About
In this episode of Open Source Directions, we were joined by Fabian Franz who talked about the work being done with Drupal. Drupal is a content management software. It’s used to make many of the websites and applications you use every day. Drupal has great standard features, like easy content authoring, reliable performance, and excellent security. But what sets it apart is its flexibility; modularity is one of its core principles. Its tools help you build the versatile, structured content that dynamic web experiences need.
It’s also a great choice for creating integrated digital frameworks. You can extend it with anyone, or many, of thousands of add-ons. Modules expand Drupal’s functionality. Themes let you customize your content’s presentation. Distributions are packaged Drupal bundles you can use as starter-kits. Mix and match these components to enhance Drupal’s core abilities. Or, integrate Drupal with external services and other applications in your infrastructure. No other content management software is this powerful and scalable.
Transcript
okay hello the internet uh welcome to open source directions
hosted by open teams the first business to business marketplace for open source services
open source directions is a webinar that brings you all the news about the future of your favorite open source projects
i’m tony fast i’m a scientist and developer advocate at quansite from atlanta georgia um and i’ll be your
host for open source directions today co-hosting with me is hi i’m david charbonneau cto at open
teams and i’m excited to be here again co-hosting uh and i’m coming to you from durham
north carolina uh today we’re going to be talking with fabian my name is family in france i’m
the vp at software vice president at software engineering at tech1 consulting
and have a pretty special birthday because i happen to be the born of
source and that means my birthday is the same day as gnu was born
um and that was so funny at one time i was at a debian conference and um they both celebrate me and glue so
that’s the thing overall i enjoy um architecting i’m i love architecting software
for drupal what’s our topic today i’ve architected the caching system it’s still one of the most advanced open
source caching systems out there i don’t even know if closed source has something similar to cache context
etc so i’m i’m passionate about performance i’m passionate about making the internet
fast i’m passionate about helping people solve problems
essentially so empowering them to do things to um be able to use drupal for example to
make the fastest side the internet has ever seen high performance so that you could compete with drupal
site with something like facebook or so drupal has a big pipe of facebook for example we have a big pipe module
you can access streaming automatically and you don’t even need to configure anything it works kind
of out of the box if you build a site in the right way um also doing a lot of mobile
development and other things but in general i like to innovate i’ve also originally
brought the twig template engine from uh symphony um fame of fabian potency into drupal
uh way back in 2013 2012 2013 and um so yeah that’s that’s what i’m
doing welcome fabian uh we’re super excited to talk about your passions uh today but
before we get into the juicy details of drupal um uh what we’re going to do
is we’re going to talk about uh recent uh pull requests that you found particularly interesting right
this is our uh our social media um so what uh kind of good stuff have you seen happen in npr’s
fabian lots of things um lots of things to say the internet is
just great um but um what i um especially like prs4 and what i find fascinating
is is working with rust i’ve recently started looking at reviews by um the
founder of tech one um he’s writing a load testing tool completely open source it’s called goose
and it’s written in rust and if someone is familiar with locust which is written in python
gooses can can do the same essentially but it uses the cpu and everything much
better because it doesn’t have the global indicator lock the time things are a little bit more difficult in goose so one of my pr’s
my own ps in this case was making it possible to use clojures which is non-trivial in a language like
rust so now you can completely programmatically built your your lord test you can build it from a
spreadsheet or whatever you want and then modify it things like that so that’s
that what came to mind if you said pr of the week it’s not this week but we just time travel back a
few weeks oh that’s fine that’s why it takes a long time to land pr’s
uh what about you david uh what’s been interesting in your little part of the open source world
well uh open teams was approached by matthias persone who had a great idea
for a follow-up to october he calls it closed ember the idea is
that in november there’s going to be all these pull requests that need to be processed and dealt with by the maintainers and so
why not encourage that and provide a way for maintainers of different projects to kind of commiserate and and
work together with each other and their respective communities so we moved uh the prototype uh
support for this into a new domain closember.org and uh we’re starting to get ready to to
plan some events for close ember and see if we can have this wonderful compliment to october
oh that sounds like a great idea and then uh hopefully and it’ll definitely help out some parts of the community
um for me uh i made a bunch of pr’s a while ago and now i have to fix them you know you
forget that like the hard part isn’t getting the pr in the hard part’s getting the pr closed
so i don’t have anything specifically interesting i’ve just got some work to do after this episode’s over
um but uh yeah let’s uh let’s continue and get into the uh get into the details of uh drupal
