TD Cafe #018 - Drupal Site Templates

Martin: I was hoping we could kinda get together today and, and talk a little bit about site templates in Drupal.

And thought maybe a good place to start would be for anybody who hasn't been sort of, you know, keeping attuned to all of the discussions about site templates in the last year or so, the marketplace more recently. Uh, who wants to maybe chime in and, and talk about w- exactly what is a Drupal site template and, and how it's maybe different from some of the things that came before?

Mike: I mean, I can start with that, because I'm pretty passionate about it. Um, so a site template is basically a starting point from Dru- for Drupal where, um, it, it gets you going into a particular vertical very quickly. Um, so for those of you that are not familiar with Drupal, there's probably like zero of those listening to this podcast.

Drupal has always started you off at very bare bones. You don't ... You might have a, it gives you a content type or two, or at least it did, and you have to theme it. You have to do all this work just to get it, uh, looking good on, uh, for whatever you're doing, you know? Um, that, the problem with that is it leads, it lead, leads to increased total cost of ownership for Drupal.

So Drupal tends to cost more because people need to do all the setup, right? So a site template is kind of like a starting point. Like, so let's say I am a charter school or something like that, or any type of, like, day school for kids. Instead of going, uh, instead of going and setting up a, um, you know, different content types for my teachers, different content types for my staff, uh, event content types, and then having to spend like 50, 60 hours theming it to make it pretty, have a designer do some stuff.

Uh, instead of doing all that, you can download, uh, which may or may not cost money, a site template. And the site template, you install it, and then boom, you're all set. And the cool thing about site templates are it's Drupal. So, like, let's say you download a site template from Andy and, uh, my company, and it's not exactly what you need.

Well, that's totally cool, because it's Drupal. You can create an additional content type. You can add another field. You can delete stuff that you don't want. And it's, it's just basically a starting point

How did, how did that, how did that, how did that work for you guys? That make sense?

Martin: Yeah, no, I, yeah, I think maybe the other thing I'll, I'll sort of quickly add is if anybody has played around with Drupal CMS, they've probably already seen site templates because- Mm-hmm ... you know, sort of that second step in the installer, as soon as you sort of say what name your, you want your site to have, the next step is it'll show you that kind of, uh, wall of, of the different templates, the little thumbnail with the description.

And those are all site templates. And so that, that's exactly sort of like the concrete manifestation of what you're talking about as that, you know, choose your starting point and then go from there. So out of the box, I think today Drupal CMS has about 12 or 13 different site templates. That, that number is expected to grow over time, certainly in the marketplace, but, you know, some of those also being incorporated directly into that ex- installer experience.

Uh, but I think it's, to me the thing that, that I'm excited about with site templates is, is allowing us as a community to, to going back to being better suited for things like, you know, those small nonprofits and things, where, you know, a lot of us... Like I know for me, the, the very first Drupal site that I built, you know, from, you know, base to, to launch was for a local nonprofit.

And I think a lot of people- Yeah ... that have been around in the community for a long time, that was kinda how we originally cut our teeth. And so making Drupal better suited for those kinds of sites again, I think allows us to sort of, you know, for it to be used for those kinds of passion pro- uh, projects, where for a long time it felt like, you know, it was too heavy or too cumbersome to, to spin up this thing and do a lot of, you know, complex integrations.

So having a lot of those pieces, as you say, kinda out of the box so you can sorta spin it up and, and then, you know, continue to tweak it to meet the, the specific needs of whoever you're building a site for, I think, uh, potentially is kind of a game changer in terms of the kinds of sites that Drupal can be used for again.

Mike: Yeah, 100, 100%. You know, uh, going into Drupal 8, like, it felt like Drupal made the shift to say, "Hey, we're, we're not for these smaller sites. We're for enterprise only." And I think that was a s- strategic mistake, you know? Uh, I thought we lost a lot of community members and, and market share with that. But now I feel like we're kinda rectifying that by, by saying, "Hey, listen, you know, we can do these smaller sites too competitively."

Martin: For sure. Yeah. So I'm, I'm curious for y- you guys, in terms of the work that you've put in to this, the site templates that you have listed, how-- what's the, the process of working on a site template been like for you guys? For example, as different from, like, working on, you know, a specific site for an individual customer.

