupal work for the Exploratorium? Okay, for us, we had like tens of thousands of web pages and we needed to be able to have multiple editors. So we had to be able to deal with role-based, multi-tenant, different experiences, as far as things like the Eclipse, as far as the main website, other projects as well. Drupal, your LAMP stack is a tried and true platform, when it's Apache, my SQL PHP, it's tried and true. I used to work at Yahoo when Yahoo was a thing. And they were LAMP stack and it's a very classic architecture with caching is scaled very well. The concerns were repressed with that volume of pages and their data model, we thought Drupal would be a lot better. We decided that sticking with Drupal, like primarily as not just the data layer, but as a front-end, who are trying to do the front-end and react or in Gatsby or anything like that, we found that this would be best for us to stick this route because of not just SEO, but editor knowledge and visibility into what the end product was. And Drupal is infinitely flexible. It's open source, I love open source for a long time. Yeah, it generally, I think was the best choice that we had. And you mentioned multiple stakeholders. Did you have to sell Drupal to these stakeholders as well? You mentioned marketing is in the mix. I'm not sure, maybe Canopy had to help you to do that. How do you get everybody on the same page before finding a solution, a capable solution partner like Canopy? So being already in Drupal, we had to sell them that, we did have to sell some folks that people were saying, a lot of folks were like, why don't you just change the WordPress? And then there were the folks like, well, this is a great technology. Why don't you just do it the old way? Do it in or do it in React. And we had some folks like static HTML and is King and I was like, well, that's not gonna work. So it was, some people it was a hard sell, but most part of it was the sell of like, what my content will look like, how will I be able to access it, you know? And also like, what content belongs on a website anymore? On this single website? Because we were all things to everything. We were an archive. We were a portal for selling tickets. We were a knowledge base. We were too many missions. So we had to, even with Drupal, we had to take some data and move it elsewhere between archive it and between a static HTML S3 bucket. So that's a, yeah, make some tough choices and have a lot of stakeholder conversations. So we tried to manage it through also from the top down. So kind of working up my like management ladder and then down the leadership ladder because creating, scoping this by just asking everybody what would you want? It was never going to work. We really need to approach it from this is what you need and go as database as possible. So we leverage tools like Google Tag Manager, Google Search Console, Heatmap Tracking. Like we use all that to justify what we wanted to do as opposed to the passion battle because the passion battle was never going to, it was just gonna be, it would never work out. Wow, that's amazing. Nice. So you had mentioned that you just a couple of weeks ago launched something on Drupal 9. Where is the rest? So you're still in the midst of this. This is an ongoing and there's still work to be done. We're all the way on Drupal 9 now. So as of 419, 420, we went fully into Drupal 9 and a couple of weeks before that we just had the eclipse in there. So it's been wonderful but there've been a couple challenges along the way but after cut over, but it's mostly little content stuff like dude, where's my page? So we just dealt with that and the feedback we've got has been very positive from this is amazing. I never thought this would happen. Oh my God, I can't believe it. It took a long time to get the project off the ground because of the pandemic. And so that was a major hurdle as well. But also just because we launched the site doesn't mean we're done. As things go in Drupal and the internet. So just today we've talked about scoping a plan to upgrade to Drupal 10 before. Talked about during the project, Georgia's team had to launch another site on a standalone Drupal 9 instance just because of scope and priorities there. We talked about rolling that in. So we don't like to launch, say goodbye, we wanna be partners with our clients in the exploratory and support them in their web journey. Yeah, I think an ongoing relationship is definitely gonna benefit us too. And hopefully I can get more of the team involved in the Drupal community. So I think that would benefit us and hopefully the community too. Speaking of teams, so Tim, you are managing the project, right? What's the team size that was currently working with the exploratorium from Canopy's side? Yeah, so on the Canopy side, we had about four developers, myself project manager, and then we had a designer who was also working on the project too. Great, excellent. And as Drupal 10, this is approaching, what are the conversations now about getting ready? I hopefully, I would imagine they're much easier to be had than the previous project, right? Which is the whole point. Yeah, the conversations we had today were, let's get it on the roadmap. Understand that George has a lot of, probably content commitments he needs to address first, but we run tests on our active developments. So we already know where deprecated code lives