um so drupal is an open source content management platform uh it supports a variety of websites
ranging from personal uh web blogs to large community driven websites uh we can find some more
information at drupal.org and uh it seems that the drupal community has so much energy
in it too which is the drupal.org community uh there’s a mirror of drupal on i know
you all have your own get rape repo there’s a mirror on github it’s got quite a few it’s got over 3 000 stars and i i guess you had
mentioned there’s over 3 000 independent contributors to this project yes definitely drupalite um there was a
website uh celebrate drewplayed.com i think it was called and i met listed all those three
thousand people they even made a little like contribution map where all the names are
shown um i see if i can find it later um but yeah that was pretty cool to to see kind of to be be
part of such a huge open source project so so drupal is not only old to
what we come later but it’s also um it’s also it has a huge community of
contributions like that it’s it’s for everyone to contribute that’s
and well yeah i mean uh when i looked at when i looked up some stats on the project you all seem to just be the one of the
most popular open source projects i didn’t even think to look who is ahead of you all but in the united states
you’re the fourth most in some countries you’re like the first most used open source project so we’re really excited to be talking to
you uh about about drupal in its community today so i’ve got a question that that might
sound a little uh odd following talking about how popular and uh the longevity the project has been
but um who started drupal and then why uh what need does it feel
um drupal was started by dress bhuta and um i can tell the history but i also
want to quickly share the screen of the um of the history tab sure so that um we
can all look together a little bit um so let’s check this tab here yep that’s the home page of
drupal but now we want to look at the history page and there we can
can quickly see um how it will start with start by dries brutal enhanced schneider and they they
originally needed an internet connection that they could rely on um so they shared an adsl connection
and then they need to um coordinate that a little bit because yeah sharing across eight
students so they want to have a little name and so they want to call it
um and um yeah and for this they need the website and there was nothing really out there and so a small
news site this web board was started and um there they could talk about what
they were doing etc so for this sacred basically a small
cms um what need does it feel um drupal is for for everyone it’s it’s
the same as for for everyone essentially so um if you look a little bit again
at the home page in that there’s lots of sections white rupaul it’s for developers it’s for marketers for
agencies there’s lots of case studies um drupals in the news everywhere but
those are kind of the three things it can help you as an agency um to make really really really
data driven applications we come a little bit later to that it can be used for for marketers you can
pretty quickly set up a site that’s looking nice but it’s not limited
a lot of those frameworks like um the non-open source world and that are commercial um they’re very
limited in what they can do in the end and one of the problems is um
if you’re so limited at one point you come to that limit and once you’re there what are you gonna
do now and with drupal you have flexibility and that means there in all my career of drupal and
i’ve been using it personally since 2009 um so also over 10 years now
there was nothing that drupal didn’t have a way to do essentially and often it was
many things obviously can be complicated requirements are complicated but if the requirement was pretty stable and
clear and was just some extension needed here or there there’s usually a good way that trooper can do that and
that’s cool so uh yeah and that brings us for drupal for developers um we have essentially two versions to
choose from right now the old legacy drupal 7 that is more for those people that like the more
um um functional not function based not
functional that’s something else function based programming style with no cloud almost no classes and really programming
like it’s uh 1999 with php4 um no um and
but there’s also this modern version of drupal that’s based on symphony like levels also based on symphony and
other popular open source vape framework and um a lot of being able to use
modern front-end technologies with it like react p-react whatever you want to use um
i mean there’s 20 and every week there’s a new framework probably um but
whatever drupal has json api rest api and it can access all those things and
you could even create your own api very easily if you want to uh graphql yeah so whatever front-end
application you have you can combine it with drupal so that’s also why it’s for developers and even those
that are using the hotness of javascript frameworks of whatever is hot right now this week right right
uh well that was a great history thank you so much maybe before i don’t know uh i don’t
know if you need to close the screen just yet you can uh you describe the history of the you’ve already talked about the name
but uh the logo yes um it didn’t finish talking about the name
because i have this little cheat sheet you know where it tells me which question um you
want to still ask in this section so i want to give it all away but dorb is dutch for village and that’s
how drupal got its start um but then reese actually misspelled it
as drop dot org and so the domain got not dropped.org but drop.org which is
that and so it all started with kind of this little mistake and then um we have this
logo now it makes much more sense of what the drew polygon is um because it’s a drop and so
