Talking Drupal #497 - Drupal Forge

Nic: [00:00:00] This is Talking Drupal. We could chat about web design and development from a group of people with one thing in common. We love Drupal. This is episode 497 Drupal Forge. On today's show, we're talking about Drupal Forge, how it works, and why it's changing Drupal with our guest Darren O. We'll also cover E-C-A-V-B-O as our module week.

Welcome to talking Drupal. Our guest today is Darren. He has been a member of the Drupal community since 2005. His work with the community led to his current role as a senior software engineer, cognizant, and since 2024, he's been the project lead for Drupal Forge, a platform for instant Drupal demos.

Darren, welcome to the show and thank you for joining us.

Darren: Thank you.

Nic: I'm Nic Laughlin, founder at nLightened Development, and today my cohosts are joining us for her second week as guest host Kathy Beck, [00:01:00] senior UX engineer at oo. Welcome back.

Kathy: Welcome. Thanks for having me again,

Nic: and also joining us as usual, John Picozzi , solution architect at EPA.

Howdy. And now to talk about our module of the week. Let's turn it over to Martin Anderson-Clutz, a senior solutions engineer at aa and a maintainer of a number of Drupal modules and recipes of his own Martin this week.

Martin: Thanks Nic. Have you ever wanted a powerful and flexible way to create views bulk operations without writing code?

There's a module for that. It's called E-C-A-V-B-O and it was created in May of 2022 by MXHA prolific maintainer in his own right and an active member of the group that has made the ECA ecosystem so far reaching. It has 1.1 0.1 and 2.1 0.1 versions available. The latter of which supports Drupal 10.3 and 11.

It is actively maintained and has security coverage, [00:02:00] and as for documentation, it's sort of has it. There's, uh, pretty extensive read me with good step-by-step instructions, and the project page has links to both an example model and a tutorial video. It has seven open issues, one of which is a bug against the current branch, which is pretty good considering it's in use by 320 sites according to drupal.org.

Now with the module installed, your site will have a number of events within ECA specifically for defining models that can perform bulk actions on these selected items. In a view, in my own experience, the most useful event is VBO execute views, bulk operation one by one. From there, you can define the logic of what needs to happen to these selected items.

I've used it for fairly simple operations, like changing content to a specific moderation state, but you could define complex logic that is conditional on field values, site configuration, or even global factors like time of day. With one or more [00:03:00] models defined, you can now add a field to your view for ECA bulk operations and then select which eligible models you want available in that specific view.

It's worth adding that. The ECA model can also include logic to define who should have access to perform a particular operation, which could be as simple as checking the role of the current user, but can be as complex as you need. I came across E-C-A-V-B-O during some recent work on the Drupal event platform, which is already available to try out on Drupal Forge, but there should be a more formal announcement on that front soon.

So let's talk about E-C-A-V-B-O. I

Nic: have some questions. So I imagine that when you create a new model using this, it adds the operation as an option on the dropdown, right? In whatever view you added to.

Martin: So there's within views, there's a special field that you add that's like E-C-A-V-B-O, and it adds it to that, it shows up as an [00:04:00] option there.

Nic: Okay. And it merges, did it end with the normal VBO options that are available from the VBO module or is it a separate dropdown?

Martin: I think it's a separate, um, selection of actions. So I, I'm not sure you can, uh, mix and match them. Unfortunately,

Nic: that's too bad, but not a, not a huge deal. I, I feel like VBO used to be like, I did use it on every site, but I used it on a lot of sites and I, I feel like this module might be a way to kind of bring that back.

I, I think the piece that I have to get over, and this is, this is definitely, um, something I think I've seen in the community beyond myself, but I've definitely moved away from the, let me use a module first. This kind of thing I've just written code for. And so it feels like a heavy lift to add ECA for one [00:05:00] specific thing that you need.

But if you start using ECA as the way to manage this type of logic and you start using it for all those little things that you write custom code for, code for code, I think it can start replacing that. If we, it can, you know, Drupal can get back to the basics.

