Talking Drupal #539 - EvolveDigital

Nic: This is Talking Drupal, a weekly chat about web design and development from a group of people with one thing in common. We love Drupal. This is episode 539, evolve Digital. On today's show, we are talking about Evolve Digital, what it is and how it started in Drupal with our guest, Maya Sheffer.

We'll also cover Drupal CMS as our module of the week. Welcome to Talking Drupal. Our guest today is Maya. Maya is the community lead at evolving web and board member of the Drupal Association. She's the driving force behind Evolved Digital, formerly Evolve Drupal, the summit we'll be talking about today.

Welcome back to the show and thank you for joining us.

Maya: Pleasure to be here.

Nic: I am Nickle Founder, enlightened Development, and today my co-hosts are joining us for the next four weeks. Katherine Buku, backend developer and architect at my Mindcraft, just a normal backend developer, architect trying to build nice things and not delay projects too much.

Thank you for joining us.

Catherine: Thank you for having me.

Nic: And as usual, John Zi, solution Architect at EAM.

John: Hello, internet Friends.

Nic: Been a while since you've said that. I think

John: I usually say it after I've not been here because when Martin fills in for me, he says it.

Nic: It's come full circle and now to talk how operate and now to talk about our module the week, let's turn it over to Martin Anderson, includes a principal solutions engineer at AA and a maintainer of a number of Drupal modules of his own what have this week.

Martin: Thanks, Nick. Do you wanna start your next Drupal site using a variety of best practices, including Drupal Canvas for page layouts or site templates for opinionated architecture outta the box. Then the recently released Drupal CMS 2.0 could be just what you need now. The 2.0 release was created by Finn Proxima less than a week ago and requires Drupal 11.3.

It is actively maintained and has security and test coverage, and there is a documentation guide that we'll have a link for in the show notes on the development project. There are currently 145 issues, 24 of which are bugs, and there's no direct way to track a Drupal CMS usage today. But the Drupal CMS helper project was added as a dependency late in Drupal CMS 1.0.

So the fact that it has been installed 3,780 times according to drupal.org really is an indication that Drupal CMS has been installed several thousand times at a minimum. Now, the biggest change in Drupal CMS two is the addition of Drupal Canvas for creating and managing layouts. We talked about Drupal Canvas in depth back in episode five 18, so I won't go into too much detail here, but having it set up for you as an out of the box feature is a huge benefit.

CMS 1.0 included a carefully curated content architecture, including some optional recipes for additional content types. With version two, the intent is for site templates to be the source of the content architecture. I'm sure we'll be hearing a lot more about site templates, including a marketplace where people can find them in the coming weeks.

And in particular with Drupal Con Chicago, fast approaching Drupal. CMS two also ships with much more sophisticated AI capabilities. There is a dedicated canvas AI that can be used to generate and populate entire layouts, as well as generating code components based on a user's prompt. And listeners may remember the demo in the Vno Vienna Dres note of using the context control center to automatically create drafts of content updates when marketing information changes, all of that.

Very exciting. Of course, starting with Drupal core 11.3, you'll get all the performance and other improvements in that latest version. So let's talk about Drupal CMS two.

Catherine: Yeah, I, I mean, I, I, I think Drupal CMS is a great, is a great nod to the way that. Many, many, many people actually build out sites now. And I think that's important. Even if, even if like in my daily work, I, I wouldn't use it, right? It's not, it's not what I would use. I can, I can definitely see that it's necessary and, and very sorely needed addition of Drupal or, or whatever we wanna call it.

I think it, it is absolutely hitting on how the vast majority of people who are interacting with Drupal build with it and use it and want to use it.

John: I think it also paves the way for a version, or I won't say a version, because that's not, that's not the correct term.

Nic: Yeah.

John: A, a platform to be built for, for Drupal.

That is you know, similar to something like Squarespace, right? So like, hey, everybody's got their site and everybody's got like Drupal CMS with all of its features and all of its greatness and all of its, all of its AI and layout tools and everything. And like. Here you go. Now you can pay, you know, your, your $30 a month or whatever it is, and build your, build your website using Drupal.

And you know, if you de decide, you know, if you, you know, Ima just imagine the story, guys, if it, if you're like a small startup in your mom's basement and you're like, I need a website, and this service exists, and you, you go and you start a Drupal CMS site, and then, you know, one day you grow to be a Fortune 500 company, you're like, oh, you know, maybe the $30, you know, Drupal CMS hosting isn't working out.

And then you can move into like a custom build of Drupal and just migrate your site into that. Right? Like, isn't that a, isn't that a beautiful picture of the future?

Nic: Yeah.

Maya: A stepping stone, right? Basically, it's great to get the word out there. People get people that haven't heard of Drupal before, maybe hear about Drupal for the first time now.

So I, I love it.

John: Had an idea the other day, and I'm interested to hear what everybody here thinks, but like I was like, huh, Drupal CMS 2.0 now comes with Canvas and has these great layout tools and like wonder if people are gonna stop using WordPress. Like, are they just gonna be like, nah, WordPress, eh, I don't know.

This Drupal thing seems a little bit, a little bit more stable and like, you know, there, there are developers behind it. Uh,

Nic: I don't know. Maybe I'll say,

John: what do you got?

Nic: I, I think it's an opportunity. I, I will say one thing for, lemme respond to your first comment first. You don't migrate out of Drupal CMS to a custom build.