drupal till version four was called drop the drop and then it was renamed to the um to the
other part um in uh when the software was um was finally um
um released and um it’s pronounced drupal and it comes from the
dutch word drupal i’m not sure if i set it right now which means drop so uh this is how it all comes together the
making of the druplicon and the name and other thing like that so pretty cool story in that that the
typo kind of start the logo and then uh from the logo it was released and yeah
so many great things come out of happy little accidents exactly happen please yeah
in this case well uh are there alternative projects out there
sure i’m going to stop screen sharing for a moment because we don’t need to screen for that yeah obviously there’s all those
commercial things there’s wordpress there’s the cms of the week there’s note based cms
there’s all those new things and they’re all great if what you want to do is um
[Music] build a little side for the next door
client that’s a bakery or whatever like that or even even a larger organization already and
we have so much choice right now and it’s fantastic but there’s one thing that
drupal is still king of and that is structured data and i’ve heard that your audience is often
scientists and they’re interested in python and data driven things so
um later when we have been looking at the demo of drupal i will be looking at specifically this
part how you can structure data together how you can input data and how it can help present data
strong taxonomies with 10 levels deep no problem drupal can do that and this is one of its its strong parts
the other part where strong is and that it allows everyone
to build a website but not a simple website where you click it and click click some boxes together
but um my sister when she was still studying um had a little little homepage and
where he put uh where she put um some data on actually um the um
the magic craft of of harry potter she kind of collected those and um and um so it was data driven
approach and um then at one point she wanted to create create a new side of it
and then um i i showed her basically here’s where you can create your fields
and did some screen sharing etc and the rest she built kind of
herself and it’s possible so drupal has this role of a site builder and this world of
site builder is pretty unique to drupal because it means you can set up a pretty complex site just by
clicking click it click the click many developers don’t like that just to be clear
so many i want to code everything i want to put it all in etc just fine but one of the reasons why
drupal has been very popular and is still popular um we can look a little bit at usage at
some point um is um that we have the site builder problem site builder doesn’t need to know how to
write code um drupal had no code because before no code was popular essentially
it’s a little bit more involved than how those no code tools are evolving a at wish that drupal could have
gone into this direction a little bit more of making that easier but it’s what it is um but anyway the
um the site builder really allows you to create very complex sites um there’s no
coding at all we’ll be looking at them later thank you so much for all of those
stories they were fabulous um it’s it seems like uh the technology
choices you make are important in the success of drupal so what are some of the core technologies
that drupals build on that afford you this success lamp the money-making machine
no um yeah there was this joke on twitter where best kenya someone was like yeah but you need
a cdn and you need this service in micro servers and kubernetes and everything
the other person was i have index php lamp money-making machine so uh yeah
it’s drupal is not as easy as index php so but essentially we are running the linux
apache mask php stack um what’s mostly used often
memcache is added or redis because drupal is making very heavy cache
usage of caching technologies especially with drupal 9 in the new cache system so unfortunately for smaller sites the
database would still be enough but if you have lots of writes like per second then mysql really doesn’t like that and
unfortunately the support that essentially can speak the the memcache protocol mysql
that never got really so stable because it could circumvent the query layer and
all those things and keep it also more in memory and write it back and be less stressful for anyone to be
that never got off the ground so um for now just adding a memcache instance cuba needs that’s no problem at all
anyway um now and or redis um is um probably still the uh the best choice
um if you want to do a professional thing there’s lots of hosting companies commercial offerings that are
automatically giving you kinetic things so in this case the landscape also has changed while before
it was mainly shared hosting that that was there and for now um many things are doing uh
enterprise or managed hosting so like all the um the graphql
headless things um you can use drupal for that as well you can just have a drupal
and uh um a thing that’s basically exporting everything to static content
then exporting to the web but can do as well but the current drupal is
still basically the main thing is you have this drupal and then outputs your pages and you host it somewhere
you add some caching layers to it memcache maybe a little cdn or varnish and that’s it so for the more professional
things yeah so that’s our stack that’s nice it has that feeling that um you can start small and
you can opt into more sophisticated support over time relatively with relative ease and that
way you can you can grow with your audience that’s right exactly you can um it’s a very good point yeah
you can definitely start with a very small drupal site and once it gets bigger um you can do performance testing
checking the screws for example load testing and then you know i probably need to do something here and