Martin: Oh, I was just gonna say, the other thing to think about too is ECA potentially also makes, uh, migrating between major versions of Drupal easier.

Because if you can use it to replace some of those smaller, lesser, um, maintained modules, then that can mean fewer things that you need to sort of wait to, to have those updated before you can move up to like Drupal 12 next year.

John: Yeah. I also, I also would think like if you are building something. Where you have a lot of like, maybe integrations or like you need to move, you know, a node from one state to another, and then based on that change you need to go out and do something and then [00:06:00] report back and all this other stuff.

Like I, I imagine this could be super useful in that regard, where it's like, okay, select these three nodes. Like I almost imagine like, I'm gonna use this example, even though there are already like plenty of modules that do this, but like, if you were translating content right. Like for some whatever reason, Drupal, you were using some maybe proprietary translation service or something, um, like I imagine this could help you with like, hey, send these three nodes to the translation service.

Once you hear back from the translation service, update the status of the, like, I imagine that could be, that could be like a, a lower barrier to entry to get your, you know, a better integration, a better user experience than like custom coding. Something that you'd have to then maintain and update and, and those business rules are, are pretty easily updated, I would say, through, through, uh, ECA.

So I definitely see this as being super, super useful for like admins or, or folks that are kind of using Drupal, [00:07:00] um, in more of like a, I dunno, management capacity.

Kathy: I think with the recipes coming around all the like manual site building pieces of, uh, bulk operations is, is going to get easier, uh, for, for popes.

John: So yeah, I definitely agree that like maybe even the building of ECA models will be easier, right? Because you could install a, install a recipe that kind of had that config already, already there for you. So like, you know, if there was something that was more of a common task, you could recipe it. I don't know if that's actually a term, but it should be.

Um, and then like people could just kind of use, use that, uh, to, to enable that, that feature functionality. So definitely see, um, definitely see a lot of interesting use cases for this.

Martin: Well, and I know there's, there's also a lot of talk right now between sort of the, uh, ECA community within [00:08:00] Drupal as well as the AI community.

And, and the pairing of those two, I think is also incredibly powerful in a variety of ways, including potentially the ability to, to have AI maybe do the first pass on your model for you after you sort of use normal language to describe the business, lo logic of what you're trying to achieve.

John: Um, that would be absolutely a game changer because my biggest problem with ECA right now is the fact that when I go in there to try to create a model, I'm like.

Basically hunting and pecking for like what that model needs to look like and do. I'm like, here's the idea. Okay, now how do I translate that into like ECA parlance? Um, so yes, that piece of it would be, would be awesome. And, um, you know, I mean like DBO is super useful. It's like one of those modules every time I use it, I'm kind of like, why is this not in core again?

Like why, like what, what,

Kathy: when you need to use it, like you need to use it

John: because Yeah, [00:09:00] I mean, I guess that's true. If you're not in views all the time and doing things with multiple nodes, then maybe, maybe it's not as useful. But I mean, I think even like on the content view, right, there are a lot of, a lot of things VBO ads there that are, that are helpful.

So, um, anyway,

Nic: yeah, I mean the, the pro, the problem is that VBO does it, it probably isn't super, uh, it probably doesn't change a super lot anymore. But it does need to respond to contribute a lot faster than core again, right? If there's a new module or data type or action, something like that, VBO will need to update.

And if it was part of core, that would take a lot longer and I think you'd want for something like this. So I think this kind of utility, like I can see both sides, but think

Darren: it, I think it makes sense and contribute. Yeah. Alright. I like it.

Nic: Well, well thank you Martin, uh, for another [00:10:00] great module of the week.

Uh, if folks wanted to connect with you to suggest the module of the week or just chat was the best way for them to get in touch with you

Martin: always to chat. I was happy to chat about interesting modules in the Talking Drupal channel of Drupal Slack. Or folks can reach out to me directly as man clue on all of the Drupal and social platforms.

Nic: Thanks Martin. See you next week.

Darren: See you then.

Nic: On May 2nd, we are recording episode 500, which is just three away. That's three

John: episodes away. Three episodes.