Andy: Yeah, we have a pretty unique story with site templates because we started a little over a year ago, I think, building, uh, our, our themes, and we wanted to ship demo content with our themes, uh, so that people could basically have, like, a site template experience. But all the things that a modern site template are, uh, built on now weren't available.

So we didn't have Canvas, we didn't have CMS2. Uh, you know, we started with Layout Builder, uh, and Recipes. So it's, it's not completely different but, you know, we had an experience of building our themes and rolling recipes to have that kind of site template, and then eventually once everything r- you know, became ready with CMS2, we had to rebuild everything.

Um, which wasn't too hard, but, like, for example, our charter school template, site template that we built was initially built by Mike on Drupal Core, and then we had to, like, shim in the things to make it, um, you know, CMS, which there, uh, Adam has built a bunch of tooling for that, so you don't have to start with CMS.

Um, it's best if you do, but you know, we, we had a nice, uh, experience. So we had a l- tons of experience with Recipes and, like, the core, um, architecture underneath site templates that make it all happen. Um, I think now that things are out and stable, it's a lot easier. There's, like, one Drush command, basically.

You, you, you build your site the way you want it, you run Drush site export, and it packages everything up for you nicely and, and you, you know, move on to the next thing.

Mike: Is the command site export? I thought site export was like where it did all the, uh, database exports and all that.

Andy: Uh, it's Drush site colon export, right?

Mike: All right. All right. Yeah. You know better than me.

Andy: At least that's what I had in my notes from- ... my last presentation, so I hope it hasn't changed.

Mike: Yeah.

Martin: Now, I had seen that you guys had actually developed some of your own tooling around, you know, sort of recipes and, uh, those kinds of things over that process as well.

Are, are those, some of those custom pieces that you guys have built, you know, still relevant today? Or were those kind of more like useful in that, that older workflow that, that you were describing?

Andy: Yeah, I think they're definitely still relevant. Um, w- as we build our next site templates, you know, there's content types and things that we want from our, um, charter school template that we'll wanna bring in, staff or events or something like that.

Um, and that allows us to kinda just, um, extract small parts of the site as its own recipe to scaffold the next, um, type of site. So I think it's definitely still relevant. Uh, it's helped us, you know, early on and, um, helping us now 'cause not everything's gonna have the same, you know, content model. And that's one of the kind of restrictions of site templates is that if, if you build it and you do site export, well, it's, it's a whole package.

You know, you can't really easily extract bits of that without some other tooling or some manual work. And so, uh, we built DripYard, uh, Recipe Builder to kinda go in and have like sort of a features interface, if you're familiar with that from Drupal 7, where you can select, uh, say a content type or even, um, certain fields, and then it automatically resolves their dependencies.

And it's a 2E-based interface that you go through, check out what you want, and then it creates the recipe for you. And that allows you to, you know, move those singular kind of, uh, content types and views and, uh, field formatter or like field config, um, image styles, that kind of stuff, allows you to move that over independently.

Martin: Very cool. So m- one of the things that, that I think you touched on, Andy, was, you know, some of the, the fairly significant changes that Drupal has made, you know, really even in just the l- the last year in terms of, um, you know, like Canvas as an example being a pretty big one in terms of, you know, this, this entirely new layout engine, uh, using some different things like, um, you know, uh, being able to use React-based components, using Tailwind, uh, which I think, you know, there were pockets of people using Tailwind before, but certainly, you know, the degree to which Canvas leans into Tailwind I think is probably gonna be a bit of a game changer in terms of just generally as a community how much that gets used.

I mean, I'm curious, how much has that changed how your themes are, are implemented in terms of, you know, like have you had to go back and retool, uh, some of the themes that you had already built pretty significantly?

Mike: We've, uh, like so during, like as Canvas was actually under active development, I followed along pretty closely.

So as things were changing with Canvas and, and things were changing extremely fast, and they currently are changing extremely fast, um, we're constantly adapting. Um, and like c- Drupal is still like in a slightly weird place right now w- if you're using Canvas because not everything is Canvas. You know? I, I, I feel like Canvas has, is taken over like a lot of, a lot of the user interface, but it's not everything.

And so, um The, the components that we create need to work with both with Drupal Canvas and with traditional theming, like view modes and render arrays and all that type of stuff. And so we have, like, a bunch of lot... W- w- we have, like, some utility components, uh, which basically means th- that they're meant to only be used by other components.