then go your way so so who uh currently maintains the project
um there’s several versions so there’s drupal 9 drupal 8 7 and drupal 6 there’s those 30
000 sites let me quickly share the user’s statistics you can take a look at that um
let me share that tab from top
um so um as we can see um there’s still 1.1 million there’s 1.1
million sites on drupal and that’s pretty constant um there has been this old version of
drupal 7 that was that is really popular and still popular and the maintainer of this
7x version so i’m still responsible for together with another person um for a 690k
asides greece officially is also a maintainer but is focusing more on the newer versions and overall project oversight etc
and we can see the the most popular eight eight version is still the 89x the last
release before the nine and that’s but there’s already around 40k sides on on the nine version
so uh it’s pretty much um fractured like that you can see there’s a little bit of a change here before we had like this
5x667x8x thing um where we essentially um uh
always had one big version and then we switched to semantic versioning and then it was uh every six months and then
a new new major version came out so we had this minor releases and
and then the major releases with and no uh bc breaking changes nameless drupal 9 the
first bc backing changes so there was a a large change um why before everything was integrated in
drupal 7 and drupal 9 it’s we’re dependent on symphony components and they also have some certain end of
life and depend on other technologies but it’s all basically together
so um what is an advantage is that with the nine version are you essentially
um can always upgrade because upgrades are easy as long as you keep on it
um but you must in a way also upgrade because um the whole ecosystem is always changing
with the drupal 7 version um and you could essentially
keep on the platform if you wanted to it will be end of life soon um it’s probably one more
year i think by now um but the pro but the thing is uh even though um it’s kind of end of life at that
point um there will be commercial offerings that are already working for the drupal 6 version which still has
30k sites which really does not change that much it’s 32 to 31 over a curse of of
of a month or so so it’s it’s still very active there’s a 2 6 sides that are
still there they are persistent and um so this this drupal part
um and for this 2×6 version we already have successfully uh the long time
support that’s offered by commercial vendors um take one is one of them there are others
that are also doing that and um we think um the same will happen with drupal 7
and um so whoever is on drupal 7 it will cost a little bit of a fee um
at least for the enterprise support and um if you want to really get taken care of
but um in essence um you could could um if you want to you could be like
those six x sites and just keep on the platform it’s a very stable platform it’s a
nice platform and it works i mean if i didn’t like it i would not be maintaining of it still
and uh yeah it still has potential we just had uh php 74 support and other things
and my eight is around the corner so um and we can do all that and that’s
really cool so and uh drupal 9 however is the newest hotness which i’ll be also
showing um so it depends what you want what you need and etc for most people probably the 9x
version is is a better choice because they why you need to continuously upgrade and
you can continuously upgrade very easily due to the pc model so when we essentially
uh deprecate just here at this point uh just here at this point between 89 x
and 9 x was code that was deprecated for this long time
finally removed so you had a long time to upgrade and i think somatic versioning is just great
well uh this is uh thank you for telling us more about the users in the community
um it’s gonna be hard to talk about all the users but uh where your users seem to come from everywhere what about your contributors um where
are you finding folks contributing to the drupal project from everywhere
now it’s really um drupal is everywhere it’s all around the world there’s
australia america europe a lot um especially when we were
finishing the drew play there was a like a core team in europe that was was doing a lot of the hard work and
finishing it so drupal being started in europe even though most of the larger companies are in america
uh open source spirit is still very much alive here here in europe a little bit
and um there’s also always camps like before clovis obviously like developer
days where developers come together hacked together for a week or ten days at some
nice location like they had some castle at one point and sorry but some ghosts etc
i would love to hack in a castle that sounds fun um so uh is the drupal project
participating in any diversity and inclusion efforts yes they are
we have a whole initiative that is diversity and inclusion um they always speak at the drupal con
and um i think one of the things that i find important for diversity and inclusion
is is the overall topic i mean in its own it’s also very important but the overall topic of being human
we are all humans we all belong together in the end that’s at least the end goal of all of that
however you reach it is is your own choice but the end goal is essentially um we are
all human and this being human aspect um that is always a part of drupalcon so
we not only have technical tracks etc now they are online so even easier to go to them um
but this we are all humans there can be sessions about burnout um
there can be sessions about um how um um people from uh marginalized communities
have have stronger problems with burnout for example or something like that uh because of certain issues or
something so um there could be lots of things that are like all together or how can i