I mean, Drupal CMS is just a recipe. Once you apply it, it just, like all recipes is done. Once you, once you install Drupal cms, you just have Drupal.

John: I, I technically, I, I was trying to make it less technical for,

Nic: for

John: folks.

Nic: But, but I think it's important to note that you're not getting something different than Drupal.

It's just you're getting Drupal with every, all the, a lot of the difficult stuff pre-configured for you. I agree with

John: that point. I I agree with that point a hundred percent. You, yeah. That why I, I, I didn't use the word version because that, you know, anyway. Yeah,

Nic: yeah. Your, your second point. I think there's an opportunity there, but I think, I think there's two or three things that need to be solved in addition to just having CMS in Canvas, right?

One is we need to figure out simple, easy hosting for Drupal, because everything else said one thing, it WordPress, uh, I'll keep those opinions to myself. WordPress is very easy to host on super cheap hosting, right? Sure. You can get a, you can still host a blue host. WordPress. Now, you can't serve a lot of traffic there, but you can serve it.

I think there are, I think triple plus CMS is encouraging a lot of startups around it, and some of those startups are around hosting, right? So if you can get 5, 10, 15, $20 a month hosting, that's kind of, you put it on the sites there and then one click, but updates with automatic updates and that kind of thing.

I think we're on our way. The second thing is

John: I have a question though on that, on that point. Sure. Before you move on to the second thing, like, so I don't know, like I I, I look at Bluehost and I'm, I'm wondering like what's stopping them from doing like a Dral CMS one click install? Like is there, is there a technical limitation there that I'm not aware of?

No, but like,

Nic: no, I, I think, I think there's two, two big things. One is there, I think they just didn't have as much demand for it as they did in the Drupal seven days. Sure. The second thing is Composer is a barrier for some of these places because they don't put it in a place that it can execute.

Properly. But that's one of the advantages of Drupal CMS is they're working, they they do, they spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to get it working on shared hosts and that kind of stuff.

Yeah.

So it's a, it's a problem They're working on solving, but it does need to be solved before it can be the WordPress killer.

The, the other thing is, is you have to people vastly, vastly, vastly underestimate the

capital needing that needs to be invested in WordPress to get a Drupal like experience. Mm-hmm. Yes. The initial outlay, generally setting aside Drupal CMS and one of a lot of the inroads it's making, setting up and getting a site running for WordPress is much lower cost than setting up and getting a site, working for Drupal right outside of the Drupal CMS days.

But once you want to get all the great stuff that Drupal does, it's orders of magnitude more expensive to get that in WordPress because things like. Responsive image management. It just doesn't exist in WordPress at a granular level, uh, a strong content architecture. It doesn't exist in WordPress. The ability, you know, internal WordPress doesn't really have a whole lot of internal APIs, so when you're trying to integrate different modules and different plugins and different systems, they're all walled gardens and getting something, getting something off the ground.

WordPress very lightweight compared to Drupal, maintaining something complex long term, or is the magnitude more expensive in WordPress than Drupal?

John: I know, I know. I know this isn't gonna be a, a selling point for you, Nick, but I'm wondering, like AI in WordPress, like, is that like a thing that they kind of have built in, like is there a WordPress AI similar to like the Drupal AI that, that we're, we're working

Nic: just like everything else in WordPress, every company's doing their own thing.

So there's an elementary ai, there's probably Gutenberg ai, there's probably a WordPress. Just like everything, garbage in, garbage out. I mean, and I

Catherine: think that that's, that's WordPress for me. Right? I haven't, I haven't touched WordPress in I Hand to God must be more than a decade. Right? Like I, I honestly don't have any idea what it's doing now, but what I remember of it was just nonsense.

Just absolute spaghetti nonsense. So, and horrible, horrible to work with for anything that was more than just a base WordPress song. Yeah.

Nic: I mean, the, the thing that I go back to, the way that you define a theme in WordPress, the, the only way the theme will show up in your UI to be installable is if you have the metadata in a style CSS file.

And I'm not saying like that's a legacy way to do it. And you can do, it's supported because WordPress is always gonna have BC that is the only way to get a show, to show up That is the current support. You cannot have a theme show up with, like, there's no info yaml, there's

John: nothing. All right, Nick. All right.

Take a breath. Take a breath. We're gonna, we're gonna bring this back to Drupal and Drupal cms. So I didn't, I didn't mean to go down the, uh, the WordPress rabbit hole, but

Nic: I, I, I think there's opportunity there. And I will say I played with Canvas last week, uh, and it's been maybe two months since I have, there's been a lot of improvements.

It's significantly faster than it was. Like the performance was abysmal the last time I looked at it, and now it's pretty snappy. I will say there's, I don't know if this is because I am a seasoned Drupal developer, or there's just still some kinks to work out. There's still a couple of. Ui things that, like, I, I found myself clicking around a little bit trying to figure out how to add things.

Like it's not in the place I would expect it, but, you know, with any new tool, you kinda have to learn how to interact with it. I, I, I foresee a lot of clients wanting this for landing page content. I think they're gonna really love it. I, I see, I, I hope they clean up the data model and that kind of stuff because

mm-hmm.

I'm not going to like that as a developer, but, you know, I build sites for people. I don't build sites for myself.

Catherine: One of, one of the things that I'm quite grateful for with, with will CMS coming out is that I, I think that open source. It has a hurdle to get past here with the brave new world of ai, right?

