Talking Drupal #569 - Site Templates

John: [00:00:00] 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 569, Site Templates On today's show, we're talking about site templates, what they do, and how you can use them, with our guests, Tim Lehnen and Adam Globus-Hoenich.

We'll also cover Haven as our module of the week. Welcome to Talking Drupal. Our guests today are Tim Lehnen and Adam Globus-Hoenich. Reading T- uh, Adam's haiku first. Drupal 19 years, much more... Oh, m- oh, no. I gotta start over. Wait. Drupal 19 years, much core work and other stuff. Also, ride my bike. I think we're gonna require everybody to do haiku.

It's way easier.

Tim: It's very meditative. I, I'm, I'm, I'm enjoying this.

John: It is. And I got all the information that I [00:01:00] needed. That other voice you hear is Tim Lehnen, who is the CTO of the Drupal Association, where he leads the engineering team behind drupal.org to build the tools that help contribute build Drupal.

With somewha- s- with somewhere north of a dozen Talking Drupal appearances behind him, he needs about as much introduction as the issue queue does. Tim, welcome to the show.

Tim: Thank you. Thanks for having me back.

John: North of a dozen Talking Drupal appearances. I think we're gonna have to catalog all of those in the show notes.

Uh, I am John Picozzi, solutions architect at EPAM, and my co-hosts are, joining us for the second week, Amber Matz, developer advocate at Tugboat.

Stephen: Hello.

John: And, uh, filling in for Nic this week, Nic is taking a well-deserved vacation, uh, Stephen Cross, developer advocate every day.

Stephen: Yeah, I was going along with the rest of [00:02:00] the developer advocates here.

John: There you go.

Stephen: Happy to be here, John. Hope I can fill Nic's shoes well.

John: I mean, I don't see any Lego in your background, so- That's true ... I'm already, uh, slightly disappointed, but that's all right. We are gonna turn it over to Martin Anderson-Clutz, a product marketing manager for Drupal at Acquia, and a maintainer of a number of Drupal modules, um, to talk about our site template of the week.

Martin. That's

Martin: right. Thanks, John. Have you ever wanted to quickly spin up a flexible website for a nonprofit built on the power of Drupal CMS? There's a site template for that. It's called Haven, and it was created in December of 2025 by Pamela Barone. Uh, but is co-maintained by the Drupal CMS team. So Se- Secrena, Lori, penesquito, friendofproxima, Jurgen Haas, and TheJimBirch, for example.

It has a 1.0.3 version available, which was released last month, and it works [00:03:00] on Drupal CMS too, so you'll be using with Drupal 11, probably Drupal 11.3 or newer. It is actively maintained, has security and test coverage. And has six open issues, three of which appear to be bugs but don't seem to be tagged as such in the GitLab issue queue.

Now, Haven ships as one of the site templates included with Drupal CMS 2. So instead of installing a blank CMS site and wiring everything up, you can pick Haven in the installer to get a fully designed content-ready nonprofit site. Out of the box, you get content types for blog posts, projects, and people profiles, plus standard pages, so a small organization has somewhere to put their work and their team on day one.

It bundles newsletter sign-up and donation add-ons. You can use MailChimp for sign-ups and your choice of a simple Stripe donation form or full commerce-based recurring donations when they're ready to grow into it. Search and web form-based forms come baked in along with an editorial [00:04:00] workflow and a content editor role that's already been granted the right permissions so a non-technical volunteer can log in and start editing safely.

The design itself is built with Drupal Canvas, Drupal's next generation layout creation tool, so the page layouts are real editable, uh, component trees, not locked down t-templates. The blog page and other project views ship with pre-built template layouts that you can rearrange visually. Those components come from a dedicated Haven theme with things like hero billboards, section grids, buttons and headings, so the whole site hangs together and stays on brand.

The theme also has WCAG 2.2 level AA compliance, so it builds you a site that not only looks great but is inclusive too Listings use infinite scroll, and there's a curated add-on list wired into project browser, accessibility tools and AI assistant Google Tag. So the what do I install next question already has solid options that can be enabled directly through the [00:05:00] UI.

A lot of us longtime Drupalists cut our teeth building sites for nonprofits. It's how a whole generation learned Drupal, and Haven is basically that starter project done for you. A low-effort, low-cost way to give a nonprofit a real website they'll never outgrow, because under the professional design, it's just Drupal CMS.

So let's talk about Haven.

John: I, I love how you ended that, Martin, with a, "Back in my day, we built websites for nonprofits."

Adam: I just want to say, when you said there are six bugs sitting there, it took everything I had to not immediately just, like, go find out what the bugs are. Open the issue queue. I was like, "Oh my God, six bugs.

I haven't been checking."

John: I will also say, I, I think I, I think I helped maybe inadvertently with the, um, the Stripe donation form, uh, recipe at, at some point, um, uh, you know, uh, last year maybe it was or, or whenever. And I was like, "Oh, I remember. I remember that. That's pretty [00:06:00] cool and spiffy and works really well."

So, um, yeah, I mean, I think overall this is, this is a great way for a nonprofit to get, get going very quickly.

Amber: Yeah, I'm really intrigued by it because I'm, um, I lead a, a local accordion club, and the site is currently on GoDaddy, and every month I've gotta use, um- But you know what? I will say one thing for GoDaddy.

So the former president, who's 85, she, um, they made her, um, uh, migrate from a HTML site to their new kind of, you know, layout template thing, and she was so excited. She was like... And she did it all herself. She was like, "Through the power of AI, I was able to migrate my HTML." So their AI tools enabled her to totally migrate the site from HTML to their new system.

But now I'm like, now I'm president, and I'm, I'm doing the, the newsletter manually, and there's always this constant stream of [00:07:00] content. And I've almost done this job for about a year now, and I'm realizing, like, I'd really like to move to Drupal, but do I have the time? But this pro- this, um, site template looks like just the ticket because it's got the things that I need for, for a nonprofit.

And having, you know, having not done that job before, I didn't really know what I needed, but now this looks really good. So just from that perspective, well done. Like, it seems to check all the boxes.

John: Sweet. I, I feel like, I feel like, um, I, I wanna insert the, like, uh, Peter Griffin falling GIF when somebody mentions GoDaddy, where he's just like-

you know, real, like and it just goes on for, like, six minutes of him just writhing in pain. But anyway, we've, we've moved- It's

Amber: actually not that... Like, I used to feel that way, but it's, it's decent. It honestly is. So it's good competition for Drupal CMS.

John: Oh, oh. I'm a Travis

Adam: diehard,

John: man. I don't

Adam: know if I'm, uh-

John: Yeah.

Yeah, I'm with you ... into the GoDaddy as being good. I'm [00:08:00] with, I'm with you on that one. Anyway, let's go back to talking about our site template here. So, um, feels pretty fully featured. Uh, Martin, did you have a chance to, or have you in the past, installed this at all? Just curious.

Martin: So how I came across Haven was actually in the lead-up to, I think it was Drupal in a Day at, uh, Drupal Dev Days in Athens this year.

Mm. There was some discussion about potentially using a site template on Drupal CMS instead of starting people off with vanilla Drupal, because that is- Mm ... kind of what Drupal CMS is meant to be, is a better starting point. Um, and so I spent a little time with, with a few of the different sort of out-of-the-box site templates that come with Drupal CMS.

And for me, g- Haven actually seemed like probably the most kind of feature-rich out-of-the-box one, because it has a number of content types that you get, whereas other ones, it was usually, like, you know, one or two, in [00:09:00] some cases three. Um, you know, some of the, the extra features really seemed sort of, you know, uh, well-considered and sort of fitting with the overall theme, whereas, you know, some of the other ones, it just, um, you know, they look pretty, but there isn't necessarily, like, a lot of, like, content architecture out of the box.