increase the diversity in in my company yourself so that’s um an important part of that uh
diversity and inclusion um to be at this drupalcon is to to have this voice and
always um sometimes even keynote speakers etc really cool it’s great to hear that it’s
just lovely overall it’s a lovely community and all the people are so great when we were
still able to meet in person it was like in a way like getting to a family
gathering but not a bad kind but a good kind you know it’s great to hear that that’s such an
integral part of the community and and the practice for for this project and for the for the conferences
yeah the the the mental and physical health of your communities is important and i’m super glad to hear
you all talk about that part um it’s uh there’s a lot more i learned as i got into software there’s a
lot more to uh open source than just being able to sling some code there’s a there’s a lot of new challenges that uh
folks are unaware of um but now it’s a good time to shift uh and we’re gonna switch into the project
demo and well we’ll get to see some really cool features of drupal and how it works
um while fabian’s getting air fabian’s getting set up here uh we would like to take this time
opportunity to thank our sponsor quansite for sponsoring this episode of open source directions
uh kwanzai is creating value from data um so when you’re ready fabi fabian
please take it away you got it here we go so um this is a
sample installation of drupal um this is shipping this drupal itself it’s a umi
distribution essentially and it shows how pretty drupal can look like like it doesn’t need to to look like the
next um thing um but it can look really really pretty so we have here this recipe
collections um we have here these um this banner then we can so you can take
a look at the articles there on the side give it a go and grow your own helps etc we can view an
article and um so that’s really cool um and here’s for
example some more featured articles but now we look at a little bit and how um yeah how can we
can we build something like that so here we have this more featured article and it’s um and we can edit this view so
and that’s kind of what i meant with the site builder role because what would usually be some code that needs to live
in some controller etc here you just configure it so if you want to say for example i need
a site where only the unpublished content is here not going to do that now but i could
click here select publish so just not no apply and then i would be saving and then
would be only showing me the unpublished content okay there’s no right now there is no
um nothing um but yeah this is one possibility of how
to do it so i’m going to cancel that because i don’t want to do that but here we are back so um and then we have
something what’s also very nice is drupal is it makes it very easy and that also speaks to the inclusion of the
whole world because it’s important to support different languages if you want to be international so here we have this whole
site again in spanish and now we can look at that so let’s go back to english you have some
built in search it’s very simple to if you want to extend the stack to extend drupal with something like apache
solar because we have a search api and this
can also work with other leucine-based search engines so that’s pretty good and then we also
have this recipes being chocolate nut and brownie oh i love it let’s go there
and here you can see this is it here preparation time cooking time number of servings recipe instructions
ingredients very nice we can share the link later so if anyone um that
um they would need to to set up a drupal site so there’s some work to do for you but what
i want to look at real quick now is the layout essentially so we can take a look at the layout and
we have this little thing called layout builder and then we can see um and i’m gonna
quickly um uh [Music] check this show content preview uh off
because then get a little bit more clear of what we are seeing here we have the recipe category field the text fields a summary
field a media field preparation time cooking time difficulty ingredients recipe
moderation control field and if i now show the content preview again then we can say
here’s our category with the tags our image and here all those blocks that we have seen we can basically uh
drag and drop them we can add new blocks we can add new fields so it’s very very flexible in
what it can do um and it’s also giving me this little hint that i’m just now editing the layout for
just this recipe content item so i can essentially overwrite it but it could also edit the template
template for all the recipe content items instead and then here just gives me one example
and then i could essentially try to change it for all recipes and i could
add something for those recipes another nice thing that drupal has is both it’s translation support
so i can translate that in in different languages so if i edit it now we’re looking at the
edit screen um we can already see that also all the
interfaces is spanish here and then we see the category the image etc um there’s even the
possibility if i enabled that to have a different image by language so if i had an image where
there was some text on it i could upload different ones for the different languages
and another thing that is very nice is revisions that means you never need to be shy
in doing any changes so if i want brownies school to add back to the title here
i can both do a preview so once i’ve seen that okay this is how it
looks like yeah that looks good so um and um
then i can go go back essentially and say okay and now we want to save this
for this translation this is english and now we have it super cool now someone comes and that might have
been a little bit overbought so let’s just revert to an older version uh revert and