Nic: I am, I'm getting very excited. I'm also, I, I think we currently have 20 guests signed up. Um, so it's going to be, uh, it's gonna be a lot of fun. Feel free to join us.

We want everybody to join that can, uh, if, if it wasn't clear from that, you are the special guest. So if you wanna sign up or you wanna learn more, you can visit talking drupal.com/show 500. That's [00:11:00] SHW in the number 500 to learn more. Everybody's welcome. Alright, moving on to our primary topic. Darren, can you give us the elevator pitch for Drupal Forge?

Uh, you know, me personally, I hadn't heard about it until it came out as a possible contender for Drupal CMS. Demo. So can you tell us a little bit about Drupal Forge? What is it?

Darren: Yeah. Drupal Forge short description. It's a marketplace for ready-made Drupal sites, and it's designed to sustain open contribution and collaboration.

So last, uh, Drupal Con in 2024, no, actually 2022. It was, we, I was hearing, so ma many people complaining about make, you know, takers getting more out of Drupal than makers. Um, um, Jay Rockwood was talking about how he couldn't keep up with the, his work on, [00:12:00] on, uh, web forms. And I was thinking we've got to get a better, uh, business model for this.

So my idea was that, uh. We could, was inspired by, uh, Drupal Pod and simply test me that, that we could just have links that, uh, people could use to spin up sites and on different project pages. And then if they liked the site, they could buy it. And the some, and part of that revenue would go back to the project to, to support the maintainer.

Um, and I didn't have time to work on a distribution for, for, to make that, um, that people would wanna buy. So when I heard about quadruple CMSI said, okay, now we can do it.

Nic: Did you cover everything? 'cause there's a lot more information. Yeah, [00:13:00] there's

Darren: a lot to cover. So yeah, I can tell you what we've built for, for the user experience so far. We've built, um. Instant demos so that users can use to evaluate, uh, a ready-made Drupal site or they can use it for training. We've, we've already had, um, every Drupal, uh, training, uh, business that I know of started has been using it.

Um, and do we, users can also save these, uh, sites and either buy hosting from Drupal Forge or deploy it to their own hosting.

John: So, so it sounds like Drupal Forge is, is kind of like sitting in that space of, um, like, well last year, last year's DrupalCon, where Dres had that kind of like launch button on a slide and everybody was like, what's it gonna do?

Yeah. Right. Like, it sounds like Drupal Forge kind [00:14:00] of sits in that space and allows you to kind of spin up a. Drupal CMS site. And then maybe, maybe host it. Maybe host it, yeah. With Drupal Forge or take it, take it somewhere else and, and, you know, host it yourself. Is that that fair to say? Right. And it's

Darren: not just Yeah.

And it's not just Drupal CMS, it's any kind of site that you want to put up on, on Drupal Forge. Okay. Um, yeah, so there was all this, uh, anxiety that came from that Jesus slide and that, and people saying, what company is going to be controlling that launch experience? And I was saying, why don't we make it a community project?

And instead of, uh, fighting over what company's going to control it, why don't we build it as a community? And that's, I I wasn't able to get, um, the, the Drupal, uh, uh, CMS or I mean, the Starshot leadership to buy [00:15:00] into that, or the Drupal Association. So we, we just created a separate project.

John: I see. So then what if it's, if it's open source, right?

Like obviously there are a lot of, um, there's a lot of nuts and bolts and a lot of like glue that kind of needs to come together to bring this, bring this together as a cohesive offering, right? Yeah. So like, I'm wondering like what's Drupal Forge built on? Like how does it, how does it kind of work basically?

Darren: Well, it's, uh, assembled together with a, as a, it's Drupal 10 and web forms that do everything, that all, all the, the, the work of actually making things happen. Uh, these web forms submit to, um, data to a dev panel, um, tool, backend tool. So I, I don't know if you've used dev panel before, but I, I think Drupal Forward has given a lot of exposure.