And for me, Haven was probably, uh, as I say, kind of the, the, the most sort of, um, you know, built out of, of the ones that you get out of the box. And so, uh, probably for the Drupal in a Day that we're gonna be delivering in Rotterdam, uh, in just a few short weeks, we're gonna be using Haven as really the starting point that people learning Drupal will, will be using as their kind of introduction to Drupal.

I,

John: I- Try to get those bugs fixed, man. Sheesh. I just, uh, I just had a great idea for, for either Drupal in a Day or maybe some spinoff of Drupal in a Day. But, like, it's, it's like, it's like a, it's, it's almost like a, a, a marketing pitch to folks who [00:10:00] need a new website to be like, "Hey, Drupal in a Day," and the outcome is gonna be you get a brand-new website- You

Tim: actually have your site, yeah

John: in, in your industry focus, right? So you have Haven for nonprofits. Maybe, you know, you pick a site template for, for e-commerce and a site template for some o- some other thing, and then, like, boom, there you go. People, people would be, would be, like, uh, waving their hand, "Take, take my money, Martin," or, you know, whoever.

Maybe not specifically Martin, but-

Stephen: All right, Martin, Martin's got to go unlock There's an o- there's an opportunity here. There's an opportunity here, too, for someone to, like, do a video tutorial online of starting with downloading Haven and customizing it for someone's needs in an hour, you know?

John: Yeah. If only, if only we knew a platform and, and, um, Drupal-focused thingamajigger that could do that.

Tim: Like a podcast or something. Yeah.

John: Yeah, I mean- Uh, yeah ...

Stephen: those things are hard to find these days.

John: Mm. Yep. It's all live [00:11:00] streams and Twitch.

Stephen: It's a real mystery. Yeah,

John: yeah. All right. Well, Martin, um, as always, very topical, um, not module, but site template of the week. Uh, if folks wanted to sugg- suggest a module or a site template or recipe or really any gosh darn thing that has to do with Drupal, how could they go about doing that?

Martin: We are always happy to talk about 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 a variety of Drupal and social platforms. And I'll also throw in a quick plug to, uh, for our webinar that actually Tim and I will be on a week from today, and there's a link for that, uh, down in the show notes as well.

John: Fabulous. We love, we love webinars. And, uh, Luke does highlight, uh, in the chat here, um, Drupal, uh, uh, Drupal in a Day is free, I believe, so, you know, you don't have to have to pay for it. So sorry, Martin, no- Free and

Martin: free lunch.

John: Yes. [00:12:00] What? All

Amber: right. Are you saying there is- Okay ... such thing as a free lunch? What?

John: You're, like,

Amber: upending my world

John: view. Sold. Thanks, Martin.

Martin: Thanks, all.

John: All right. Let's jump into site templates, which is our, our primary topic today. Um, Tim, can you start at, like, a super high level and tell us, uh, for folks that might not know yet, what a site template is and, like, what problem is it trying to solve?

Tim: Well, to be honest, I think Martin's, um, you know, highlight of Haven is kind of a good case study of this, right? Because the, the fundamental idea of Drupal CMS, and therefore the fundamental idea of site templates, is making, uh, giving you a head start when starting with Drupal, right? This is the, this is the whole purpose.

So our goal here is that, and this is speaking totally non-technologically, but our goal here is that someone who's coming along and considering Drupal either to [00:13:00] migrate to or considering really Dr- Dr- whether or not Drupal's the place to start with their new site, um, making sure those people have, uh, a good starting point, a reason to start.

And, um, as we, as was kind of discussed, depending on what industry you're in or depending on your history with Drupal, we have all redone all of the starting steps that get you from a blank slate of Drupal to, like, a workable initial site over and over and over and over again, uh, over the years. Um, and we, that has built into a lot of Drupal insider knowledge about what's the suite of contrib modules you need to start with with your Drupal site, what's all of this kind of stuff, right?

And so we've gradually been building towards this easier-to-use system. And it came in a series of, of architectural steps, right? It's, um, the sort of foundational thing that's, that, that all of this depends on is the recipes architecture. And so, you know, a recipe is the ability to install more [00:14:00] than just picking a module, more than just picking a theme or something like that, but able to install something like that alongside the configuration, maybe alongside default content and all of those pieces.

And at their core, a site template is just sort of a super recipe, a recipe of recipes, um, that lets you collect together multiple recipes that might exist, add in a beautifully designed theme, add in maybe some additional configuration or fe- features to make things work all together as a coherent whole.

Um, meaning that, you know, once you download Drupal CMS and pick one of those templates, you're starting from an actual buildable site instead of a Build-A-Bear, build your own site blank slate. Um, and that's fundamentally what the site templates are for.

John: So, um, I have so many questions. Let me, let me start with, let me start with a, a basic one.

So site template, um, you get- [00:15:00] A th- a theme, a look and feel, right?

Stephen: Mm-hmm.

John: You get functionality. Um, do you also get components that you can use with Canvas to kind of, like, build your own pages and that sort of thing? Does, does that come out of, like, a site template? And we'll, we'll use Haven as an example.

Tim: Uh, sure, yeah. Um, so depending, uh, on the site template, technically speaking, you don't have to build a site template to use Canvas, but the ones that we have recruited from the community so far, and the thing we really encourage is, um, is folks to go ahead and use, um, a Canvas when they're building their site templates and building their site template themes.

So yeah, so the ones you see there do ship with Canvas components, which means that you have that beautiful drag-and-drop, um, page layout, uh, building experience, page building experience, um, that you have the ability to, uh, extend the look and feel by building additional templates, uh, or excuse me, additional components [00:16:00] for your, for your theme.

Mm. Um, all of those kinds of things. So yeah, the goal, we really do wanna showcase, um, you know, while there's nothing technical stopping you from, from going off the rails and building a site template with some of the more obscure contrib ecosystem stuff, we're, we're generally encouraging folks to use the most, like, commonly supported, commonly used- Mm

um, parts of the contrib ecosystem, parts of Drupal CMS itself, or parts of Core to build these things on a foundation that's going to, to put people in a good place for future, future growth

John: So, uh, I'm actually gonna jump to a question from, um, Bernardo in the chat here 'cause I'm, I think it's pretty interesting.

How are we promoting site templates outside the Drupal community? Um, is there an initiative to take them to other conferences and events? And I'll, I'll actually add onto that a little bit here. Like, I imagine we have, you know, uh, we're using the Haven as a, a nonprofit example, right? Mm-hmm. How are [00:17:00] we getting the word out for, for that, that, you know, that Haven exists and, like, nonprofits could be using this?

They could go to Drupal in a day and, and essentially have this thing ready to go by the end of it if they wanted to.

Tim: Yeah, that's a really good question. I think we are still on the front end of figuring out how to promote all this stuff and figuring out- Mm ... how to get off of the Drupal island in terms of where we take it, right?

It's very easy for us to talk about it in a, you know, prerecorded video for the trees note or to- Mm-hmm ... go to the site template browser on drupal.org to look at what we have and those sorts of things, but that's kind of talking to the insiders, and that's still important. I still talk to people who've been doing Drupal for years who haven't tried a site template or who haven't tried Drupal CMS even yet and, um, and maybe don't realize that it's still full-fat Drupal.

It's just, like, a leg up on everything else, a, a way to get started much more quickly. Um, so I, you know, I think we still need to encourage that to the internal audience. But yeah, I mean, fundamentally, we need to meet people where they are, and that- Mm-hmm ... and that is [00:18:00] going to mean not just promotion at DrupalCon, not just promotion on drupal.org.

So we're gonna have to start thinking about are there actually... Here's the message for people out there. If your organization is going to, uh, a nonprofit conference, if you're going to NTEN, for example, or, um, maybe you're going to a, a healthcare pro- uh, uh, conference or maybe at the next, uh, GovCon or something like that, um, consider, you know, reaching out to the DA and asking, "Hey, is, is there a way that I can help, help promote this stuff?"