uh here we are and we are back um to our old title and there’s a div module
so i can div changes etc so um it’s all probably not what
you’re one person that is having a side with this little things needs but as soon as
you’ve got a team of several content editors you want content moderation you want workflow and drupal has all of those as even much
more advanced workflow tools but i promise one thing we would be looking at um at structured data um
that um and uh what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna expand this little thing
here we look at the structure part so and there’s a structure here i can select my blogs content forms
etc but what we’re going to interest in this content tags and we have this little article here for
example uh now what we’re gonna do is first is taxonomy sorry uh taxonomy so taxonomy everyone
scientific will know what that is and we’re gonna add a moon phase um to our uh recipes because
everyone knows at them is the best moon phase for writing recipes uh so there’s a
vocabulary language for that and the default language and then we can
can even enable translation uh but you could also say it’s not specified uh the
language or it’s not applicable so let’s let’s not translate the thing for now or maybe you know
we translate it um so um we save it
and now we have this this moon phase essentially and now we could could add a term like
recent moon even describe it we could even have here another field so for example um this
whatever negatives goes on so now uh the full moon and
a half moon and a secret of mana moon um and um but that’s not
gonna show so we go back to taxonomy and now we can can go to this um thing and we can manage the fields
and now we have this tags for example and we had a field and uh that’s just a reference and we
reference another taxonomy term and call that the tax
and um now we select the vocabulary um yeah
okay
and now we can select the vocabularies attacks and then we have different ways of referencing
these taxonomies we can create them automatically etc here you can see already it gets a
little bit technical but uh still cool so when we now edit in add a new moon phase essentially and
then we need to go back to this taxonomy uh lists the terms and
um at the term so we also need a half moon and then we can see oh there’s our text
we can add and we just add um this is a cool moon
and it’s mana ending
so do you get validation and stuff when you do these things yes it could be um so this is free tax
tax essentially but um you could also say that only select the text should be allowed
uh okay that actually there is validation so i would need to create them first
because i didn’t check this checkbox there anyway not important um but now what i could do
to my article is um content types uh in my recipe again i could go manage
fields has also a few attacks but i think that’s a free free attack
and i could add a field and um so another taxonomy term and call that
new phase
and once you have that um that’s pretty cool saving [Music]
take some return limited one yep
and now what we want to do probably is [Music] when i do this moon phase category
i will one say that default value should be so are there different like
administrative interfaces and stuff that you can have when you’re when you’re using drupal this is just one example
yeah definitely um so this is the ginseng you can also write your own admin theme if you if you wanted to
um here’s our moon phase and um
i’m gonna check this real quick um
okay i need to to create something here no that’s fine um and there’s also other widgets
usually where i can can then just have like a drop down with chosen etcetera
i just didn’t um didn’t enable this here but we could say it see if it’s available um
this is live so um they um one other speciality is in
this times at least is that you don’t need to go to the code base and do something but you can install the
module essentially by um um
options you can trade your buttons reference see if there’s something we want ah
there’s not but essentially um here’s several um modules i could install so if i want to have comments on my
articles or whatever then i could just enable that there’s still a forum in it so lots of useful things out of
the box and then there’s this whole essentially
ecosystem of things where again you could have have lots of parts so um
the possibilities are kinda can endless you have different
themes that you can choose from this is umami here’s this nice thing a new admin theme the old admin
team so a lot of possibilities and obviously you can manage your content
and again this is all essentially configurable so i can for example i want
to filter all articles and i want to filter all the articles that are in english
and i can do that it’s it’s no problem essentially and um so yeah and
um the nice thing is however i don’t like this filter and they don’t like this also whatever
like that then most of those filters are views and that means i can change them and
this is just one part where drupal is just so very flexible um that i can essentially just go to the
structure and i can look at all the views on the side and there’s probably a content view
yep for the admin content page and i can edit it
and here we see um the fields for example the username is called awesome
it seems like a great way for folks with uh teams with different abilities to be able to work together on a site
definitely and um yeah and for many things as you’ve seen you don’t need a developer
you just need a little bit more advanced person um that can do that and so um once we go back to content
um we saw we just changed the string no coding required all uh in the
database essentially the original no code [Laughter]
yeah they marketed it better
open source projects have to take too much marketing responsibility too right like i thought we were just supposed to write the software