And, and people looking at, well, it's, it's right or wrong. Right? Right or wrong. People, people saying, oh, look, it, it's, it takes, it's gonna take me five minutes to spin up a, a website with some other tool, right? That's not open source. And so open source needs to compete with the squarespaces and, and the, the AI builders, the, what's the one that love lovely or something lovable.

Lovable,

Nic: lovable.

Catherine: And the right. There's, so I, I think we're gonna see more of these like build a website in five minutes with AI and everything's gonna be great and it's utopia come up that are not open source. And I think that triple CMS is one of the only things that I've seen that is making a really great effort at competing with that.

John: Hmm.

Nic: Yeah.

John: So Martin, I was gonna ask we've, we've seen Drupal CMS 1.0, we're now at Drupal CMS 2.0. Do we have like a timetable on Drupal CMS 3.0 or, uh, a little too early to tell there?

Martin: Well, we seem to be banging them out about one a year, so hopefully, you know, this time next year. But I guess trees will have the final say on that.

John: All right. Well, I mean, I think that sounds, that sounds fabulous. I would be, I would be excited about that. And Nick, back to your hosting comment, I will say, Martin, cover your ears Pantheon. It does, it seems to do a pretty good job with the composer, the composer, uh, integration and, and using their UI to like composer, update your, uh, your website.

So, I don't know, I don't know if that's any indication of, of, uh, you know, their ability to maybe handle it a little bit better or not. But they seem to do a pretty good job of. I

Nic: mean, the, the problem with all of those ho all three of the main hosts is like, the cheapest plan you can get is 40, 50 bucks a month.

John: Sure. Yeah. I mean, it's not, it's not, it's not cheap. But,

Nic: and, and to compete with that level of WordPress, you need to have something that's 15 bucks a month or something. Or Squarespace 15, 20 bucks a month, right?

John: Yep.

Nic: So, and, and Pantheon, the other thing with Pantheon is their, their scale is, well, awe has this too, but you know, it's 42 bucks a month for the cheapest.

The next is 160. That, that's a big jump for like, for, yeah,

John: there's definitely

Nic: probably type site.

John: There's definitely some demographic and like market, market sort of, yeah. You know, uh, conditions there I think that are, that are. You know, they need to be figured out. But you

Martin: know, I think also the, there's also like an experience piece.

I mean, again, going back to the idea of the like business owner who wants to launch his website

Nic: mm-hmm.

Martin: On some of these SaaS platforms, they can sit down, they can try it out, you know, maybe throw something together, maybe use AI to generate the first draft and then tweak it. And then once they're ready to go, they can basically drop in a credit card.

And you know, like in that one sitting have their site launched and, and publicly available. Whereas all of these other tools, you have to go somewhere else to get the domain and then, you know, get, either, some of them will provide security certificates, but like, I feel like there are a number of pieces in that over o overall experience that if we really want to provide an experience that's equivalent to like a Wix or a Squarespace, that we, you know, there are other pieces in there that we have to solve for as well.

John: Yeah, that is true. Hundred percent.

Nic: Maybe I'll, maybe I'll dust off my old Aegir project where I was just, I was toying with, uh, Drupal site as a service dust.

John: Does it have dust on it or has it turned to sand?

Nic: I mean,

John: the

Nic: servers are long gone. I

John: won't, yeah, got it.

Nic: But maybe alright. Okay. Thank you Martin.

Uh, if folks wanted to suggest in the module of the week MPM project, theme or recipe, how could they go about doing that?

Martin: We're always happy to have lively discussions about potential candidates for module of the week in the Talking Drupal channel of Drupal Slack. Or folks can reach out to me directly as Mandclu on all of the Drupal and social channels.

Nic: Thanks Martin. See you.

Martin: See you then.

Nic: All right, well welcome back Maya. Sorry for canceling last minute when we were gonna talk about this right before New York, but I understand another summit is coming up. Before we talk about the next one though, can you describe what evolved digital summits are and like what, what's the kind of problem you're trying to solve?

Maya: Yeah. No, for sure. No problem at all. I know we were all busy and it was a rough season anyways. Yeah. Okay. Evolve digital. So we are basically, maybe, maybe I'll give you my full spiel first. So we started with Drupal about three years ago. Over three years ago. With a goal to bring different communities together.

It was COVID, uh, people didn't really go to in person events anymore, right? Everyone was scared. So we at Evolving Web, Alex came to me and was like, Maya, I need your help. Do you wanna create an event series or summit series similar to Drupal cams, but a little different? And I'll tell you why. So we basically created this summit to bring people together who build, manage, evolve digital experiences.

So a summit that. Does not only focus on Drupal, despite the name that we had back then involved Drupal, we really provide a space to, for people to come and talk about their digital experiences, their problems about their CMS they're using how they use it for their organization. So it's a lot of digital teams, end users who are coming to share their challenges, but also their solutions and key takeaways.

So it's like problem first, I would say not. Not platform first, if that makes sense.

Nic: Okay. And,

Maya: Yeah, and we focus really on like different sectors. So we are inviting a lot of people from the higher ed sector, from healthcare government, so anyone who is in the digital space to tell their digital story.

And I think that's what, uh, differentiates Evolve Digital from a lot of other camps or conferences because we, we really try to give the space to people to to share what they're, what they're doing instead of, and I mean, I'm working for an agency too, but it's different right? When an agency goes up or somebody, or developer and talks about their.