We're actually trying to empower- Mm ... uh, folks, you, you know, not just DA staff or not just certain select community representatives but kind of any organization or individual to be able to promote this stuff, to represent this stuff to the, to the wider world, and we're hoping to provide contribution credit for folks who, who, who do that, who say, "Hey, I'm going to this, you know, Groundswell, um, uh, healthcare event, and I'm gonna talk about Drupal there."

So I think that's one of the things we would love to engage with people more, [00:19:00] um, and I know we have some communities in Drupal for each of those, like, common verticals. Um, so hopefully we can engage with them and be like, "Where's the best place to get this message out?" Um, but yeah. Mm. You know, after Chicago, DrupalCon Chicago in March, we sort of piloted, um, uh, the site template browser, and so the question next is how to encourage more people to build them and how to encourage it to scale, so.

John: Makes

Stephen: sense Tim, when, Tim, when you say site template, I think distribution. Mm. 'Cause I've been around- Yep ... a

while. So- Yeah, yeah,

Tim: yeah ...

Stephen: you describe this as a starting point So maybe you could talk a little bit about what you exactly mean by a starting point. And once you install it as a starting point, is there any connection to that site template after the fact? Are there upgrade paths? Are there new versions, et cetera?

Tim: No, that's a really good point and a really important point. So distributions were an important, um, [00:20:00] sort of technological era in Drupal where they allowed us to do something similar to this concept. They were, they were a, an attempt to build, I would say, I would put it a, a bit more strongly, they were attempt to almost build versions of Drupal that also had pre-bundled things, but frequently had custom code and sets of patches and all of these things, um, for various deliberate purposes.

And distributions were sort of great in that sense, but one of the problems with distributions was you were locked into distributions to keep up to date, to, um, to, to kind of figure everything else out. If you wanted to customize the distribution with additional custom functionality, you were in this like sort of strange forked, um, configuration model and all of this kind of thing.

It was really difficult to stay on top of a distribution, to keep up to date with it, all of those things. Site templates are fundamentally designed to be, um, much easier to maintain and much easier to keep [00:21:00] your site up to date after you use them. So you are not updating your site template after you install it.

You're just updating your Drupal site. You are updating the modules- Mm-hmm ... that are installed. Um, you are updating Drupal core, you're updating all of those regular things. Um, and you are, you know, maybe installing new modules and all this kind of stuff. But you're no longer locked into this like specific set of patches, specific set of custom code.

We don't allow those things in site template definition files because we don't want to create this strange orphan branch of Drupal that is a distribution. Instead, it's more like we're, we're, um, you know, in the AI world, we'd think of it as like we're, we're sort of automating a lot of the first steps you would take, and then you're continuing on a standard maintainable Drupal setup.

So, um, Adam, I don't know if you want to add to that, but that's, that's kind of how I would put it at a high level.

Adam: I mean, when somebody says distribution, my blood pressure just shoots up. [00:22:00] Um- Oh man. Totally. Mm-hmm. They... I mean, from my perspective, I'm not, I'm not maintaining sites, um, on the regular. Um, but from my perspective as somebody who has authored a distribution, they are so hard to maintain precisely because of what Tim said, where it bec- like a distribution kind of goes and becomes its own thing.

And keeping it up to date is so hard because- People might wanna do things their own way, like people who are using the distribution might wanna configure things a certain way, and now you wanna push an update and w- there's conflicts. What do you do? It's, it's really, really difficult. And so what I really like about where we've gone with the site templates is this is not replacing distributions.

This is, you know, another way of doing it where it's a much sort of cleaner, um, you know, approach to maintenance where it's like, it's just a Drupal site. You're just updating core and Dru- It's freeing, right? It's freeing. [00:23:00] Yeah. And, and if people- There are people out there who still want to have, like, to make distributions that work like distributions, and there's nothing stopping them from doing that.

Um, but you have now this other option for it that's a lot easier.

John: Hey, uh, okay. I got two follow-up questions here. Um, and, um, I'm gonna limit, limit, uh, your answers to, like, maybe a sentence. Um, for the first one at least. Are, are distributions dead?

Tim: I would say tech- technically no, practically yes Technically no, but don't use them

John: Okay.

All right. I mean, that, that fair. Okay. I think we're all thinking of it the same way. Um, the other question here, uh, Adam, is, uh, Tim already said that, like, site templates are, you know, not really versioned. Like you, you install it, and then you kind of go off and do your own thing. You don't have to worry about [00:24:00] updating it, right?

By design. That's awesome. It's great. What I wonder though is, are there, a- and I'm using air quotes for people listening, "versions" of a site template, for example, like, hey, I installed, um, my site template version one, and it had this set of features and these components, right? Um, but you installed site- my site template version two, and it has these additions to it.

Um, uh, are we gonna start seeing versioning, uh, like that, where it's like feature, feature release versioning, kind of similar to, to the semantic versioning we have today?

Adam: Uh, that's already how it would work. Um-

John: Okay ...

Adam: I mean, the, the site templates that we on, that the Drupal CMS folks, including myself, maintain, we haven't really done, you know, a 1.0 of Haven and a 2.0 of Haven that's radically different-

John: Mm-hmm …

Adam: um, yet, but that is currently how it would happen if I did...

You [00:25:00] know, if you installed version one of Haven, and then version two comes out and it's got a whole bunch of new stuff, yeah. I mean, you're not... You know, when you, if you've started on Haven 1, that's your site, right? That's now just your Drupal site. That's how it's set up. So there's no way to like transform your Haven 1 site into a Haven 2 site unless you go and just redo all the configuration steps that are different and, you know, add the modules and the necessary changes and things like that.

It's not something I think we're planning for, but like-

John: Mm ...

Adam: it's, uh... You know, that, that's how you would do it. So there's nothing, there would not be anything like stopping you from making those kinds of changes.

John: Great.

Adam: And yeah, Commerce Kickstart is, is well-maintained for sure. That's, that doesn't mean d- distribution maintenance is not hard.

Yeah.

Amber: So who is this for? Like, what types of organizations or Drupal teams would benefit from using site templates? [00:26:00]

Tim: Um, well, I'll go first again, and, um, I'll let, I'll let Adam chime in too. But in my opinion, this could be almost literally for anyone, and this is- Mm-hmm ... and here's what I mean by that. If you, if you have an, if you are a site owner or a prospective site owner, you're intending to build a site for, for some purpose, um, and that site is not some radically novel idea that no one's ever thought of before, then it's very likely that a site template will have some of those tools that you're looking for.

It'll have something that you want, um, that will get you closer to the vision you have, right? And because it doesn't work, again, because it's not a, uh, I liked how John sort of put it, it's not, it's freeing, not constraining, right? You don't g- you don't suddenly get locked into a model. You just start with a, a bunch of tools that you can implement.

So it, you know, it gets you that head start, whatever you're doing. In a similar way, if you are [00:27:00] building Drupal, and you do anything that's even remotely repetitive, like you always set up X, you always set up Y, you have a sort of standard practice, then you can build a template for that and save yourself a bunch of time in your initial sort of site building or, or scaffolding phase, um, whether that's for client work or, or, or, you know, internal IT work across departments of things or things like that.

Um, so I think that that is a big, a big, uh, consideration, and I think that goes partly towards addressing a question I see in the chat. So, uh, Bernardo is asking, you know, digital agencies have concerns that site templates could, could eat their lunch or could commoditize sort of basic site building. And, um, my response to that, it's kind of yes and.

Like, it can do the simple stuff. It can kind of get the, the basics of the site out of the way, but I think that, you know, almost all of the, [00:28:00] um, the, the, the significant value that an agency brings is still intact in terms of whether they're doing the content strategy work, whether they're doing the branding, whether they're doing customization or custom functionality.

