 Okay. Thank you so much, everyone, for coming along tonight. It's great to see you here. This evening, I would like to introduce or talk about the Drupal Distributions Initiative. For those of you who saw the Drees note, and I know probably one or two of you here actually saw it in person. But for those of you who've watched on video, you probably would have seen or recognized Drees. Let's talk about a few sort of key concepts for what's coming up in Drupal. And a few of the ones I've picked out here are the fact that in the future Drupal is going to be looking at being having a smaller core, removing unused modules or lesser use modules in Drupal core. So the concept of the site builder persona is something that is receiving extra attention these days. So in past Drees notes, you may remember Drees talking about things like developer experience and editor experience and marketers and UX. It seems like the pendulum is swinging back to the site builder experience and not just ordinary site builders, these are ambitious site builders. And one of the other things Drees mentioned was starter templates and that's really what we'll be talking about today. So if we have a look at just bringing the starter templates and the ambitious site builders together, you can see like with a traditional distribution, it's typically being very developer focused. The idea is that the ambitious site builders will be the ones who will be able to maintain these new starter templates, as well as install them and make use of them. And of course one of the other overriding concepts there is to make the effort small to make starter templates much easier to use than distributions as we know them today. So if you take a look at what the concept is, it's basically to improve the instalment, install procedure, you know, when you're spinning up a Drupal site, what do you see, you know, you see basically a blank screen with empty, an empty site with no content in it. So the idea is that when you're actually installing the site, you get to choose things such as your location, your language, and why not augment that by selecting or possibly selecting a template. So instead of just using minimal or standard, you get to pick a template like this. And of course we can see here that the general concept is to have different templates for different industries or verticals. So basically the idea that Reese has promoted there. During the presentation, there's going to be a few recurring themes. I've just mentioned the installation experience there. But we also have the concept of Drupal existing in a world where it needs to compete with other CMSs, where they do offer that full package, that full experience. So the concept of the business model. It does take efforts to build a distro or a starter template. What are the potential rewards there for companies that do, you know, put that effort into actually build that. Is it just a tool for the community to use or is there a business model behind it. Another concept is, we ask these starter templates, starting points, we just install it, you get what you get, you build it as you like. Or are they upgradeable, you know, do you expect new features to stream through to your, your website or, you know, do you expect to get updates to content types and things like that. And finally, we have the technical foundations. That's a lot of what sort of is being discussed. You know, at the moment in the Drupal community, how can we make all these, these starter templates a reality. Before we get into what's happening in 2022. I'd just like to go through some history. This is sort of some, you know, it's just some fun stuff to look back to to see where we've come from. And the concept of Drupal distributions has been around for an awful long time, you know, that's going back 1516 years, you know, trees first started talking about this stuff. And then back in Drupal five, Drupal six with installation profiles. And you can see, Drew Streets has really touched on all of the points that are still very much relevant today and, you know, Dries is talking about, you know, competing in markets and opening up new ones. You know, having a collaborative, you know, community effort behind it. I think you recognize the hard work that that was there and also the need to build a business model around that and back in 2006 that was, you know, the idea was that Drupal agencies would build services around the distros, you know, that they made. Yeah, Dries called it an awesome adventure and here we are, you know, 1516 years later, still talking about it. A few years after that. And this is roughly when I was getting involved with the Drupal community. There's a whole lot of conversation around small core and a number of you may, you know, sort of remember that that conversation. There's a Drupal company called Development Seed and they, they were a big proponents of it and basically, you know, the concept of small core is one that is relevant to this conversation because it's it's all about, you know, building a solid foundation for Drupal having Drupal made of, you know, reusable components and just focusing on those generalized things that each site, each site will would need. You know, Dries in response to this said he didn't necessarily like the term of small core but you know when it all boiled down to address was really sort of favoring the product nature of Drupal. So he was saying he wants to promote a strong Drupal product and I think from 2009 we've really seen, you know, Drupal improved with all of these other personas I was talking about such as, you know, editor experience, you know, marketers, trying to, you know, improve things such as you know media experience and editor experience, all of these kinds of things so that's really where sort of, you know, Drupal progressed to sort of like a move away from that that smaller core. Larry Garfield had had a few words to stay on what small core was and he had a slightly different angle on it it wasn't really about the size of the code but it was about the architecture of the code and so. He was saying asking is Drupal going to be an additive system or a subtractive one. And the development seat guys were complaining about it, you're having to subtract stuff from Drupal. And Larry was saying well okay let's let's make it a more building blocks thing and of course we've had symphony. I think the word additive there is very interesting because in his keynote, Dries was talking about composable and it just seems that that language is coming full circle, you know, 11 or 12 years later. Okay, Dries was also picking up this idea of business models as well all the way back in in 2010. Dries was basically asking how can we make it commercially interesting. I think from that side of things. You know, Dries and Acquira probably, you know, trying to work out how they could build distributions in a profitable way. And even in 2017, Dries is still pondering these these questions. And, you know, the solution there