Their coding experience or what, like theoretical talks. We really try to provide case studies and it seems to have worked. I mean, we've been doing this for three years now and we have like three to four summits per year. So, yeah. So that's basically evolved digital and yeah.

John: So first thing, like I always think about whenever I see these events right, is like, you know, who are they for?

Right? And, and a lot of times you see Drupal events that are very focused on developers. Not some, some events like designed for Drupal, very focused on designers. I'm wondering like Evolve digital, what's the, what's the target audience, what's your ideal? You know, who's the ideal person in the room for you guys?

Maya: Okay. Honestly, everyone who is working. In the web or in the web space. So really still developers, still designers that you were mentioning, marketers now, and that's like the name change, and I can talk about this in a second, but Evolve Digital has helped us to also attract more marketers and content strategist, communications people to come because evolved Drupal was just like, oh no, I don't work with Drupal.

And they didn't wanna come. So, but it wasn't never, it was never about only that. So we really tried to get everyone of those people, but also digital leaders to come. So, the director of web services from UFT or University of Toronto, excuse me, or you know, like anyone who has the power of bringing their team as well, like not just them, but their team or bringing it back to their team and with ideas of how to.

Do things better. And now of course AI is huge topic. So I'm, like Nick said earlier, I'm currently planning the Evolve Digital Toronto Summit on March 6th, so, uh, almost in a month. So I receive submissions and at least 50% include AI in it again. So it's just what it is. Right. And and yeah, so

John: any, any insight, and I, I apologize, I didn't, I didn't give you this question ahead of time so you could, uh, prepare for it.

But any insight to the, like, the breakdown of, of the folks that are there, like, oh, it's 50% developers, designers, 50%, you know, business marketing executive types. Like do you, do you know what that breakdown is?

Maya: Yeah, I would. I mean, I don't have the data right in front of me, right? Sure. But I think it's about 40% really end users like mm-hmm.

From digital teams, from, uh, healthcare, higher ed, a lot, because Evolving Web has a lot of higher ed clients, and so for us it's just easier, like personally inviting them

Nic: Yeah.

Maya: To come. But then also, also of course, the Drupal community. Like it, we see a lot of developers from the Drupal community still coming, which is great.

And despite the name, like I have to say from the beginning, we still have to evolve Drupal as part of the summit. Like it's a track name because we didn't wanna get rid of it completely because Drupal's still part of it, and we always wanted to be part of it. So. DRAL community. Then we are also always touching base.

I'm looking for local communities wherever we do our summits, I try to find the accessibility community there. I would try to find local design communities and meetups and reach out to them and invite them to really bring different people together and also increase, again, the knowledge sharing, right, that those different communities bring together.

So, and we have this, I wouldn't say issue with Drupal, but you know, like that's why I'm so excited about Drupal CMS 2.0 and Drupal Canvas. It's like it attracts new people and our summit helps to bring this to completely different people who might have never heard of Drupal. So, yeah, so I think that's part of it too.

So I would say again, 40% and users, maybe 20% is. Agency owners or people that work for an agency. I mean, we, I'm always looking for sponsors to also obviously help us with the summit. And then, yeah, 10% probably like, new people to the different communities or like students. We are always inviting students as well to, you know, like bring help the next generation to grow as well.

But mostly, mostly we try really to focus on like the digital teams, which is also why our program really focuses on that, right? Like giving giving people who are using Drupal in their organization to come and share their case study.

Catherine: Yeah, I like the idea of it being like a more of a curated conversation than a traditional summit. I think that that's quite powerful.

Maya: Yeah. It, it, it has worked. I mean, why, why would I organize the 11th summit now? So, it's definitely great in my opinion. I, obviously, I'm biased, but

Catherine: Yeah. So you, you said the rebrand was three years ago?

Maya: No, actually we only started last year. So, or did it last year? Sorry. We've had the name Evolve Drupal for about two years and then rebranded it. We, we. Honestly did it. I don't even remember exactly why we chose that name. It was like, we want to evolve the Drupal space, right? Yeah, yeah. Okay. Evolving, web evolving is in there too.

But honestly, I don't even remember having thought about that. I, I was just like, let's evolve Drupal. So this is where it came from. And as evolving web, we are just pretty well known the, in the Drupal community. So it was supposed to be like a stepping stone for us to build a brand. So we've done that.

And then it was very, very hard to really attract also like the people that I was mentioning, because I, how often did I receive an answer saying like, oh, I don't work with Drupal. I'm sorry, this is not for me. And I had to explain to them, it's not only about Drupal. We, we've always had an ex like a design track.

We've always had a digital craftsmanship track or. Case study track, communications track and so on. So it was just misleading. So that's what, yeah.

Catherine: I I also think that the, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. Go ahead.

Maya: You're good.

Catherine: I, I also think that Drupal itself, again, let's take CMS out of it, but, you know, Drupal itself has, has, I think as a lot of these platforms has, have, had been less of a product and more of like a, a piece of a larger ecosystem, right?

So we've got, we've got ais we're connecting to, we've got s front ends, we've got, you know, APIs, we've got, uh, it, it makes sense, right, that these, that these summits and talks are much broader than Drupal because in our day-to-day lives of working with Drupal, we're very often working with a much larger system than just Drupal, the product.

And I think that's been kind of the path for thank goodness, like at least the last decade.