from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10. We know which modules will need to update ourselves or with help from the community. We'll know what content editors will look for with like the CK Editor 4 to CK Editor 5 upgrade. So we're looking to put it into our schedule this summer. Before we get near the end of life date for Drupal 9 and before the Exploratorium team gets into fundraising season and they're gonna be busy working and supporting those teams. Perfect, so you're definitely keeping your eye on how busy it gets at the Exploratorium. I understand fundraising season, so working with them on that, all of those deadlines. Yeah, it's a big grouping together of technology and real-world business needs. We try to find that place in the schedule for all of the things. Awesome. Yes, yes. All right. Great, great. I mean, I just had a couple more questions. If that's all right, I wanted to know about what makes a relationship work really well because we can tell that you all have like a lot of synergy. The relationship is really strong and you have a legacy of delivering value and investing in your platform. What makes all that work? Like, is it just the demonstrated trust from those three phases of the initial launch and now, George, you can rely on Canopy because you've seen them in action? Or is it something else? And this is open to anybody to answer just about how the customer and agency relationship, how it works and how it's working really well and the why behind that. Thank you for your stretch of your word. Go for it, go for it. I think what's been really great to see with our partnership with the Exploratorium is just that it's been a partnership. Not only has it just been the Canopy team doing the work, it's been the Canopy team and the Exploratorium team. So Jim mentioned earlier that there were developers on the Exploratorium team as well and we've really collaborated and worked really well together, I think, throughout the entire project. George's team might take on a couple of tickets just so they could learn more about Drupal and our team might have given them some support or some insights to sort of one up their Drupal experience or expertise. But then we were having weekly working sessions, meeting to discuss priorities or any sort of challenges or if there are any sort of sticky topics that we needed to work our way through. So there's a lot of transparency, a lot of collaboration and I think a lot of trust between our two teams throughout the entire project. Looks like the customer agrees, George. Definitely, I definitely agree. And I think like in that, even with Canopy, they're willingness to deal with when they got on, we were like, oh, we know we're gonna discover so many skeletons, these clauses. Like they're skeletons behind the skeletons, behind the skeletons. And it was a wonderful phase of discovery and collaboration and partnership. I think definitely the key word in being partnership for sure. And that they, we wanted somebody that was gonna be there to help us learn and work together and not just throwing requirements over the fence back and forth. I can't, having been in software for some time, like just throwing requirements back and forth over the fence just never works. It just makes for a painful process. And I've also done technology consulting before. And so I wanted somebody would help us to, not just be a hundred percent dependent, but to help us to understand, to help ourselves. We can help each other along the way. And I think that forms the best consulting relationships. From a droopal point of view, I think George and his team also had a very good understanding or learning of where all the skeletons in droopal are buried also. Oh my gosh. So, we came up with some very interesting bugs in core and contrib. And it's not just, here's another ticket. This is broken, fix it. But let's get to the root of the problem. Can we contribute code back to the community to help fix this at its root rather than just for us today? So that understanding is because they're a very technical team, even though they didn't all come from the droopal world, they really embraced understanding of droopal and we're trying to do very complex things. And sometimes all the little bits and pieces, all the little Legos don't fit together in the right the way they're supposed to in droopal. So, we work to try to make droopal better in addition to the website. Yes, thank you for that. That's amazing. That's the end game is contributing back and these partnerships make them successful and successful for the future of everybody using droopal. Awesome. Well, I mean, thanks everybody for joining. I know we're about 28 minutes in, so I hope that this was okay. It was our first time, Kelly and I, right? Thank you so much for that. You all really expanded and did more for us than Nathan and I could have done, the things you said. So thank you so much for all your expanding on everything. That's why we want to talk to the experts. I know, I'm so good. Thanks, folks. Thank you. Thank you, teams. It was so nice to meet you. Thank you for joining us on our first episode of Beyond the Build and if you have a droopal agency that you want to bring on with one of your amazing clients, please email me at partnerships at association.drupal.org. That's partnerships with an S at association.drupal.org and thanks a lot and we'll see you next time.