Um, uh, whether there is, like, you know, these, these things come with an editorial role, like Haven does, for example, for, for your nonprofit kind of thing. But when you start getting to the point where maybe you have a, a much larger team, you probably need something more complex, right? So again, the, the goal here is let's, um, let's level set at a further along starting point for all of these projects, right?

And maybe for, maybe for an agency, this actually means a little bit more margin opportunity. 'Cause again, we're s- not starting from scratch on every project. We're starting from a further point. And you might have an internal site template that's not publicly shared. That's your starting point as your, as an agency.

So I don't know. I think it creates- Yeah ... opportunity and lets us compete better rather than- Just maintain what we did before

John: I, I [00:29:00] tend to agree with you, um, Tim. I think, um, uh, Rajab actually highlights this. Um, a- I know he, he maintains, I believe, uh, well, it used to be the Var dot distribution, but now I think it's, I think it, uh, it sounds like he's u- maybe moving towards site templates, um, based on his comments in the chat.

But I, I mean, I think it's, it, it provides an agency with a starting point that's not linked to a distribution, right? So back in the day when I did, when I did agency work, we w- we'd always like, "Oh, we need a starting point. We need a starting point." And it would either be like, "Hey, here's the Git repo, um, that we're pulling into this project," or, "Oh, we have a distribution and an install profile," but, like, then they're kind of tied to that, and, like, we don't necessarily want them to be.

Um, site templates kind of fix all of that. Um, uh, so I mean, I think, like I, I see it as a [00:30:00] Agency having their own site template, right? Is like the, the Agency X site template and, you know, that's their starting point to accelerate their building of Drupal, right? Like, I think we're, we're probably saying the same things there.

Amber: Yeah. It sounds like it's, it's really a tool to encapsulate best practices, and that's gonna vary- Yeah ... agency to agency. And it can also be an onboarding tool for, um, new developers, um, for the agency. It's like, "This is where we start from. Like, you might be used to this other place, but here's where we start from.

This is our, our go-to config and what we've learned through our years of experience." So, and whether or not they share that, um, publicly is, is of course up to them. But I think sharing those best practices are, you know, benefit everyone, and it can also, uh, really highlight an agency's work and also highlight, you know, Drupal as like-

hey, you know, it's really versatile, and you can use it, uh, for any number of, of functionality or [00:31:00] use cases.

John: Um- I, I wanna highlight something, uh, again, Bernardo said in the chat here, agencies will likely need more volume rather than chunkier contracts. I mean, I think, like, the way I'm looking at this is like a agency doesn't have to build a site template and then provide it to the public, right?

There's no, there's no requirement for that. So you could use your site template internally to your team, and it could have, um, you know, a lot of your agency tooling built into it. It could have a lot of your theme starters built into it. Um, and like, you know, I think that there's a lot of, of, of upside and acceleration there to be able to start a project.

Um, so I mean, I think that, I think that's kind of what we're, what we're getting at here maybe. Mm-hmm. Um, okay. So I think we have a pretty good idea of what a site template is, and then we talked about, um, Haven, which is specifically for, [00:32:00] um, nonprofits. Uh, looking at if you type Drupal site templates into Google, you get a page on drupal.org that allows you to browse, um, some site templates.

Um, so, uh, the open-ended question here is, like, what types of site templates are available? Um, but I, I, I kinda wanna put a finer point on that. Um, Tim just asked, like, what- industries are you seeing kind of looking for these site templates? Um, and, you know, are we, are, are you seeing adoption of those, um, in those specific areas?

Tim: Yeah, it's a good question. Adoption, adoption is hard to measure. I think one of the things I'll say upfront is that we don't have the best telemetry to be able to let us know exactly, um, what folks are running there. And because site templates, um, one of the unfortunate side effects of their architecture is we can't necessarily detect, um, uh, what's [00:33:00] out there except by looking at the custom theme that they might include and seeing how much usage those themes have.

So that's how we would kind of keep track of, of adoption. Um, but, um, s- talking more about industries and those sorts of things, right, we have, there's an even- event management template. There are multiple, um, government-related templates. Um, there's higher education or just regular school educ- um, school, like elementary school-type templates.

There are, um, there's, uh, healthcare and then there's nonprofit kind of stuff that's up right now. And so these are, I think, the first round of templates, and the partners we worked with, um, who built some of these things and what the s- Drupal CMS team focused on is, like, the, the templates that are historically where Drupal is kind of well known and likely to be shortlisted, but also potentially likely to be intimidating.

So for example, one of the, um, one of the gov templates is the, the local [00:34:00] gov, um, uh, kind of template. And this is, I, I think a good use case because the, you know, the group that does this does a bunch of local government councils in the UK especially. And so it's that sort of city, town-scale government thing, where there's a lot of people who know that Drupal's used heavily in government use cases at a, a state or nation level and things like that, and possibly imagine, uh, because they are, um, that those are huge projects, massive budgets, um, all sorts of things going on, lots of requirements.

But then there's gonna be folks at a, um, smaller scale government level who are like, "Well, I know Drupal's this thing, but is there a thing that's achievable at my scale, or at least a place to start?" Um, and so this kind of slots in there. Um, so we're seeing a lot of those things. Um, we're also seeing things that h- haven't been Drupal's kind of center of, um, gravity anymore, like portfolio sites, um, and, like, the kinds of, you know, do you just [00:35:00] want a blog or do you just want some of those, those things, where it was sort of unnecessarily complex to do the easy thing.

Um, and I think those will be an emerging opportunity, um, for, for new folks to come into the community. Um, but I think we'll have to see. So

Stephen: Tim, where can people find site templates? So I, I'm, I'm listening to this, I'm interested. Oh, yeah. Where do I find them? A- and I know you're gonna talk about them being within drupal.org, but can they also find them outside of drupal.org?

Tim: Yeah. So, so that's, uh, two really good points. One of the, the, the, the... If you're just interested in browsing around and seeing what's there, you can go to drupal.org/browse-templates, um, uh, or drupal.org/site-templates, excuse me. And then you can also just download Drupal CMS, and the Drupal CMS installer features a series of templates that have been selected by the CMS team, including Adam, um, to be ones that we want to make available [00:36:00] directly in the installer.

So this is the other thing, right? It's, it's not so easy if you have to figure out what to do, and go in and use the command line, and all this other kind of stuff. Instead, you're just presented it when you install CMS, and you can kind of choose that option. Um, so trying to make it absolutely as easy as possible.

Um, I will add one more thing, which is people, you know, we're, we're featuring these templates in a marketplace-like view right now on drupal.org, um, but anyone can make them and anyone can contribute them just to the regular, like, general projects on drupal.org. And even if they're not featured in this marketplace listing, they would be available for use, and the community can share them, and they can be nominated to be added to this list, and all of that kind of thing.

So even though we have about 14 that are in these, like, sort of featured right now, there are, I know there are already, uh, more out there. Um-

Adam: Well, I will also point out that if you have created a site template and you think it should be featured in the Drupal CMS installer, which is sort of- Yeah ... the forefront place you might find [00:37:00] it, by all means, please submit it to us.

Like, send it to me directly in Slack or, or to Pamel, Pamela, uh, that's three Es, and, um, you know, we'll take a look at it. And, you know, if it, if it seems like a, like something that we w- feature in Drupal CMS, we'll do it. Um, that's how Summit was added. That's how certain other ones have been added. Um, and so we're, I think that we're always on the lookout for just really, really beautiful, innovative site templates.

Uh, emphasis on beautiful. Um, we want Drupal to look good. Adam-

Stephen: Adam ... do a- do all the marketplace templates, uh, show up in the installer?

Adam: No, I don't think so. Okay. Um, the, the ones that are in the installer are... They're, it's actually a hard-coded YAML file that sits in our- Mm-hmm ... Git repo, and when we add something to it, that will start showing up in the installer.

But until that, it's, it's literally just pulled from that file. So for in- And I- ... in Drupal CMS, we're tightly controlling the list.