John: Yeah. I mean, I think you also, and, and my, you kind of highlighted this a little bit in your, in your answer, but like, you kind of like immediately set the tone for folks with the name of the event, right? Because they're like, they're, they're probably not gonna read the second and third sentence or paragraph.

Once they see the title, they're gonna be like, nah, nope, all set. Like, I don't wanna, I don't wanna talk to a bunch of, of the developers about like their code and their commits and they, that sort of stuff. You know, I need to run my marketing team and, and use my, my marketing software. You know, and I think that like changing the name kind of softens that right a little bit and, and allows us to almost like.

Backdoor Drupal into the conversation where we're like, oh, you have all these marketing problems. Ugh, man. Only there were a system with a bunch of APIs and a bunch of AI built in and a, and a layout tool that you could, you could integrate into all your systems to help you solve this. Oh wait, have you ever heard of Drupal, right?

Mm-hmm. Definitely, definitely I think, uh, makes the case for the name change. I will say one, one last point on that is I was very lucky, uh, not this past year, but I think the year previously to, uh, speak at Evolve Digital in Boston. I was on a panel and we were, uh, we were comparing a few different CMSs.

So I think like, you know, overall, that also helps inform, inform folks and attendees as to like, yes, there are other options out there and you know, maybe, maybe Drupal isn't a hundred percent right for you, even though I don't believe that, but maybe it's not, and like, here's some other, here's some other options and some other things that you can, you can kind of learn.

So, definitely like a wide range of, wide range of content there, which is, which is awesome.

Maya: Yeah. Thank you, John. Yeah, and that's the thing, right? Like in the end of the day, the, the CMS needs to work for the client or for their, for the organization. Mm-hmm. So absolutely people might not always be the best solution on CMS, so just exploring the options and, I mean, obviously Drupal is close to our heart, but in the end of the day, it wouldn't make them happy either, right?

If it's the wrong one.

Nic: Yeah. So. So you've mentioned a couple times that there's tracks and diff in different, uh, target audiences for Evolve Digital. Can you talk a little bit about how the summits typically work? Uh, as far as format and structure?

Maya: Mm-hmm. Yeah, happy to. Especially because it's so different, I think, than from what I've seen at cams.

And I've been to lots of Drupal cams now and other conferences. So we, we have lots of different tracks. So really legit communication strategy, communications, uh, yeah, communications, marketing design again, evolved Drupal. We also had in New York for the first time, a WordPress track. But again, like it's more WordPress case studies then, or Drupal case studies.

Uh, then we are focusing also on governance accessibility. So we really cover a lot of different themes and topics, and we are only able to do that because our sessions are 25 minutes long, most of them. So they're really short. Uh, so that the speaker really focuses on what do I want to convey? What's the most important part, what's the main takeaway?

And then we have lots of networking time in between as well. So. In the morning, like long breakfast during registration, then coffee breaks and a long lunch break, a reception afterwards, uh, after the day so people have the time to follow up with the speaker to talk about it again. And by having only 25 minute sessions, we are also able to have more speakers and more talks on the agenda on the program to elevate the amount of content that people can take away and with, and yeah, and learn during the day, right?

So it's very quick. But it's, it's been pretty good so far. We do, I have to say, we do sometimes give a, like have 45 or 60 minutes slots as well, depending on the topic, or if it's a panel, right? Like a 25 minute panel wouldn't make sense with four people. So we do have that as well. But yeah, so that's about the programming and, and speaker selection.

I would say again we are trying to really give the space to people who have, uh, yeah, who can really tell a story about their digital, uh, experience or project that they worked on. And mostly case studies again but then obviously with ai, sometimes, like even with ai, to be honest, like they're, if they're trying to explain something and like show how they use ai, they would show it by explaining how they're using it at their institution, for example.

Yeah.

John: So, uh, we, you know, obviously we talked about format, we talked about how you curate, you know, kind of curate the content for the day. I'm wondering like, what's your approach or philosophy on selecting program programming and speakers, and then how do you kind of like balance the,

Nic: I dunno,

John: right amount of Drupal stuff versus AI stuff versus, you know, marketing case studies versus panels.

Like how do you, how do you find that kind of like harmony between, you know, the, the, the pro the, the program you're putting together and then like, how do you, how do you select the, your, your speakers.

Maya: Well, first of all, I have to say I do a lot of personal outreach to my network, to the network of Alex and Suzanne who've been in the industry forever.

So they have a vast network. I go into LinkedIn, look at somebody I know and look at their connection and look at their profile. I look at where they work. I look like it's a lot of work. So, but I am really trying to find people who actively, proactively, who can tell a digital story and then invite them to.

To hop on a call, explain them what we're doing, and then to submit a session or brainstorm what they could talk about. And if they don't want to, they usually have connections and know somebody else. Mm. Especially if we go to a city that we're not from, like obviously I have less connections in New York or Toronto because I'm based in Montreal.

So that always helps. And we do want to find local speakers too, because again, they are the ones who can bring local people. Yeah, so that's one big factor that we always consider the personal outreach helps as well to curate the program in the end of the day, because I already know the speaker and what they can talk about.

And if they are like, you know, you get a sense of if they're a good speaker or not, if you talk to them most, most of the time at least. And then I also have to say, I, I, it's changed a bit. I'm getting a lot of. Speaker submissions now, or session submissions without reaching out. That wasn't the same earlier on.