And we have some logic within those components that say, like, "Hey, this is Canvas," or, "This is not Canvas," and stuff like that. So to answer your question, there hasn't been a heck of a lot of tooling needed for that because we followed along really closely. We don't use Tailwind, um, for a number of different reasons.

And, um, li- like, I, I don't really dislike Tailwind. Uh, I've used it before on, on, on a client project. But at the same time, it, it does have some deficiencies, and some of, like, the new CSS features that we use, Tailwind does not use. And, um, y- you find yourself kind of writing vanilla CSS at that point. And when you do that, it's, it, it's kind of at the point where, where do you just go all in with vanilla CSS?

Um, all of our, the, the vast majority of our, of our code base, like our, at least our CSS code bases is, like, heavily componentized, so it's very easy to find your way around. It's very e- like, the... It's not unmanageable to the point where you would need T- Tailwind CSS. W- w- where Tailwind CSS is, like, really good at, at fixing some of those, or, or, like, sidestepping some of those, like, huge CSS code bases that you've seen back in the day, but, but that's not a problem that we have.

So- You know, I, I think that the main benefit of, of Tailwind CSS is, is that it can be baked into Canvas. But at the same time, when you do your code components with Drupal Canvas, there's a CSS tab right there, and you can easily throw in your own CSS or use your own, uh, utility classes or something like that.

Andy: Yeah, we don't currently ship any code components. Everything's, uh, Twig-based- It is ... and vanilla CSS. So it just goes to show that, you know, Canvas is flexible enough to not, like, pigeonhole you into having to use Tailwind or code components. Um, and, you know, you can kinda choose whatever you want. Um, I don't know too much, but I think maybe, maybe Martin has some input on this, but in Canvas, can't you have, like, different, uh, rendering types?

So there's, like, code components, there's SDCs, and then it's pluggable, so you could, you know, have a whole 'nother type of, uh, rendering plugin or something like that, right? Do you know anything about that?

Martin: Yeah, that's a great point. I know there's, uh... I've heard some discussion about, I'm trying to remember what the other sort of layout technology that I h- heard somebody bring up.

Um, and, and more or less from what I understand, there's kind of like a middle layer in there anyway that does some of the transformations so that you can have both, like, React and Twig-based that theoretically could be used for other kinds of layouts as well. Yeah. Uh, which is pretty cool in terms of, you know, thinking further out.

Like, one of the things that I'm really excited about with Canvas is that idea that if you have an organization that has maybe resisted adopting Drupal because, like, their developers don't wanna learn Twig, uh, they'd rather work with React, that now there's a path for them to just go ahead- For sure ... and, and, you know, use Ca- or use React within Canvas, and that becomes, you know, the ability for them to, to sort of take advantage of all the enterprise features of Drupal in terms of, you know, um, you know, managing robust content architectures and governance and all of those cool things that as a community we're all really passionate about.

Um, but it sort of, like, takes away one of the potential blockers for, for those kinds of teams, for sure. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a great, like, gateway to get others in. I don't know, uh, where that stands as far as marketing that out to other people and, and making awareness to that, but that's a huge selling point for Canvas in my opinion.

Mike: It's a huge selling point. And another big, uh, a- another big benefit of the code components is the fact that you can do them immediately and you can have them deploy. Y- y- you can write them and, and put them up in a matter of hours as opposed to going through a deployment process. And then s- so for those of the, for those of the s- those listeners that aren't familiar with it, you're literally writing your, uh, JSX-type code in a editor within the Drupal Canvas interface.

And at that point, you can use those within your pages, et cetera, et cetera. And later you can export that to code using, like, some command line utility or something like that. So at that point it'll live in your, you know, Git or something. Yeah, and I think anybody who's seen, you know, either of the, the more recent Driesnotes will also have seen demonstrations of using the AI tooling that's also, you know, tightly integrated into Canvas to even be able to- Yeah

Martin: say, you know, I don't even have to, to write the React myself. I can upload like a, you know, a, you know, Figma screen grab or something and, and give it some specs in terms of here's how I want it to work. These are the places where I wanna have like, you know, props or slots and those kinds of things. And the AI can, can ingest all of that and then bring you back a set of code that you can sort of like preview in real time, tweak it if you need to, and then, you know, once you think it's, it's ready to use, like as you say, like with a click, that now becomes something that's in the component library and, and either, you know, you can sort of like, you know, cowboy do that on your live site or like, you know, figure out what's the, the right migration path to get that from like a local development environment up to your live site, uh, those kinds of things.