Stephen: And I have one more [00:38:00] question regarding the marketplaces. I'm browsing through it. Um, I see them all as free except one-

Adam: Mm-hmm ...

Stephen: um, which is from Drip Yard, the Meridian Charter School- Mm-hmm

um, site template, and it's listed here as 8.99. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, free versus paid, and how does that work if I'm here looking at this?

Tim: Yeah, yeah. So, um, we did, um, say as we set out to do this that we want to give folks a commercial opportunity with site templates. So, and there's a couple ways to think about this, right?

We don't want people to have to give these away for free, and obviously the underlying components, almost everything is GPL. But things like default content can be copyrighted by the site maintainer, some of the, like maybe included graphics and things like that. So they do have some control over, over these sorts of things.

You can't just easily, um, split a fork and give it away for free. Um, and so we gave people the option. We said, um, "We'd love to see a [00:39:00] lot of really high-quality free templates. Um, we'd also like to give you the, the opportunity to say that, um, you'd like to sell them at, at a price." And so, uh, right now there are not very many.

Drip Yard is experimenting in this space with the paid template stuff. And so they have a, um, a, a checkout process and, and that gets you, um, effectively sort of a, a, a key or c- to, to, to, uh, entitle you to the, to the template. Um, and so, um, right now that's something that they build and maintain the, um, the commerce to do that for their template.

They set the pricing themselves for that, all of that kind of thing. And other folks choose to do it for free, but, you know, the other thing about it is they can put their, their name, their brand, their reputation into these temp- templates. So in some cases, the hope for, for some of these other commercial templates is you'll start with this free template, but if you need it customized or if you wanna go beyond its capabilities and you wanna work with a partner, [00:40:00] you'll probably choose the person who built that template, right?

So, um, the, they're using that as a, a kind of lead gen opportunity. Um, so yeah. So those options provide, um, you know, both types of, of capabilities, free and paid, um, and hopefully some solid options that include, um, more commercial support for the people who are looking for that level of handlo- holding, and also the kinds of options that are you t- you take it and you run with it on your own.

Amber: At Tugboat, we, we actually purchased the Meridian, um, theme from DripYard, and part of the value of that is not just, um, you know, something that looks nice, but why does it look nice? It looks nice because it's got this component library, it's all integrated with Canva, and the best practices that, um, uh, that are really kind of maybe hidden from you are the accessibility and, and all of those things that are really, like, s- essential best prac- practices that go, that [00:41:00] augment, you know, something that looks nice.

So I think there, there's really... I hope that there's opportunity here for, for, um, small businesses to, and agencies to, um, aug- you know, make some money, you know? And, and put a price tag on the value that they're providing because it, it really, you know, it helps us stay in this community when we're getting paid.

Let's be honest. Yep. You know? So So Adam, um, in the, in the Venn diagram of all of the things that are f- you know, provided starting points for Drupal, like site templates, recipes, distributions, um, don't get mad, um, starter kits, um, how do these concepts differ? Where do they fit together? Like, what, how... Help, help folks understand kind of the, the, how these are distinguished.

Adam: Um, I'll get the easy one out of the way. Site templates are recipes. They, they just are recipes. There's [00:42:00] nothing- Cool ... there's no technical difference between a site template and any other recipe. The only difference is, like, basically just size and scope, right? Like, most of the time a recipe kind of does something fairly small, like it gives you a content type or two or three of them and, or like a donation form or a contact form or some, some fairly small piece of functionality.

And a site template is just a recipe with a lot more stuff, a bunch of content types, you know, a bunch of configuration. You know, whole content model, entire look and feel. The demo content is a big part of a site template, and most recipes probably don't need as much or ship with as much. Um, so but other than that, there's no technical...

There, there's really no technical difference. That Venn diagram is a circle. Um, distributions, as we have talked about, uh, are, are a whole- ... other animal. They have nothing to do with recipes. They are... I mean, yeah, I don't know if I can describe them in relationship to anything else. They're just very unique.

They're, they're kind [00:43:00] of just like forks of Drupal, honestly, of the entire Drupal thing. And, you know, if you wanna have one of those and maintain it, then, uh, you know, God help you, I guess. But, um, and then you said starter kit, which I don't know what you mean by that- ... 'cause that's not like a f- it's not like an official

Amber: thing that I know of, is it?

Well, like the, there was like a, a, a command d- like, uh- Oh, like a- ... well, a starter kit template. Uh- Oh, yeah, yeah ... a theme. Right. A starter, starter kit theme I think

Adam: it was. Okay, that's... Tha- thank you. Yeah. That, that helps it. So yeah. So here's the thing about a theme, right? Like, the theme in Drupal, I, I actually have seen a couple of times, like in Slack, people refer to site templates as themes, and I'm like, you know, pedantically that irks me 'cause it's like, well, a theme is a separate thing, you know, in Drupal.

But like I g- I get it. I get where they're coming from. 'Cause the site template is a complete look and feel and in literally like everything else, every other, you know, web [00:44:00] framework like this that I know of, these, that, that is referred to as a theme. So the starter kit that, as I understand it, is just like, it's a theme generator.

It's just giving you like a basic bare bones theme

Amber: customization.

Adam: Yeah, it's scaffolding, like,

Amber: everything. Yeah.

Adam: Exactly. For your theme. Mm-hmm. Right. And so a site template would include a lot more than that. It has to include a look and feel. How you achieve that look and feel- There's no rules on that. Um, you could use it, you could do it entirely in Canvas, you know, using SDCs in a bespoke theme, which is what Haven and Byte and the Drupal CMS templates do.

You could use React components with Canvas if you have some kind, or like maybe just plain React if you have some kind of process for that. You could use a completely custom theme that doesn't use SDCs. I mean, there's, we have no, we have no restrictions. Make it look pretty however you want

Amber: So it's really a complete model because, like, theme is always, like, okay, you're building out your content model and your config and everything, and then the [00:45:00] theming comes later.

And the site template is, like, from beginning to end, like everything- Yeah ... that's going into the database and, and all of the configuration, and the theme and how that, that fits into it. So it really- Yeah ... is like those lines are blurred now, um, because it's a complete solution for a starting point instead of like- Yeah

well, I have a starting point for a content type or a starting point for a theme, and it's like no, no, you have a, a starting point for a whole, a whole site- Yeah ... with all the functionality. I

John: don't know if I, I don't know if I would say that the lines are blurred or maybe they're just clearer in my head than in, in general maybe.

But, like, I view a site template as like, you know, a packaging of functionality and then theme, right? 'Cause, like, your theme should be interchangeable, right? You shouldn't necessarily be building functionality into that, into that theme specifically, right? Um, because it is look and feel. So, like, I feel like now we have site templates that are kind of like bringing those two pieces together to [00:46:00] enable somebody to be able to, to rapidly develop a website for, you know, whatever, whatever it is that they need a website for.

Martin: Well, hello site builders. Yeah.

Amber: Yeah. I mean, I, I would push back on that because, like, Canva- Canvas really, like, enables the, the building of site, and it doesn't matter. Like, are you building a form? Are you, are you building, you know, are you placing a component? Are you building pages? And it... You know, we've always had these, these special, you know, specializations, and I think this is a way for all of that, including Canva- Canvas.

I keep saying Canva. I've been u- using Canva all weekend. Canvas, um, to, you know, really empower, uh, site builders-

Tim: Hm ...

Amber: or, you know, builders of sites really. Like, what- whatever your sp- you know, whatever your skills are, it, it's helping you out. So- Yeah ... anywho. Thank you- It is interesting ... for that clarification.

Tim: No, I think it's true because there's, um, there's some ways in [00:47:00] which, like, we have the... You know, there's a, there's a sort of sinusoidal curve about how much a- an individual builder has been empowered to do over time in different eras of Drupal. Um, and we, we did go through in the, especially the early eight and, and nine years, I feel like, an era where it was like the site builder got more limited to this, like, lockdown set of things they had permissions around.