So like, we're doing something right, so people wanna present, but it, it depends. Right. A lot of other agencies as well, or, and we, we don't want to have people selling their products on stage. Like, that's not

Nic: the idea that, that was actually one of my questions. Not, not just for speakers, but for revolving web in general.

Right. You know, I, I went to the one in Boston, I think last year or the year before. It was great. I, I mean, I didn't expect it to be, you know, in your face sales, I, I imagine evolving web beyond, you know, helping build a community and all that kind of stuff. There, there's a value proposition there for Evolving Web.

I, I'm curious about how you balance that with providing just a, a good experience and a good event, because like I said, I, I didn. I didn't expect it, but I also didn't feel like I walked in the door and it's this evolving web, evolving web. Like it wasn't, uh, it wasn't an advertisement. Right. Thank

Maya: you for

Nic: saying this, but I'm sure, I'm sure you do get value out of it, and this connection made that stuff.

So how do you balance that, that side of it?

Maya: Yeah. No, thank you for saying this, because it's hard to convince other agencies to bring them on board and sponsor because they're always like, oh, this is your event and it's going to be always evolving web, evolving web. And I'm like, no, I, I'm trying to give you as much exposure as, as evolving web.

So, we obviously, like we are investing a lot of money into that and you've experienced it. We always have like a cool you know, like the food, like we don't have sandwiches. We're trying to have in Boston. We have tamales. Yeah. And like, you know, good stuff. So we're trying to create a good experience.

And this costs money obviously. So. But in the end of the day, if you create a good experience, you're more, more likely to be on top of mind in the future. And with events and summits or conferences in general, and we all know this, by even just going to a DrupalCon and talking to potential, uh, or prospects potential leads, it takes time until they publish an RFP until they are ready to, for a project, uh, or for sale.

So in the end of the day, it's the community aspect and it's about creating a network, growing your network, building a relationship. And then hopefully at some point they'll be like, oh, I need a new website. I like these people and I'm gonna reach out to them. So in the end of the day, the summit is just a stepping stone for that.

And that's why I'm always, or we are inviting other agencies too, because in the end of the day, it's what you make out of your attendance, right? If you connect with the people there. You build a relationship with them, it doesn't mean that they will come to us. It could mean that they also come to you and you're bringing our clients, the agency part, other agencies could connect with our clients.

Right. Again, I didn't relates a little bit to what I was saying earlier. In the end of the day, the CMS, it depends, or the choice of CMS depends on what the client needs or the Yeah.

Nic: You

Maya: know, the project and it's the same for an agency. Like if you feel like that agency works better for, would be better for your needs.

Go for it. You know, it's not, we don't see it as a competition, unfortunately. A lot of people see it that way. But me personally, I mean, I don't own evolving web, obviously I've been there for over four years and like I'm supporting them as much as I can. But in the end of the day, what our, my main goal is to give everyone a great experience and have fun and learn, you know, and I think we,

John: yeah, I mean, I, I think a lot of, a lot of what, how people evaluate companies nowadays is, is not so much like, well, I mean, it's a lot of like, who, you know, and like the, the relationship, but it's also thought leadership, right?

And to see, to see like, hey, evolving Web has a, has a conference. They're bringing people together from all, all walks of life. And like they're talking about these really interesting things is you know, is definitely, definitely a feather in your cap when you go into that RFP process for sure. I will say, interesting, interesting story about your last point of like, hey, there's kind of like a long tail of like, you know, making a relationship, getting into the room with the right people and then, you know, the the event in Boston. Uh, I literally was in the lobby before I registered talking to somebody and they were like, oh, we have this problem.

And, you know, we were talking, we talked for like 30 minutes and, you know, at the end of that there was a, there was a, a connection made there and, you know, we, we stayed in touch, followed up and got really close to almost working together. And then, you know, it didn't, didn't necessarily work out, but it was definitely one of those, those stories of like, Hey, listen, we, we were able to have that conversation.

We were able to see if it made sense to work together and like, you know, at the end of the day it didn't really work out 'cause the organization shifted in a different direction and that happens. But you know, the first step is always, they always having that conversation. So, I definitely think, I definitely think you're right on with that, with that point.

Catherine: Kind of a, a related, a related question or a question that jumps off where you were at before. From a, from an organizer's perspective, what have you learned as you've worked with different cities and, uh, different communities, and how has that influenced the way that you've set these summits up over the years?

Like, have you, have you, you mentioned learning about things as you're doing them, so I'm interested in how, what have you learned and how has it affected?

Maya: Mm-hmm. It's a good question. So we obviously, the more often you do it in the same city, the easier it gets because you set the tone, people know you, you can rein them and then expend, I think the biggest difference really because, and we learned throughout the time, throughout the summits or yeah, throughout the series that the 25 minutes, for example, ha are what people want the most. Plus the panels. But in the beginning, our sessions were longer, I think we had 40 minutes and then a couple of lightning talks, like five minutes, but that was too short.

So like we experimented with the session length. So that's changed. In terms of city, again, I really learned that it's important to involve the community, the local community wherever we go. So I tried to touch base with what I did in, for New York, for example, with the Drupal NYC. Organizers pulled them in.

I gave them, uh, during the opening remarks, 10 minutes to introduce themselves. They had a conference room where they could meet to get people to bring the Drupal NYC back to life because it kind of unfortunately died down a little bit as well during COVID and over the years. So it's really important to really touch base with those local communities.