But, you know, as you say, that, that ability to sort of create those in a much more agile way, I think is, is pretty cool. In the fact that you can mix them so you can have, you know, like a drip yard theme with, uh, SDCs, everything server side rendered super fast. And then if you have a component or series of components that you need that need to be, you know, more interactive, you can write those as JSX and, and have like the partially decoupled thing just out of the box, which is awesome.

Andy: Yeah. Yeah. And I think the other thing, the other point to make too is that it's also pretty exciting from sort of like a third party integration standpoint because, you know, if you think about wanting to drop in some kind of like a, you know, stripe out of the box component for something, the likelihood that they're gonna have some kind of an off the shelf, you know, drop in component written in React is probably higher than something written in Twig.

Martin: And so that ability to sort of take, you know, those kinds of third party integrations and just sort of drop those in your component library is, is also I think, uh, pretty exciting as well. Yeah, I can see that. So one of the things that, that happened in the past week was the release of Drupal Core 11.4.

Mm-hmm. I'm curious, you know, have you guys tested, uh, your site templates on 11.4? And if so, has there been any sort of like, uh, has it created any sort of new things that you've gotta go in and tweak and fix? I don't- We're gonna do that today, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. W- we have a, uh, we have, like, a, an AI workflow where it kinda spins up, you know, a matrix of different web- uh, sites, you know.

Mike: And this includes, like, our various themes, site templates, um, and then you gotta test is it on Drupal Cor- Core or is it on Drupal CMS, and, you know, is Jupiter's moons in retrograde and, and- ... and all these different things. We've traditionally had a lot of problems with the hashes of our patterns, our Canvas patterns, where, like, um, for those of you that are, are not familiar with Canvas, like, you can group a bunch of components together and pre-configure them with content and stuff, and then save it so you can use it all throughout your site.

But all those have, like, different, like, MD5 hashes and stuff, and, like, you know, if a, if, if a butterfly flaps its wings in Alaska a certain way, the hash will change. So, so, like, we have... Well, I'm, I'm expecting something there . But, but we update our recipes pretty regularly because of that- Yeah ... thanks to Andy and his workflow We, we still support, like, the...

Andy: I was telling you earlier that we built the whole, like, you know, precursor to site templates with our demo content. We still support that. Like, you don't have to use, uh, Canvas, you don't have to use CMS, and you can still get, like, a fully functioning kinda demo site with, with all of our themes. Mm-hmm. Um, so supporting that has been fun and challenging.

And yeah, the, the problem we've had more than anything is trying to ship patterns, which in my opinion is one of the most useful, um, features of Canvas because onboarding somebody new, uh, to the Canvas user interface is, is not the easiest thing. There's a lot there. It's very powerful. Um, but y- if you can just, like, point them to the patterns tab and say, "Hey, you know, drag in this entire pattern and half your page is built, and then you just swap out, you know, whatever you want."

Um, so we've always wanted to ship patterns with our recipes, um, but that config is hard to ship. Uh, it's like a chicken and egg with default content and, um... So yeah, we've, we've always had to chase, like, every time there's any release of Canvas, we have to immediately, um, you know, run, run our tests to make sure that our patterns still apply.

Um, so what, uh, 11.4 will be doing that. I did, uh, receive a message from Ryan Srama. He said that the article page and the article and page content types were maybe briefly removed from the standard profile and recipe. They are removed, yes. Um, uh- So- But I don't-- I'm not sure if they added those back or, or what the fix was, but that may have hosed some site templates.

Martin: So th- there was actually, uh, a couple of days after the 11.4 stable release, an 11.4.1 that brings back some of those, those recipes. Okay. So I think they're, they're still officially deprecated, so probably by the time 12 comes out- Sure ... people will need to figure out, you know, a different dependency chain to pull those in.

But, uh- Yeah ... but yeah, I think there was a recognition that removing those recipes was almost like an API breaking change, so. Okay. Yeah. So fixing 11.4.1. Well, that got fixed- Yeah ... quickly, so. Yep. Sweet. Um, I think that, you know, that, um, that mention of patterns is actually, uh, a really important idea I just wanna double-click on for a minute.