They were less likely to be doing anything involving the theming. They were sort of like they're snapping together some content types and some things like that, but they're escalating a lot of things to support to a developer or something like that or to, or to off-the-shelf things. And now that combination of- Of Canvas, that combination of being able to snap together larger components of functionality with recipes or the way they're bundled together in site templates is, is giving them more control again.

So I think that's a really good point. And John, you used the word packaging together, and, like, [00:48:00] to, to riff off of that a little bit, a lot of this was enabled, uh, you know, not to raise the old heartburn of the seven to eight transition and everything that went on there, and the, the switch to composer-based workflows and a lot of more command line work again and all of those things.

But a lot of this was directly enabled by that foundational work, right? All of that work to create composable code bases, the, the, the, the way that a recipe works, all of these kinds of things are, are, are all building on a lot of those original architectural changes so that we don't have this weird, uh, distribution-like thing where you're doing features exports and patching on patches and trying to reconcile all of these things.

Like, there's, there's proper dependency management, and now there's proper, um... It's not just dependency, but proper lowercase P packaging of functionality into these discrete parts that you can install together in a template individually with recipes or assemble yourself, so. [00:49:00]

John: Uh, yeah. I mean, I think that, that all, that all makes sense, and I'm a, I'm a big fan of empowering more site builders to, to be, to be free to build, build sites how they want.

So, um, that all, that all makes sense. Um, let's jump into creating a site template, right? So, like, we've talked a lot about what they are. We've talked a lot about, like, how you might use them. Um, Adam, I'm spec- I'm specifically asking, asking you, 'cause I feel like you probably have a lot a, a lot of insight into this.

Like, I just come on the scene and I wanna create a site template. How do I do it?

Adam: Are you asking me this or Tim this? 'Cause that got, that

John: got

Tim: crossed. I am asking you. Oh, it's gotta be you, Adam.

John: You got this. I'm asking you, like-

Adam: Okay. I-

John: Right. Right. I'm, I'm, I'm looking right at you.

Adam: Yeah. Okay. It's very clear with the angles and all that.

Um, how... If you've just come on the scene and you wanna create it, I mean- Honestly, [00:50:00] so are, are you a person with, you know, do you know how to build sites in Drupal to begin with?

John: Yeah, I mean, like, let's assume I know how to build sites. Let's assume, um, let's assume I have some, some knowledge of Composer and, you know, the structure of a Drupal site.

Um, I might not be, like, a deep in the weeds developer, um- Okay ... but, um, yeah. Like, where, where do I, where do I start?

Adam: I wrote a module for this. Um, actually- Ah-ha ... I'm not the only person who wrote a module for this. But, um, so let me take you back to DrupalCon Vienna of last year. I was gonna give a session called, uh, How to Build a Site Template, and midway through working on my slides, like a week before the conference, I was realized that the slides were just buried in, like, really fiddly technical details of, like, well, you gotta run this command, but also remember to remove these keys and edit your YAML.

And I was like, "This sucks. This process sucks, and nobody will [00:51:00] do it. Um, or nobody will es- especially no one's gonna do it if it's, if it sucks this much." So I hacked a Drush command together, um, and that is called Drush Site Export, and what that... And that's, that, that command is packaged into the Drupal CMS helper module, which means it comes with Drupal CMS.

You can also install it on any site. There's no actual, um, requirement for Drupal CMS there. But so I, I added this command to Drupal CMS, and what it does, when you run it, it will take a snapshot of your s- it'll take a snapshot of your site's config and your content, and it will output a recipe with all of that stuff in it.

Um, it's ... It'll output a recipe that, like, developers won't like looking at because it's a huge recipe with just tons of lo- lot of YAML, a lot of files. It's a, it's a site dump, basically. But you can take that recipe, and you can, you can package it, and you can ship it, and it will ... You can, you can s- use it to start a site.[00:52:00]

So it basically just creates this monolithic snapshot of your site that, in the form of a site template. So I would say if you're new to the scene and you're not in the weeds of, you know- There of going through like tons of YAML and writing all that code. The easiest thing to do is to get Drupal, get Drupal CMS actually, 'cause it's nicer.

Uh, build a site, make it really pretty. Do it how, you know, just build it the way that you wanna do it and that you think will be pleasing and useful to people. Don't worry about the code. Um, and then just run Drush site export. There's your site template. Close enough, you know? There's things you can do after that to, you know, to

You could add, you know, test coverage. You could add CI integration. You could add a Tugboat preview. So there's additional things you can do, but when it comes to just bare minimum, get a site template built without having to think too much about code, that, uh, that's the way I still recommend, and it's not perfect.

It's not a perfect process. You know, there [00:53:00] are, there are things, there are bugs, um, but it's the best we got, and it was really my intention there was to have it just be dead simple. Build a site, never look at the command line except until you run Drush site export. So that's what I would say. I'm proud of it

John: All right.

Stephen: John, go ahead. You take, you take that question.

John: So sounds like I already have my answer, but just to confirm. Yeah. If I'm an organization and I build a Drupal site using Drupal CMS or maybe otherwise, and I'm like, "This is the point at which I want to make a site template," I just go into my command line, run that command, and then I have a site template?

Adam: You'll need Drupal CMS Helper installed, but basically, yeah. It's, it's about that.

John: Huh, okay. That seems- Yeah ... pretty... And it, I mean, i- it's complete as, as far as it'll pull the content, it'll do all the things to, like, make [00:54:00] sure that you can basically reproduce that thing exactly as it is.

Adam: I- I'll expand on that.

It will export all your config. It will export all of your content using the core. The core now has support for exporting default content, so it'll just use that. Um, it will generate a composer.json file, listing all the dependencies, and it will output a properly formatted recipe.yaml. So yes, it will, it will resolve all that stuff.

John: Hmm. Okay. Wow. I mean, I think that's, that's, that answers our next three questions- ... so maybe we'll just skip down in, in the show notes here. Um, so let me, let me ask you this, 'cause this is the, the next question on my, on my listy list here. Like, if I'm starting this process, say I, I work... B- let's go back a, a couple of, a couple of minutes, right?

Say I'm an agency, and I'm like, "Hey, we're gonna start... We're gonna build a site template so that way we can move faster and build sites faster," and like, [00:55:00] what are the decision points and the things I should start to think about, um, when I'm, when I'm, when I'm choosing to do that? Like, uh, and the things I'm thinking about here are like, you know, taxonomies, permissions, like certain configuration for things like maybe like, uh, Stripe or other things that require API keys.

Like, how should I start thinking about this process to be able to just, you know, build the site and get to that point where I enter the command and have a site template?

Adam: What I think, I mean, if it was me doing this, I think the guiding thing should always be who, who do I expect to use this? Mm-hmm. Um, and so who are you building it for?

What do... What exactly do they need, and how simple can I get it for that person? Hmm. So, you know, as an example, in the case of the Stripe form, Pam is the one who built that, uh, or she built, you know, Haven using that. But I think part of the reason she chose to use a Stripe donation form is because it's so low configuration.

Mm-hmm. You have an API [00:56:00] key from Stripe. You enter that when applying the Stripe donation form recipe, and then it just sets it up. Mm-hmm. Made it as easy as possible for the people who will use such a thing, which is nonprofits would want a Stripe donation form. Mm-hmm. So, so when it comes to thinking about things like content types and taxonomy terms and media types- Mm-hmm

that, that I think really should be guided by, by who is going... Who do I intend to use? Who do I intend for this to be used by?

John: Mm-hmm.

Adam: Um, and I think also an important thing is that, uh, you know, a site template does not have to, and indeed should not try to do everything for everyone.

John: Mm-hmm.