um but thank you so much for that walkthrough uh that was really cool to see um and uh i
appreciate you sharing that with us um we’re gonna move into the road map section real quick this kind of meat of
the episode here um i noticed uh when i was preparing for today
that uh drupal has like two future directions they’ve got strategic initiatives and road maps um i was wondering if you
could mention broadly where the project’s going and how those concepts sort of fit into the future direction of the project so
um [Music] the e-strategic initiatives a lot of
part is is essentially in the roadmap is that we wanna be able to
ensure that we are fit for the future so the strategic initiatives are
that the admin ui as you’ve seen it’s nice it can do the job but it could
look a lot better and um it’s also that many many frameworks are going in the direction of
just having a slick javascript application like uh framework so um actually let me
share this window that makes it simpler to to explain the things when the audience can see
uh strategic initiatives yeah so admin ui and javascript modernization
so it’s it’s it’s very important that we get a better ui
and um that we have something more modern than jquery in core
um so that was that is very very important that it feels slicker to use
drupal that the ui fields feels better and as you’ve seen when i did that i could do everything
but it still felt a little clunky there are many options that probably from a you extend point
i shouldn’t need to know about at that point and that should really be hidden
somewhere or be less prominent right now everything has the same importance and i think that’s
one of the points where um a new initiative for great admin ui
could shine in in saying these are the important parts of the ui and these are less important
and giving that more apart another next thing is the apa first so the drupal
can speak to your mobile application um that it can speak to your website it creates uh the automatic static
websites and all of those things multilingual it can even there was even one drupal
system that did an alexa integration so that’s pretty cool so this is um then everything should be
automatic first then since years over time finally we got back to automatic updates
there was for a long time a strong backlash from the security community because any
automatic updater is also responsible for for example 690k sites
so if there’s any bug in in in the updater itself it could be pretty bad so it
starts to be a large thing on the other hand so many things have changed and there
are so many possibilities now in in doing essentially things that um yeah there is a way to do it and
um there was funding provided by the european union for this initiative and
they’ve been very nice in supporting open source and so this um automatic updates will
finally at some point come to drupal and that means you could have your site on the net and
you allow it to be automatically updated and then you don’t have to worry about security issues as much anymore because
it automatically updates itself so that’s a pretty nice thing to see composer support and quarry yes so
composer is php php’s packet management
system similar to npm our pipey i think um and
um so um this is essentially for that and it should be a little bit more
integrated right now it feels a little bit foreign um and i was able to install this drupal
super duper side um tools for local development called d dev orlando or other things um
to um with just composer i just essentially just go to the ddf docs
text how do i install drupal 9 and installed it um because while i do a lot of
maintenance of site i’m not installing it every day in in in a demo environment i
have my local installations for development of core but i don’t have some uh for
a completely fresh thing and they didn’t want to set up virtual hosts etc so just using this i was able to get a
drupal site running probably in around 10 minutes or so so it’s really simple if you you use the
right dockerized tools um by now configuration management is really cool
um configuration management is kind of like the the the second part of the um of the
site builder role that you’ve seen so um why is a site builder essentially
is creating this configuration now it all lives in the database and while for little sites that might still
be acceptable we found over the years that that’s a little bit difficult um if um the
um if you always change the life side because you make a mistake and suddenly
half your site is five or three that’s an idiot so um in drupal
many parts are still then done via the command line and we have often this workflow of dev
stage and life and so you do something on your dev environment with a fresh database
you export the configuration and then you import it again on live as as a default so if anyone had changed
it on live this import would essentially fail because the state it expects does not match the
state should be in so you’re not overwriting any changes for example done in a hotfix
because hey um it’s friday night and site goes down and you need to fix
something real quick and no one at that point usually i mean documenting in the ticket maybe
but no one is putting in the proper code at that point and so that can then
because the next money there’s another alert or whatever um can already be forgotten and um so um this helps essentially
so the configuration management is essentially the defaults and as long as no one changes it on live
site which you can uh remove um the permissions from drupal has a very great permission system both
on seven and nine um it allows you very granularly to show what each person can do
um is allowing you to do that then you have the documentation and help
functionality essentially so um much more better experience in in
using drupal evaluating drupal etc just documentation etc then we have the