So, um- I like how you used double-click. Like, like that's- That's, that's like the nerdiest thing I've heard. There you go. Uh, Andy, do you wanna maybe, for anybody who's not familiar with the concept of patterns in Drupal Canvas, just sort of explain briefly what those are? Yep. Yeah, so, um, in Canvas you have components, and a group of components can be considered a pattern.

Andy: And what that means is, um, you might have an image component, a paragraph component, a heading component, a layout component, and when you wrap all those things together on the page, they look a certain way and you may wanna s- kind of snapshot that tree of components, uh, into a reusable, um, kind of mega-component, and that would be a pattern.

Um, so in Canvas you can either, you know, I think you can right-click in the wrapper component or right-click in the sidebar where the tree of components is and say Create pattern, and then you name it, and then it's immediately available to be reused. And if you were to create a new page and drop that pattern in, it would look exactly like it did, you know, when you created it in, in the editor.

Which is super helpful, like because, uh, I mean, our themes, we try to make them, uh, very user-friendly. But at the same time, like, in order to expose, like, a lot of options to people to customize them, sometimes that u- uh, user interface can get overwhelming with different props and stuff like that. So just being able to wrap those up as kinda pre-built things that people don't have to worry about spacing or where the header goes or whatever, you know, um, makes it, the usability so much nicer for, you know, marketers or just people that aren't as familiar, including myself, with like where all the props go for, uh, you know, consistent spacing.

Uh, we try to deliver that out of the box, but when you, you go in and customize it, you know, things could start to shift, and, uh, you kinda just take care of that for the end user Yeah, and one of the things that, that I think is actually super cool about patterns is that I, I feel like there are places in a lot of Drupal sites where people build things into their content architecture that are really meant for kinda one-off use cases.

Martin: So when you think about like, you know, quick links on the homepage, like a hospital landing site where there's like, you know, one for directions and one, you know. So there's all of those things that are really only for the, the homepage or like, uh, you know, people really shouldn't be, you know, building carousels anymore, but that's another one you still see, you know, every so often.

People tend to build those into the content architecture when really they only need to be used in one specific place. And so with Canvas, you can have those as more kinda like patterns that could be, you know, dropped in, customized in terms of the content, and it doesn't have to be sort of like a thing that people have to remember to scroll past when they're like going to add a new note or something like that.

So I think patterns are also pretty cool from that standpoint, that allows Drupal sites to potentially, you know, continue to work with sort of cleaner content architectures as well. Yeah, that's a huge point, um, because I, I've seen in the past where, you know, content models get over-architected, over-architected to support like, you know, here's your slider content type or whatever it was.

Andy: You know? And people are like- Yep ... people that are the end users are like, "Oh, I hate Drupal because it's just like I gotta go six layers deep to upload this image for the slider on the homepage," and it just didn't make sense. Like structurally from a developer standpoint, maybe it made sense, but like you're saying, like that's just another usability win, I think, for Canvas, um, simplifying those things.

Martin: Right on. Um, I'm curious, you know, what kind of reaction have you guys had since you launched your, your site templates and f- just from the community? I mean, uh, also curious in general what you're hearing about, you know, people's reaction to site templates, spec- specifically the, what the pretty nice ones that you guys have put together.

Mike: It's a little weird. Um, like a lot of, a lot of what people are, are using our site templates for are like kind of demo stuff, to demo the ... Because it, it's a f- uh, uh, in my opinion, it's, it's the nicest site template, you know? But I'm, I'm obviously pretty biased too. But, but we support a lot. It looks really, really good, and it functions really good.

Um, but we're charging a lot of money for it. Like our, our, our price is, was it 900 or something like that? Which, which includes our, uh, which includes the theme, which we price at 500, and then like all the recipes and the work that went into it. So we're not selling a heck of a lot, as you can imagine. Our, our goal, and plus we're in a very vertical niche, you know?

Our goal is to kind of, kind of throw out a bunch of premium ones in multiple niches and kind of just feel the market out to see where it goes. Um, as far as what we're hearing, it kind of depends, you know? Like obviously coming from like a lot of Drupalers, we're hearing very positive things, but we also, you know, a lot of these people are our friends, so I don't know if, if it's 100%, you know, valid, you know?