down the bottom was to be able to offer the Drupal hosting at scale. And it's similar to what, you know, Michael was has just been talking about, you know, the idea of, you know, paths and SAS services that are able to spin up these these distros at scale does does provide you know a viable sort of business model there. Another very interesting presentation was one that happened at Drupal South Lee Rowlands in 2016 really sort of picked up this idea of the concept of the starter profile as he called it. And, you know, basically was really pushing the idea of having install profiles to receive a first class treatment. And to actually have a vetted by a product like a product manager at Drupal to vet what these install profiles could look like and so Lee is really picking up on the concept of a foundation for Drupal and then you know the profile being the product and so Lee was really pushing hard this idea of Drupal's to improve. We've got to get better we've got to sort of deliver these end experiences, if we're going to succeed. And I think the very important takeaway there at the end is that, you know, Lee says a profile is just exported site building. That was his sort of final sentence for the day. And that really means, you know, an ambitious site builder can, you know, deliver a starter template because all you have to do is build a site capturing configuration. And that's it you know you've managed to do to do a starter template. And that's exactly what Reese is now talking about with ambitious site builders. It's really about sort of democratizing the way the templates can be built by, by site builders. Yeah, so Lee's been really promoting this. And that's a quite an interesting thread there. You know if you want to sort of read up on on some of the, the sort of ideas, you know behind what's been happening recently. So yeah, anyway, so Dries, he's got his, he's got his plan. He's had the Dries know we've got starter templates. It's the latest and greatest. In a recent article, Dries has laid out a roadmap for the next two years. So this is not Drupal 10 it's Drupal 11. And you can see the main, the main sort of things that we'll be looking at over the next two years to get to where we want to go and like the project browser is a big deal, you know, allows people to browse modules that is going to sort of hook into this starter template idea, and that's going to be, you know, supported by smaller core as well. So you can really see all of these ideas, you know, that would sort of discussed all the way back in in 2009. Just yeah, coming to the fore now so it's amazing how these these mega cycles take place. It's worth just having a bit of a quick look at some of the successes and failures in the, in the, in the space. And we're probably many of you are familiar with the commerce distro by the commerce guys came out, you know, with Drupal seven. It has such a familiar screen if you know if you ever built one of these Drupal commerce sites, Drupal commerce was very opinionated it had an opinionated design functionality and structure. And it was amazing if you wanted a site that did that exact thing. However, if you wanted to change it adapted or do something different. It was not so good. Also, if you wanted to update it it was not really possible. So we've, you know, we kind of got amazing success but we also have problems around sort of upgrading and customizing things. Lightning is another one I'd like to call out for different reasons. It was based around a lower level sort of editor experience. So it's not so much interested in a specific sort of use case it was more the general use case of supporting editors. Unfortunately for lightning, you know, it did. I do say I think it was successful but unfortunately for lightning it had massive problems with, you know, upgrading through the versions of Drupal. So changes in the way layouts were done, layout builder arrived, and just the upgrade experience would have been horrendous for the developers I would say of lightning but also equally frustrating for, you know, people using it so this is a case where they were supporting an upgrade path, not just a starting point. And I think if, if that upgrade path wasn't supported life may well have been, you know, easier all around so I think when Dries grits his teeth about the expense of maintaining distros here he may be thinking about lightning there. Okay, so let's move on to the distributions initiative that's what we've we're at today and this is an active area in the Drupal community at the moment. It's not a formal initiative, but it certainly seems to be shaping up to be one. So Alex pot is sort of organizing a lot of it and there's a link there for you to see, you know what the roadmap is and what what what work is being done in the area. Firstly, you know the roadmap identifies all of these difficulties right with the distros that that currently exist and these are all the things that we've been, you know, talking about one of one of the big ones is that the if it distros in a profile it's very difficult to change right it's baked into the baked into the whole system and like Dave Hall has an article that's about 10 years old for Drupal seven on how to change the profile and I found myself looking at the article just the other other day and scratching my head on how, how difficult it is, and, you know, basically because it's so hard it's very difficult to mix and match different distros you're not going to install one and install another and have it work with it so that is that is a major problem. The roadmap has all of these potential resolutions and these are the areas that are being worked on and you know basically I won't go through all of those, but it's essentially addressing how how we can solve these problems. I think that the main thing to pick up on is it's really all about modules and config and that's really going back to Dries' original 2006 post he just talks about modules and config, and you know it's very easy for ambitious site builders. In 2022 we have Composer, back then they had Drushmake, but it seems that the solution that will be arrived that will be based around those three things for distributing and maintaining these starter templates. And we also have content or default content there. At the moment that's a little bit less clear how do we ship default content with distros. From my read of it, it doesn't seem like default content will be going into core, but it is certainly something that people are talking about as to how we can manage that with the distributions for the starter templates. Okay, so yeah, just wrapping up the conversation and work continues. So if you want to follow along with this you can go to Drupal Slack. There's quite an active channel there they're meeting each week and discussing these things and you know it's going to be interesting to see how that all unfolds. So thanks a lot everyone that's that's pretty much it. A quick intro to the distributions initiative. Thank you.