road map uh because before the end of life dates of the of the other parts we need to replace certain parts in core
again um so um drupal 9 will already be end of life at 2023
so and there’s jquery ui php 7 symphony 4 804 all the flows need to be ready at
that point so it needs to run on php 876 and it needs to have a new editor
there’s a media initiative because media is still um it’s already
working pretty well um but still a large part of what editors like to do they need drag and
drop they need to change things they need to reuse media which was for a long time a pretty large
problem in drupal under the media module came in and made that all simpler that you have
like a media library you can choose from you can add to but that’s also moderated in a way
because nothing worse than someone accidentally changing the image of the home page out and being
that uh immediately live there’s also um that’s not an initiative but just noticing it
there’s something really cool it’s cooler the best cool things in sliced bread i
think it’s called cps and it’s a content preview system in drupal 8 it’s a module
and it’s called workspaces and this allows you essentially to do
several changes to change an image prepare content
change several things on the homepage even change the layout etc and then in the end when you are finished with that you’re working in a
sandbox and someone else can work in another sandbox when you are finished you just click a button and
all your changes are live at once so it’s not only one workflow for one article that you’re working on that
you’re then publishing or one person poor person that has to click 10 times to publish things and then the
users might still see the main article before the corresponding banner is coming live
etc but you can do all that simultaneously and to my knowledge no other cms there’s other parts that
have one staging server yes but no other cms out there has modules
uh that are able to give you unlimited staging area like the git would do
and at least no other cms set back by database and not like it which obviously would
have um there’s a new front-end theme in in the work
so again it’s about making it beautiful making it beautiful and then
we have the workflow here so that’s uh pretty cool and these are all the initiatives that have been
already completed so that’s a lot of that that was mine
that is an impressive amount of uh things that are going on in parallel as well as just an impressive amount of
progress that’s great for thought yeah and for thought
i can’t look at next week and y’all are 2022. get out of here it’s fantastic
well hey thank you so much for laying out the road map um it looks like we’re about running out of time
so uh this is when we get to our world famous rant and rave section
um so you know this is your 15-minute soapbox to rent and rave about anything
that you want um and i’m pretty sure that fabian chose to rave about something
yeah um can you can you start real quick tony i’ll be right there yeah uh
oh i’m gonna start with raving or ranting or raving um well uh yeah i just uh i kind of want
to really just echo what we talked about earlier that everybody take care of their mental health and their physical
health and you know take care of yourself so you can take care of others better right now things are hard and you know
be a be a good human right now and look out for others that’s that’s where i would that’s that’s what i’m going to
say and stop with i’ll go ahead um i’ve been
kind of diagnosing and repairing some significant performance issues in one of our projects and
the thing that that really struck me this week as i was doing that was how much value was provided and how
critical it was that i could just dive into the code for the dependencies so that i could have a good idea of what was going
on um and just the wealth of material and discussion that’s out there on the web
uh for the for the problems i was running into so i i’m just really grateful today for the open source community and um you
know it makes it i think it it makes our jobs
more tractable in a lot of ways and that that sense of community and sharing is just
a wonderful thing to see definitely and i’m i’m finally ready uh
sorry for that but now it’s ready so uh the thing i’m gonna rave about is called yjs and it’s
just so fantastic um it’s a way to do shared editing um in your cms
essentially you can uh in this completely javascript base so you can have like this post
mirror and someone else and i could say hi uh hi world whatever someone else already put in
something with tigers whatever you can do quill another edit or you could
draw collaboratively let’s start a new thing here um so um that’s pretty cool
and you have full um just draw some heart or something like
that love for the world and um it has so many features it’s automatic syncing offline support
peer-to-peer and i think the really really cool thing of ijs is
in the end if all goes well it could be shared editing other google docs in your cms in wordpress drupal in
everything and this would be the coolest thing ever oh i
love that i want to pr i want to program in prose mirror so bad um it’s one of my favorite tools that’s
so cool thank you for sharing that um it looks like that’s all the time we have today uh thank you all for watching
and for listening uh you can find us on twitter at openteens inc and uh kwanzai ai uh
fabian where can people find you and drupal at uh drupal is obviously at drupal.org and
me you can find on twitter with fabian france well thank you so much for
joining us uh if y’all liked what you saw please go to our youtube channel and subscribe to
see more content uh you can join us next episode for our discussion about
terminus tv um and we will see you all soon and thank you all for joining us
thank you and thank you fabian thank you very much bye bye bye