They're probably just saying like that, that because we're friends, you know? Um, I like to think that it's, it's pretty amazing. Um, we're also like a little worried about artificial intelligence, you know? Like AI's coming and, you know, can AI like ma- Like right now it's, it's not, it, it would take a significant amount of work from a, from a developer to, to, to get to where we are, l- like even with AI.

Um, but is that gonna change in five years? And if you're doing, uh, like something else is like if, if you're doing- Uh, a small site, do you need the power of Drupal if you can have AI just kinda rewrite stuff on the fly too? And so that's, that's the t- that's the type of thing that, that we're thinking about, wondering about, and I don't think really anyone has that answer yet.

Um, but, like, from my point of view, and, and of course I'm a, I'm a Drupal insider, like, to be able to download, like, a fully functioning, well-architected, best practice site and be up and running for under $1,000 and have the power of Drupal there, like, that's a game changer. But I don't think we market it as well as we should Uh, you have any thoughts on all of that, Andy, or disagree with anything?

Andy: No, I think that's pretty much right on. Um, I guess the one thing with site templates, like our themes, we, we have this problem with our themes too. It's like you go to our, our website, you click on our themes, and you see three themes, and you're like, "Well, you know, these are nice, but they, I don't like, you know, X, Y, Z."

Uh, we have a hard time s- like portraying that this is more of a framework, that you don't have to use this theme or this site template exactly for the intended, you know, vertical that it's presented on our website. Like, you know, we have Meridian, uh, Charter School, but that could easily be, you know, readopted to be like a medical office or something just because it has the same, like, people content type with li- um, you know, positions, like events.

Those types of things. They're kind of, they could be, um, kind of remolded to match really any kind of organizational structure. So, um, somebody might miss that. Like, they might see our theme and say, "Oh, well it's just for schools, I'm gonna go on to the next one." Or same thing with even just our themes.

Like, they see what it looks like. Uh, and so we've tried to roll out, like, multiple versions of the same theme just to show that, you know, within one theme you can create two drastically different sites. Um, so yeah, I think that's one of the harder things that I'm seeing for adoption is kind of, you know, if it doesn't fit somebody's immediate need, then maybe they pass and go onto something else.

But...

Martin: Yeah. I will say for me it's interesting, because I can remember a specific case when I used to be on the agency side. There was kind of a, um, you know, almost like a small prep school, uh, in Toronto that the agency I was at, we were talking to. They were really interested in having something that was sort of, like, more modern and easy to use and, um, had, you know, the right kinds of governance and those kinds of things.

But at the time, it was like, you know, no matter how simple and sort of pared down you tried to make that initial MVP build of Drupal, the fact of having to build a custom theme on top of that, you know, meant that, you know, you were, you know, well into five figures by the time they were gonna have something that was ready to deploy, right?

And so that idea of having something for $1,000 that, you know, they can use that as the starting point and then start to, like, plan, you know, out another, you know, one, two, three, you know, even up to five years of, like, "This is where we wanna get to. You know, we're no- we're nev- never gonna have, like, a big budget to be able to sort of build out this, like, huge, big, shiny thing all in one go."

That, p- to be able to use that as the foundation and then sort of, like, build over, you know, build on top of that over time I think is, you know, again, really s- reinforces that idea of, of this being something that, that can be used by lots of different organizations for whom Drupal has been out of reach for some time.

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. But we need to let them know.

Martin: Yeah, absolutely

Mike: I think that's a big part

Andy: of it, yeah Yeah, people, like especially people that have used Drupal in the past and maybe had a bad taste for whatever reason, um, I think they would be really shocked to see where things are now.

Mike: I g- I gave a, uh... I was, I got flown to Amsterdam a couple weeks ago to prev- to present in a remote conference.

So, like, put that one together. But the, uh, the conference was PHP Verse, you know? And it was, it's, it's sponsored for and paid by JetBrains, who has, like, a heck of a lot of money because we all, uh, we like pay for JetBrains licenses, right? And, um, so I gave like a 20-minute talk on just, like, uh, uh... I, I think it's y- I originally titled it This Ain't Your Granddaddy's Drupal.