In New York, we, we did two summits. Last year was the second one, and we did for the first time, a two day one. It was a lot of work. A lot of more work, even though it's technically just twice the same thing, but you have more speakers to contact to follow up with logistically. But it also was a great experience to, to.

Mostly con have more time to connect with the audience, with the attendees, right? One day is very short. People want to learn. They go to the sessions. Yes, there's networking, but then us as organizers as well, we are so busy, especially me, I'm just running around making sure everything's going well. I don't have the time actually to talk to people.

I, so I actually enjoyed having the time to see the speakers twice, if not even three times, because we also always do a VIP pre-summit dinner the night before the summit to invite the speakers and sponsors to connect again for them to set the, set the tone for the upcoming days. So that was really a big learning.

I would say that two days is a lot of work, but also more valuable to build. Connections and a relationship.

Nic: Yeah. The one of the ways that we actually handled that with Ned. Can it, it's funny to hear how different things are because I think John, didn't we experiment with shorter sessions one year and we found that that was not good.

It's so funny how, like, it, it was a while ago.

John: I, I, I don't remember, I don't remember exactly what we did, but I do

Nic: remember, I remember being, yeah, it different formats. It was too short. It's too too short. But it maybe's depends

Maya: on the topic, right? Like if

Nic: you focus, I, I think that it's more developer than it needs to be a little bit more in depth.

But the, the thing that we found that I think that's been really successful for us for our second day is it's a lot of work still. I don't, I'm not minimizing that, but our second day is more, well we call it a summit, but it's different than your summit. It's, it's the higher ed summit, right? We're inviting all the people.

Related to higher ed. There's also trainings, I think, going on. So there's still a lot of organization, a lot of planning, a lot of stuff that goes into it. But it's not like, okay, we're adding another 25 sessions and we have to communicate with all of them. But it's a way to still have some addit, some, some more value on a second day, but not, not quite as much, uh, not quite as much as doubling the amount of work.

Right.

Maya: Yeah.

Nic: I can't imagine doing two days of full sessions. That would be,

Maya: uh, and then on top of that, we had two different floors, you know, and so we had to move our banners, backdrops everything down after full day of like, you know, talks in the summit after working already for 12 hours because you obviously show up early too to set up.

So in that sense, it a lot was a lot of work, but that was also just on us. And unfortunately then you're not being available. But on the other hand, people. Did give positive feedback about the two different venue spaces because it kept people more engaged and like, excited, oh, where do I have to go? And, and it created even

Nic: interesting.

Maya: I don't know. So it wasn't that bad afterwards.

John: I'm, I'm super interested that you that people enjoy the 25, the shorter session times because I, I see both sides of it, right? Because like, sometimes you get into a session and you're like, uh, nope, this one's, this one's not a, not a winner. Like, I'm not really interested in this.

And you're like, I don't wanna get up. I feel bad. Like, so like 25 minutes, like you can do anything for 25 minutes, right? But I do just, I remember this one time, uh, I was, I was, uh, again in, in Boston and actually maybe it was New York. Anyway I, I, I was like, oh man, this talk is great. And I was like.

Oh wait, it's an, it's an hour and there's a another session starting that I want to go to. What do I do? So like, I don't know, I think you, you, you guys do record things, which is great. But like, you gotta kind of like really hone in on that schedule as to what you, what you're gonna go to and, and, you know.

Yeah. It's hard to make time and, and that's true of any conference. It's hard to make time for everything, right?

Maya: Mm, totally. I do plan on having some follow up webinars. So maybe even like, I'm trying to think about ways, and maybe I'll do surveys moving forward and ask the audience or the attendees, what was their favorite talk?

What, which one would they love to hear again? And like, invite them that speaker specifically to webinars to give this kind of opportunity

Nic: Yeah.

Maya: To them now.

Nic: So for somebody who's kind of on the fence about attending. Or thinking about submitting a talk, what would you say some of the biggest benefits are for those two, two groups of people?

And, you know, how, how can you get the most value outta participating? I almost feel like this is the question you should be asking attendees, but maybe you can answer first and I'll give my opinion.

Maya: Yeah, I was gonna say Nick and John, you both should just answer that. I, I think it's mostly about the cross like the value that it creates between disciplines.

So, you know, bringing different people together under one roof. Designers, marketers, in the end of the day, the designers need to be able to work with the developers as well, right? Like, so learning from one another, building that connection and the understanding. And d all the different perspectives is what Evolve Digital really provides the attendees, I would say.

Do you agree?

John: I mean,

Nic: yeah, go ahead John. Go

John: ahead. Oh, I was just gonna, I was just gonna say like, you know, I think like one thing we haven't asked is like ticket price. What, what's a typical ticket price for, for one of these, one of these events? Because I, I think, and the reason I'm asking that is I think like for the cost, like if it's in a area that's near you, like, and you can go, I think the cost is very reasonable for the kind of like day full of content that you get and the subjects that you hit on.

So, I mean, I think that's like a, it's like an easy sell, but I'll let you answer the cost question.

Maya: Yeah. I mean, for New York it was a bit more expensive just because it's New York, but usually we, it ranges between, for Toronto right now, the early bird price is $95.

Nic: Yeah.

Maya: And then to 150, so.

Nic: Mm-hmm.

Maya: And considering you get all the talks plus breakfast, lunch, reception, drinks, it's pretty,

Nic: yeah.