Adam: I think it really should focus, really should start with who is this for, and focus just on what they might wa- Mm

what you think they really, really want, what all those, what everyone in that group, or almost everyone in that group would want. And, you know, don't worry too much about, well, but what if they want this other edge case thing? That's what agencies are for. Mm-hmm. That's what agencies, agencies should come in and do for people, I think.

Um, but- Yeah,

Tim: I

Adam: think- But yeah, that's my, [00:57:00] that's my feeling on it.

Tim: Sorry, I

Stephen: just- Stephen. Go ahead. Go ahead,

Tim: Timothy. I, I just want to emphasize what Adam said a, a little bit about that. We've actually steered away some of the early sites templates, uh, creators from the concept of creating, um, like, it's very tempting to create the one template to rule them all thing.

It's like- Yeah, right. You don't wanna do that ... like, that's, that's kind of what we do with Drupal in, in the first place, right? Is like we're trying to build a CMS that can do all of the things, but that's also why Drupal has historically been hard to use in the first place. 'Cause you have to choose, you have to narrow that down into, to the actual thing that you need.

And so we're trying to really encourage people to, to think the other way around, to think as much of, of the site template as a, you could literally deploy it the day you install it if it, if it really meets those needs, uh, well enough, right? Um, and so I think, I think that's, that's a really important thing to emphasize, and I think it's really important to emphasize, uh, the other half of what Adam just said as well, which is like, you know, what we f- [00:58:00] we feel as, as Drupal community members, Drupal developers, Drupal site builders, that we have to give people all of the options, and there's a, a real value in trying to overcome that instinct and be like, again, Haven b- is a good example.

There is the Stripe form. There is the option to start configuring full commerce if you want to do that. And then of course, there's always the option to then engage with, um, an agency to build, like, you know, you need, you need things in the field, you need people to be able to go door to door with their iPads and that ask these donations too, right?

Like, g- get up to the agency level all the way through there. But, but, like, building it before it's needed is something we do too much of, and, uh, that site template should be really focused.

Adam: Can I add something to that about the building it before it's needed? Because I, I have some thoughts on that one.

Mm. Um, like, the, the way I see this is, like, site templates kind of... or building a site template lets you kind of indulge in some short-term thinking, 'cause it's like, "Okay, I'm gonna build what I think people need right [00:59:00] now, and what's going to, you know, just make, what's gonna make the most helpful thing for the people I'm thinking about.

Build that right now." And if I need, if they need something that I left out or, you know, kicked down the road, I can just add it. You can add it in another version. This goes back to what we were talking about a little while ago. You can, you know, if you don't wanna, I don't know, if you're gonna do your site template in version one and not have a carousel, just to pull something out of hammer space here, um, go ahead and release it without the carousel.

You can add the carousel in version two, and you're not g- the cool thing, like, there's no update path. There's no, there's, you're not going to be breaking sites that started from version one because you added a carousel in version two. It's just not gonna happen. Recipes don't work that way. So my feeling is you could really, you're really accelerated and empowered to give people the thing that's gonna help them the most right now.

Solve my problems now, and then you can solve more problems later as needed.

Stephen: So [01:00:00] I have a follow-up on the, that process of making a change and doing a new release. So I've got this awesome site template. It's always perfect the day that I release it, or I think it is, and then, like you just mentioned, a couple of days later, I'm gonna make a change to it.

That's gonna happen often. And I'm looking now at the Haven project page, and I see there's a 1.0.3 How does that impact the people who've downloaded the original release, then they go back to the project page a month later, they see a new version there? Is it now you think it's a communication? 'Cause they're gonna n- wanna know what's different, right?

Is it a communication process to help them, "Hmm, well, I like that feature, how do I get it?"

Adam: Mm-hmm.

Stephen: How are you... How is that gonna get managed?

Adam: I don't have a good answer on that one yet, um, because that's, that is tricky because it's a little bit about... The, the real tricky one is, um, you know, I- they [01:01:00] added a feature, I like it, how do I get that feature?

Yeah. And I don't, I don't yet have a good answer because that involves, that sort of starts stepping into distribution territory of, like, I want to ship a configuration update, you know? It's like, how do you ship a configura- or, uh, other, a configuration update? I don't know yet. Um, I've done some, like, experimentation in this space where, you know, maybe we could have a thing where you can write a little set of config actions that sets up a site in a certain way, and that's an upgrade path.

But, um- That's not proven at all, and there's, uh, if there's one thing I have learned about upgrade paths, it's that there be dragons. Um, there be many dragons. S- So I don't know.

John: So maybe, I mean, like, when we were talking about this earlier, though, to me, I'm like, "Well, maybe it's not an upgrade path," right?

Maybe it's a feature inclusion path, where it's like- Yeah ... "Hey, I started with this site template. I see the new version has X, Y, and Z feature." [01:02:00] And like- Yeah ... when I go to, when I go to, like, run the, run the installer, the updater, the, the feature includer, whatever the heck you wanna call it, right? It says, "Hey, here are the three new features.

Check the ones you want me to include." Do, do, do. And then it, it- Yeah ... shows you a diff of the config, so you can be like, "Oh, don't do that. That's gonna totally jack up my, my stuff." Uh, or- Yeah ... "Hey, nothing's gonna j- y- we're all good. Let's go," right? So I don't think- Yeah ... like, I don't know. I think update is the wrong, maybe the wrong term, and of course I've literally thought about this for, like, uh, what, 45 minutes now.

Um-

Tim: That's

John: true ... so, like, but I'm like, yeah, like a feature includer seems like the, the, the way to go. That's terrible naming, by the way. But-

Tim: Yeah, yeah. But, but y- but you're right. It's like, it's, it's just like, how do I catch up? Because, oh, I really- Yeah ... liked this starting point, and oh, they added something cool.

They added this carousel thing, and I want that. And, like, h- so how do I catch up to that? I don't... You do, you do not, you never literally update your site template. That's not, again, that's not how it [01:03:00] works. But if, if that feature was added just because the site template maintainer found what they consider to be the best carousel module in, in, um, contrib, plus they added something to their, uh, theme, right?

You can update a theme individually, and you can install a module, right? That might be all you need to do, and, and there's not much conflict there. So, you know, it depends. There will be, there will be cases where it's like, oh, they added this feature that's integrated into the pre-configured content type and integrated into these views and all these other things, and in that case- Yeah

yeah, that'll be tough. You'll have to- That's where things get, uh ... you'll have to probably manually recreate it. But, uh- That's why I say update path ... a lot, lot of things, not so much.

Stephen: And that's why I use Drupal Capital. Amber, I'm, I'm curious, as a Dripperyard user, have you gone through this experience yet?

Has it been out long enough there's b- there's been revisions that you've been interested in getting and using?

Amber: Well, um, because you pay for it, you get s- some support. And so they have a Slack, and so it's, it's a [01:04:00] matter of reaching out to them and, and, you know, asking for the update or something like that.

And I'm using it primarily for demos to demonstrate Tugboat. And so, um, so that's, like, the path is, like, having this relationship with the provider and communicating. I know, it's strange, communication. But, um, but that, that's kind of, um, how it, how it's been going. But I wanted to get back to, like, the planning phase, and, you know, we're talking about, um, uh, developers and, and, um, themers and front-enders, but, you know, there's a lot of really essential roles in, in, uh, building a site like the, the content strategists and the UXers, and we're talking about a site template that is really focused on a specific audience, and that's, like, where these folks shine.

So what are... How can folks in planning roles like, um, uh, UXers and content strategists and even technical project managers, how can they be thinking about [01:05:00] site templates and what a good starting point is as, you know, they're really familiar with the best practices, and best practices for a site apply to a specific type of audience?

Any thoughts on that?

Adam: That's a Tim question Is it a me question? I think it's a you question.

