In my portion of the “Drupal CMS Spotlights” keynote, I made the case that in my 19+ years of being involved in the Drupal community, now is the most exciting time in Drupal’s history.
I showed up to DrupalCon very anxious, because we had one training, three sessions, one booth session, and an extra “appearance” beyond that. Phew! In addition, Andy, Adam G-H, and I had only just wrapped up the work on Drupal CMS that allowed for paid site templates in the installer.
Drupal innovation & getting sh** done
With all of the work being done on 1) Drupal CMS, 2) Drupal Canvas, and 3) Drupal AI, it really feels like the pace of innovation has increased significantly from just two years ago. It’s exciting, but oftentimes it's also a bit overwhelming!
Instead of constantly attempting to get caught up, I focused on pushing forward several issues that affect us, and the overall UX of Drupal core and Canvas.
- SDC slots can set expectations and cardinality - this one is a Drupal core SDC schema change that will allow page builders (such as Canvas) to restrict slots to certain components (and alternately create tags for components and then create restrictions based on tags).
I worked with Pierre Dureau and Adam G-H on this, and it’s RTBC (and will likely be committed after Pierre returns home to France).
- Allow schema references in Single Directory Component prop schemas made significant progress thanks to Pierre and Lullabot’s Andrew Berry. This issue can potentially resolve the problem where creating an image prop for use in Canvas can break your Drupal site if Canvas is not installed.
Andrew reviewed the issue and Pierre has a few items to fix before this can get to RTBC.
- Allow Canvas Patterns+PageRegions+ContentTemplates provided by Recipes to NOT specify component versions is a huge issue that Dripyard has been running into. In a nutshell, we’re having to ship different versions of our Canvas patterns for Drupal core + Drupal CMS. And we’re having to ship different versions based on the Canvas version. You can imagine that this is very hard to maintain (not to mention frustrating).
We had some great work done by Matt Glaman, and Adam G-H. There are some continued discussions on the issue, but I’m going to keep on prodding folks to make progress.
- [meta] Admin theme: path to stable merged Gin (now called “Default Admin”) into Drupal core as alpha. This means that it won’t be in the actual release and is experimental.
A lot of work is needed to push it to beta, stable, and then get it into the standard profile, and that work began last Thursday. We created a “plan to create a plan”!
I met with Drupal core accessibility maintainer Mike Gifford, Gin maintainer Jürgen Haas, as well as Bernardo Martinez and Dharizza Espinach. Our plan to do weekly meetings to 1) to remove a bunch of cruft from the theme (it has sooo much that it inherited from Gin, Claro, and Classy), and 2) to triage the accessibility blockers to set the minimum standards for beta and stable.
Once the issues are triaged properly, we can begin work, and get this thing stable!
Dripyard momentum
In the weeks prior to DrupalCon, Andy, myself, and Adam G-H revamped the Drupal CMS installer to work with premium Drupal site templates. This was no small task! But the UX of it is amazing (in my opinion!) and works around the Drupal Association’s current lack of infrastructure. We even got a video of the new installer in the Driesnote, which is a big deal. Funny story, the license key in the video was actually valid when it was shown. Andy realized this and immediately deactivated it! 😅
The way the installer works is simple. When selecting a premium site template (such as ours), you simply enter a license key that you get from us. It works smoothly thanks to the smart folks involved.
Pantheon was gracious enough to have Andy and I do a half hour session at their popular booth.
Even outside of the installer stuff, it seemed that we were all over DrupalCon (which was totally intentional)! Between our multiple sessions, training, appearances, etc, people were asking tons of questions about our themes. I gave multiple demos, and had so many discussions.
New ideas for Dripyard
I had a number of great conversations with agency and business leaders including people from Evolving Web, Promet Source, Pantheon, Drupito, Acquia, and the Drupal Association.
There’s a lot of changes that we need to make to help our business grow, and Andy and I are working hard on it.
In the short term, we’re concentrating on three objectives:
- Monthly payment options for our themes and site templates. We hope this will persuade more people to “kick the tires”
- Ship a “starter” theme. I think many new sites are still in the enterprise segment and want a bespoke design. Our base theme (along with a few other components) is perfect for this. It gives a lot of best practices, has a large component library, and is very accessible out of the box. We just need to market that.
- Create more site templates. We shipped our very first official site template right before DrupalCon. It was a heavier lift than we anticipated, but now that we have tooling built around that process, we should be able to rapidly churn more high quality site templates out.
Long term, we have even more objectives, including partnering with agencies and ecommerce integration within the Drupal CMS installer.
Community
The community is the primary reason I continue to attend DrupalCons! I love seeing so many old and new friends, giving and getting hugs, and seeing what everyone’s up to.
This year was no exception!
Monday night I hung out with Mike Anello from DrupalEasy, who reserved a room with bumper cars that played jai alai (yes, really). We went out with a big group of people and had a lot of fun.
Tuesday night, I attended the Gala, where it was fun getting to see people dressed in “Drupal fancy”. Afterwards, I got good and toasted at the Irish bar at the hotel, and ended up walking several loops around the bar, talking with different groups.
Wednesday night, I ended up hanging with multiple friends to get some real-deal Chicago Pizza!
Afterwards, a number of us headed to Buddy Guy’s Legends blues club, which was right behind the hotel. Andy got a picture with the legend himself!
DrupalCon Orlando
I’ve known about this for a couple of months, but I was super excited to announce the upcoming DrupalCon Orlando to the world on the big stage (along with Mike Anello)
We have a lot of plans for this! Two of the things I’d like to put together are
- “Field trips” to places such as the Kennedy Space Center, and/or Universal Studios
- A Drupal talent show, where we pit various regions against each other
Takeaways
Drupal and the community are doing great. We (Dripyard) have tons of momentum. Our chief challenge is on the business and marketing side of things.
In the meantime, I’ve been heartened by the fact that so many folks are rooting for us to succeed and pushing for us. Thank you all!