I'll say, I'll say I mean, it's more expensive than most camps, right? It's a slightly different target audience. I definitely felt like I got the val, like I didn't go to it trying to get business or anything. Like, I treated it more as like trying to get back out into the community and kinda see what's going on and see some people I hadn't seen in a while.

So I wasn't really. I think if I was treating it purely as a marketing opportunity, I probably would've gotten more, quote unquote value out, like cash value. But I wasn't going for that. I was going for community. See some talks, see that kind of thing. I will say I, I love technical talks like right?

I, I mean, I'm a developer, what developer doesn't, but I'll say some of the, it felt more like design for Drupal, which from, from like a, a learning perspective, I feel like has always been more valuable to me because it's something that I, I'm not an expert in. So I'm learning, like, I remember I learned about sas a design for Drupal, and I learned about, uh, yeah, I mean, I didn't really ever end up using it professionally, but like human and like all these tooling for like automatically, like I, you learn stuff outside the space that you are an expert in when you go to something like the Vault, Drupal, uh, of all digital.

So I think it's well worth it. I would say, I would say, yeah, it's don't, don't be too surprised at the price. It is a little bit more than it can, but it, it's a different target audience I think. I would definitely go, again, I kind of wish I spoke. I the reason why, I know you reached out to me, the reason why, I don't know if I told you this, but I, I was planning my vacation.

It was gonna be on the week of Evolve Drupal Boston. And so I didn't think I was gonna be able to make it, but we ended up switching up plans at the last minute. And so, I'm glad I was able to make it. I, it, I, I definitely came away with, with a few kind of Drupal specific things and a bunch of things that were kind of generic, you know, more general marketing things that I could take to clients and and stuff.

And I get to see a lot of people I hadn't seen in a year. So yeah, well worth it. I would, I would definitely go again, if you come back to Boston.

Maya: Well, I was, I was just gonna say, I have good news for you. The plan is to go back to New York in the summer, uh, probably August, uh, and then Boston, December 5th.

Nic: Oh.

Maya: So,

Nic: okay.

Maya: Just before the holidays, you know?

Nic: Yeah. Very good. Yeah, it's two days before Thetas, which is a very, it's a very famous, uh, Colombian holiday. They like candles. I've realized candles outside to like, remember every, everything that happened. So it's almost,

Maya: that's a plan. I have nothing booked yet.

The venue is not booked yet, but I think December 5th, Boston.

Nic: Yeah. Lemme, lemme know.

John: So let's, let's dive into that a little bit further and look, look ahead. I'm curious so you talked about New York, you talked about maybe Boston any new cities on the horizon, any new cities you're thinking about or or new formats, content types, those sorts of things.

Like what, what do you, what do you guys have in the, kind of like in the lab that you're working on for, for the next, the next iterations?

Maya: So in terms of cities, doing it in a new city just is just so much more work, right? So this year and last year was, uh, quite, quite a lot. So we decided to go back to Toronto, go back to New York, go back to Boston.

Next year we do wanna, like we, we are considering Chicago. Maybe we're considering. Washington, but not right now, to be honest. Vancouver also a different Canadian city, but yeah, we'll have to see For now, the focus is on 2026 in terms of formats we added workshops to our summit in New York. Oh

Nic: really?

They like

Maya: training

or,

Nic: so that

Maya: one hour or 60 to 90 minute workshops. So we had John from Digital Polygon doing AI marketing workshops, so that was really great. We had automatic, so usually the sponsors get a slot then. Okay. Automatic had, uh, something, a workshop about WordPress, uh, and then pantheon their content publisher workshop.

And I think that was it actually those three. Uh, so that was new and. It was pretty successful. We, in the beginning thought of charging money for it, but that didn't really work so we'll. We are trying to just make this as an add-on for people for free as well. So still working on those for Toronto. Maybe a design focused one or UX and digital strategy.

So if anyone has ideas, I'm also open to ideas. Like it's really it really like cities and formats depend a little bit on who wants to help us pull this off. So here we are. If anyone wants to help me organize these in the future, future, I'm open to working with people together on this. We do have a concept that works, but we are not opposed to making it bigger and better.

Like that's always the goal. Right?

Nic: Yeah. Makes sense.

Maya: Yeah.

Nic: Well, my. Thank you for, thank you for coming back and joining us to talk about Evolve Digital.

Maya: Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure.

John: Do you have questions or feedback? Reach out to talking Drupal on the socials with the handle talking Drupal or by email with [email protected].

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Nic: Alright, Maya, if our listeners wanted to get in touch, what's the best way for them to do that?

Maya: Definitely LinkedIn. I think that's the fastest way. Or slack, Drupal, the Drupal Slack channel. My name is Maya Shafer and on Slack I think as well, so pretty easy.

Nic: Okay. And Catherine, how about

Catherine: you? Same. Drupal Slack is probably the easiest way you can, you can find me on the Drupal side if you prefer that under blech, but Drupal Slack is the easiest.

Nic: John, how about you?

John: Uh, you can find me [email protected]. You can find me on social media and, uh, Drupal, uh, D oh Drupal Slack, uh, at John Zi, and you can find out about m at ep com.

Nic: And you can find me pretty much everywhere at Nicks van N-I-C-X-B-A-N.

John: And if you've enjoyed listening,

we've enjoyed talking.

Have a good one, everyone.

Woo