Amber: It is now. Stumped the panel. The pan-

Tim: Yeah, yeah. Um I mean, well, it's an interesting question. I mean, the, the best practices and I see... This is not, this does not answer your question directly. This is more about, honestly, to me, this, this, this begs an underlying question about ongoing Drupal project roadmap and pr- best practices and direction, which is to say, like, one of the things that I think has been really interesting about Drupal CMS as an initiative, so separate from site templates, is [01:06:00] that by being the sort of packaging of, um, let's say, best of contrib or all of these kinds of things in a certain way, it has canonicalized a certain set of best practices and said, "Okay, these are, these are the things that we know we're sort of standardizing on in this way."

And in sim- similar ways, site templates standardize on another set of best practices, um, or could, or should. And so you, we begin to develop... I haven't actually, I should do this, I haven't actually gone and looked at, say, at the, the multiple healthcare templates that, that exist today and sa- and looked for the similarities between them.

But, you know, in a, in a hypothetical way, we might look at a multiple nonprofit templates, we might look at multiple healthcare templates and eventually say, "Oh, these are all using X," or, "These are all doing Y. Or two of these are, and one of them isn't, and maybe it should," and begin to start thinking about, like, other types of, of best practice [01:07:00] formulation.

And that might, that might feed back into Drupal CMS, that might feed back into Drupal core hypothetically, although I think we're moving in a more small core model these days. Um, but, um, I don't know. I mean, that's, that's a tangent, but, but I, I don't necessarily know how to, how to think about how we redevelop best practices in a site template world, how we start to think about...

I, I don't know. I think we're just gonna have to experiment and see.

John: I, I mean, doesn't it go back to, doesn't it go back to that agency model- Yeah ... where, like, agencies are developing their own site templates with their own best practices built in? And then UXers, content strategists, they all know, like, "Well, hey, our site template has all this stuff built in," right?

So, like, we, that's what, that's, that's our special sauce. That w- that's the value that we bring, is, like, we're already thinking of all this stuff, and we're starting from, from that starting point.

Tim: Yeah, I think that's a large part of it, right? And I think, again, like, [01:08:00] the idea is, um, to, to slightly put this in business terminology, but, like, you know, if, if standardizing on some of these best practices and if standardizing on an internal site template or whatever, like, that helps add margin, and then hel- helps you add your value in the things that layer on top of that, right?

The things that, that aren't, uh, just a repeat of the same decisions every time. Um, and so there's a, there's a sense in which, yeah, I don't know. I think, I think we will see- I'm just interested, I, I guess I'm more interested in observing what happens than trying to- Mm ... predict or dictate what happens. I'm interested in seeing how, how these things-

John: Let, let business and the community take it and run with it and see where they

Tim: end up, right?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. How they just, how they start coal- coalescing around these things. And I'm also w- we haven't talked to, to, to it very much yet, and, um, it's a controversial topic, but I'm also interested to see, you know, we have a big AI initiative in Drupal. Mm-hmm. How is that gonna interact with what goes [01:09:00] on with, um, site templates in Drupal CMS as a way to build sites, right?

Are we gonna see agents using templates or at least using the recipes that are used building templates? Mm-hmm. Like, who knows? Um, this is all, that's all the speculative realm still.

John: So I will, I will say, I got one, one final clo- uh, question before we, we close up, but, um, I will say, um, for any of those business stakeholders that might be listening and, and scared about, like, site template lock-in to their agency based on their agency using a site template- Oh, yeah

it's a starting point. It's not gonna happen. They're all using Drupal core and modules and recipes- Yeah. Yep ... that are publicly available. So don't worry about it. We thought about it. Well, not me, but others have thought about it, and, like, we're, we're moving in a direction that's gonna allow you to take your website wherever you wanna go.

So.

Adam: Yeah. I mean, take it from me as a maintainer and co-creator of the subsystem. Even if site templates wanted to lock you in, there's no way they could do it. Like, how you gonna do it? That, there- I can't think of a way it

John: works. You can't. Okay. [01:10:00] So, uh, last question here. If folks are listening to this and they're like, "Listen, I do not wanna build site templates, but I do wanna help, uh, develop core's site template system or work on an initiative for site templates within, within the core ecosystem," how could they start doing that?

What issues or areas of focus, um, do you, you guys need help with?

Adam: I got something. Um, like-

John: That doesn't sound ominous at all, but continue.

Adam: No, it's cool. I, it's s- so as I said before, site templates are recipes, and there are some holes in the recipe system, uh, particularly relating to translation and multilingual.

This is a sore spot. Mm. And it's a, it's a really complicated problem, and there's a lot of, like, just bugs and weirdness, and it's being worked on by, I think, Gabor and Alex Pott right now- Mm ... are, are the main guys tackling it. But if this is an area of interest to you and you like translation and you like [01:11:00] complicated problems in core, uh, the recipe system could really use some help on that front.

And I think that, you know, once we have these multilingual issues sorted out, it will unlock, you know, quite a bit more power for recipes, and therefore, for site templates as well.

John: Fabulous. All right. Well, jump, jump in. Jump into, uh, to that. That sounds like, uh, that sounds like great fun. Um, well, Tim and Adam, uh, we appreciate the- Mm-hmm

the time, and thank you for joining us as always.

Adam: Of course. Thanks for having me.

Tim: Yeah, very glad to be here.

John: Don't forget, you can reach out to us on Drupal Slack in the Talking Drupal channel, or email us with [email protected]. To promote your Drupal event, uh, sponsor an episode, or become a guest, visit talkingdrupal.com and click the corresponding button in the sidebar.

And thank you for supporting Talking Drupal, um, patrons. Your support has kept us going for now 569 episodes. Wow. All right, Tim, if folks wanted to get ahold of [01:12:00] you, how best could they do that?

Tim: Uh, you can find me as @hestonet on just about, uh, everything, uh, my user on drupal.org, in Drupal Slack, uh, on social media, all of those things.

You can also reach out to me, [email protected]. Obviously, working for the Drupal Association, you can always find me through them. Um, and yeah, um, that's pretty much how to get me.

John: If folks wanted to buy your book, how could they go about doing that?

Tim: If you are interested in m- uh, young adult fantasy books, like my novel Fog and Fireflies, you can find it wherever books are sold.

I recommend, uh, bookshop.org, which is an awesome-

John: Ooh ...

Tim: um, sort of- Less known ... yeah, it's an, it's an, it's an awesome online retailer for books that does e-books and print books. But it also lets you designate your local indie bookstore to receive some of the proceeds. So if you can't go to your indie bookstore to make the purchase, you're still supporting your, your, your indie by, uh, purchasing there online.

John: That sounds super cool. And it's funny because in the show notes, I have this [01:13:00] as admin, but Adam, if folks wanted to get ahold of you, where could they- ... where could they do that?

Adam: Uh, Drupal Slack is the best place. Uh, it's, my username is @fenapproxima. And, uh, I mean, yeah, ping me directly. Ping me in the recipes channel, the Drupal CMS channels, the contribute channel.

Basically, yeah, al- almost any channel except the AI channel. Um, and, uh,

John: It's good to know your distribution channel.

Adam: I have been known to answer at weird hours. So don't be shy.

John: That's, that's fair. Uh, Amber, what about you?

Amber: Um, you can find me on Drupal Slack at ambermatz, on drupal.org at amberhimesmatz, and you can find more, find out more about Tugboat at tugboatqa.com.

John: Fabulous. Stephen?

Stephen: Uh, stephencross on Drupal Slack. That's with a P-H. And if you got some show ideas, some things you want to see happen with the show, emi- email me at stephen@talkingdrupal.

John: There you go. And I'm John Picozzi. You can find [01:14:00] me personally at picozzi.com. You can find me on social media and drupal.org @johnpicozzi, and you can find out about EPAM at epam.com.

Stephen: And if you've enjoyed listening, we've enjoyed talking

John: Thanks a lot everyone.

Martin: Thank you. Cheers all.