But, but, but then they, uh, we retitled it to, like, something like Drupal Was Supposed to Be Hard. What Happened? Or something like that. And I talked about all this stuff, and I'm going through the list of all these things, like all these problems that Drupal has traditionally had. And, like, over the past three years with Drupal CMS, like, the, it's, it's gone away, like, by and large, you know?

It's not 100% away, but, like, the amount of progress we made with Drupal CMS has been ridiculous, you know? And I'm talking about Canvas, I'm talking about things like ECA and Recipes and stuff. Like, uh, like, like I'm, I'm, I'm thinking, uh, like if we did this so much earlier, we would still have probably, like, 10% of the web marketplace, you know?

But, but I, I really like where we're going and, and, and the, uh, the progress that we're making so far.

Martin: So one other thing I wanted to circle back to is I think, Andy, you mentioned earlier on about, you know, certain places in your, your process today that you kind of have different AI tools baked in. Um, how important is kind of AI for the way that you guys work and, and how transformative do you think it's been in terms of, you know, really being able to, to put out the, you know, both the, the quality and quantity of work that you guys have done over the last year or so?

Andy: Yeah, I think like for now, the biggest thing we're using it for is just like a checkpoint. Um, for like, like we mentioned before, we-- For every theme we have, we've got a layout builder iteration, a Canvas iteration, and then a CMS type iteration with Canvas or without any of those, just the theme. So, you know, three the- three themes times four plus iterations.

Um, w- we've used AI to like scaffold out a system that we can just chat through Slack and say, "Hey, you know, there's a new release. R- build every site, reinstall the content, you know, find any, um, errors or, um, like config issues, create a merge request for us," and then we, uh, review it and merge it in. So that's been pretty helpful.

I mean, we could do that with tests, but we're constantly changing things. Uh, and so writing a singular type test framework for all those iterations is, uh, was more than something I wanted to deal with, so having AI figure that out for us has been really helpful. Um, we've toyed with trying to get AI to build new components and do things, and we've had various success with that.

Like it looks good, but then, you know, Mike looks at it and he's like, "No, we're not shipping this." Uh- ... which is great. I mean, that's why y- we have a reputation to stand behind, and that's why we charge a premium. Uh, and that's the difference between, you know, what you can do with AI and what you can do with like 20 years of experience.

Um, so yeah, I think we're, we're somewhere in between. Hopefully we're, you know, adopting more AI things. I think it would be valuable for our customers to be able to have more AI stuff where they can start with our theme and, you know, us have, uh, like all the skills and things that people need to build new components that follow our same patterns.

Um, we just haven't been able to get quite there where we're happy with it yet. Yeah. There's a b- th- there's a new skill, uh, that Google released, um, at their most recent Google I/O called Modern Web Development, and I don't know if you've, i- if you've seen that, Martin. But, like, it, it makes the front-end code a lot better.

Mike: It doesn't make it perfect. There's a couple things in there that, uh, th- that aren't 100% ideal and, and then, like, even within that, uh, AI sometimes forgets to implement some of the things that it suggests. Um, but it's kind of like a little on-demand skill basis. So like, um, y- your a- your agent will say like, "Hey, I'm doing this and this and this," and then it'll have a l- a list of sub-skills or something that it then looks up, installs those, and does that.

And, and, and so that'll tell it to use, like, modern APIs like, say, container queries or Intersection Observer, you know, instead of, like, the old school ways. It'll, it, it, it'll instruct it to make things relatively accessible. Um, though in my, my opinion, my experience, it hasn't been 100%, you know? But it, but it's, it's been a big factor.

So for those of you that are writing front-end code, um, using AI tooling, like, uh, just if you google, uh, Modern Web Development by Google or something like that, skill or something like that, you'll find a page on web.dev and, uh, with, like, the documentation on how to install that and use it. So we've been experimenting with that, but, uh- I think we're gonna get there.

We'll see. Which is a little scary for me as a front-end developer. It's, uh, modern web guidance. Oh, modern web guidance. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, that's what I meant to say. I will say, you know, in the last couple of weeks I've been working on, uh, something that I know you're familiar with, Mike, uh, the Drupal Event Platform.

Martin: It originally- Yeah ... was kind of a fork of the FLDC site I think back in '22, something like that. Um, and has-- we've s- sort of over the years been building that out as something that, you know, other Drupal camps can sort of, you know, take benefit from, tried to make it a little more configurable, you know, adding different features over time.

But one of the things that, that I realized earlier this year was it was actually probably ideally suited to become its own site template, particularly because at DrupalCon, uh, Chicago... Uh, no, it was actually at Atlanta last year when we, we kind of, uh, took the, the newly rebuilt Florida DrupalCamp, uh, website theme and turned that into Event Horizon, which became sort of the official theme for Event Platform.

Mm-hmm. And so having these different pieces kind of actually made it well-suited to, to become a site template. And so I've been sort of going down that process. But actually, you know, because, you know, for a lot of the development, it's kind of just been sort of, you know, me out there s- you know, plugging away at these different things, getting some help from some folks, but everybody kind of doing it on a volunteer basis- Being able to leverage AI tooling has actually been pretty incredible.

So, you know, there were some things in there in terms of, like, still using, uh, you know, Sass and compiled CSS that, uh, AI was able to sort of, you know, help us figure out how to keep sort of the, like, the nested CSS structure, but, you know, make that all sort of compatible to, to not have to be compiled anymore.

Some of those kinds of things have been super cool. But one of the, the things that I've actually really appreciated with the AI tooling is by having it in the IDE. So, uh, for me, a site template is a little bit of a different challenge because oftentimes, like, as a maintainer, usually I'm working on, like, one specific module, whereas a site template, there's usually sort of, like, the si- site template repo that's mostly, like, config, maybe some, uh, provided content, some of those kinds of things.

But by definition of, like, what a recipe is, can't contain any, like, PHP code or any of those kinds of things, right? And then you've got the theme that's a separate piece, and then, uh, a common pattern I think for site templates is to have kind of like a s- a helper module that actually has a few, like, you know, PHP things maybe to find some custom blocks or, or those kinds of things.

And so you've actually got these three pieces, but with an AI agent, you can sort of say, like, "Here's the problem that I encountered," and it'll go out and actually diagnose, you know, which pieces have to be fixed in which repo, and then sort of, like, patch the, you know, the appropriate places. Sometimes you need, you need actually fixes in all three places to actually solve the problem.

But it does a great job of being able to sort of, like, take that away and figure out which, which fixes have to go where and some of those kinds of things. And, and, you know, certainly from my standpoint, I've found that, like, a huge benefit to not have to sort of, like, parse those out on my own. Yeah. Yeah.

Mike: I've, I've seen that too. Yeah. So I, I think we're, we're getting close on time here, but one last question I wanted to ask is, I think one of the things that's interesting about site templates is also the, the promise of site templates also being something that organizations could potentially use internally.

Martin: Like I know there are higher ed institutions that for a long time had kind of like internally built distributions. Mm-hmm. And something like site templates could become a more flexible way of providing that same sort of like out of the box capability for individual like departments or even projects to, to have their own microsites.

Has, has, have organizations reached out to Drip Yard at all about sort of like using your expertise to, to build their own kind of like, you know, custom internally focused site templates? No, but we- We have had some- Go ahead ... yeah, we've had some, um, some interest in that. Um, I personally feel like that's one of the biggest, uh, benefits of site templates.

Andy: Um- Yeah ... that we can, you know, provide basically a front end system for either organization or brands with sub-brands, and they can just roll out, you know, consistent sites that, that all follow the same patterns. Um, you know, you got Drupal under the helm. So I, I personally feel like that's a bigger, um, target market for us than just like a one-off somebody just bought a theme.

Um, and so we're trying to, to find out, you know, what are the opportunities to make that happen.

What were you gonna say, Mike? Oh, yeah, yeah. I was saying, uh, if anyone out there's considering that, hit us up, you know? Yeah. Uh, you know, we're, we're working with a number of organizations to, to sell, like, bulk themes, you know? And, um, like, yeah, I think that's a big, big opportunity

Martin: Very cool. Well, listen guys, it's been great, uh, talking about site templates with both of you. Um, and yeah, would, would love to, to chat again sometime. I'm sure there'll be, you know- Oh, yeah ... lots of continued innovation in this space in the coming months, so. Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure we'll be back on here in probably less than a year, so talking about something cool.

Andy: Yeah. Thanks for having us. All right. Look forward to seeing you in, in Asheville in a couple days. Right on. Yeah. See you there. All right. Thanks guys.