So the. [00:16:00] We, we have dev panels provided a light version of their, of their, um, software for, to, to handle the actual deployment of sites. Panel is, uh, is a separate, uh, company dev panel itself is not an open source, but we haven't needed to, um, worry about to building that part of, uh, of the, uh, tool ourselves because they, they provided us a free license.

John: So dev panel, you can find out more listeners about dev panel in episode three 13 where we talk to Celine about, about dev panel dev panel's basically providing kind of that hosting layer. Right? Is that, is that a fair assessment?

Darren: Yeah. Dev panel provides the tools you need to manage hosting to, to deploy code.

Um, dev panel doesn't. Provide hosting. We're, we're using, uh, digital ocean droplets for the hosting [00:17:00] and dev panel is, uh, our, the layer in between, uh, Drupal Forge and Digital Ocean that handles getting things where they need to go.

John: Got it. Okay. So it's kind of like that orchestration layer to be, to make sure that like, you have that seamless experience where it's like, Hey, you're installing this and now here it is.

Right. Right. Got it. Okay. Um, awesome. All right. That, that seems to answer it, uh, pretty, pretty handily. The, the web form piece of it, uh, that's just like plain old Drupal web forms. Like there's nothing, nothing special going on there. Nope. Oh, interesting. That's cool.

Kathy: I was wondering what the pricing model looks like.

I was, uh, taking a peek online and. There's a couple options here.

Darren: Yeah. We've got two pricing models. One is for, for, um, agencies that wanna provide, uh, [00:18:00] use their, uh, bring their own hosting. And, um, so you can either bring your, you own hosting or we can, uh, um, facilitate to you buying it for you. We've got different hosting levels, $200, $500, a thousand dollars a month where, and then you can run unlimited sites on that hosting.

Uh, the other model is for site by site hosting, which is, goes $20 a month. Um, and I don't remember what the, the other levels, it goes from 20 to 200 I think, per month, depending on the, the, the, uh, level of hosting that you, you choose. And there those. Prices are designed to provide some margin for resellers to, to make a profit, as well as cover the, the cost of the hosting.

Kathy: Is this, um, a lot of pricing models lately have gone to a user base pricing model. [00:19:00] This looks like it's, uh, per month. Is it unlimited team members?

Darren: Yes.

Kathy: Awesome.

John: So question around pricing, right? So is Drupal Forge? Like, so as a user, if I come to Drupal Forge and I wanna spin up a Drupal CMS site, is it free to start?

Yeah. Okay. So then when, when does pricing kick in? When I need to like actually host it somewhere?

Darren: Pricing kicks in when you wanna make it a, a live site.

John: Ah, okay. So it's like that, that aspect of like, okay, if you wanna add a domain to this, then you have to, yeah, you have to pay to pay to put it somewhere.

Darren: Right. And we do have a limit to how long you can extend your trial. I mean, by default, if, if you don't save your site, it expires in an hour. If you decide to save it, you can extend it up to a month. But after that, we're gonna get rid of it unless you've bought it. Got it. That's [00:20:00]

Nic: really generous though.

That's, yeah, that's, that's pretty nice. Now I just diving into this a little bit because, um, Drupal, you know, just as somebody who hosts a lot of, you know, works with a lot of different Drupal sites, 1995 is not bad, you know, for Drupal specific hosting. It's definitely on the more affordable end. Um. Do you have opportunities to change small pieces about it though?

So, for example, um, I have a client site that gets almost no traffic, right? It, it's like an internal thing. A couple people use it a couple times a week. It's almost like an archive, but it has 50 gigabytes of files. And obviously I could set up S3. I don't want to do that though. But can, do you have the opportunity to be like, Hey, you know, we'll use the $20 a month plan, but we also want to add, you know, whatever it is, we need an additional [00:21:00] 50 gigabytes or something.

Do you, do you have that flexibility or is it really just whatever's on the plan is available?

Darren: Well, it's an, it's a community project. We can build whatever we, we wanted. We have volunteers to work on. So, uh, not, not yet, but if we get that on our roadmap and someone wants to work on it, we, that'd be a great addition.

I

John: actually do have a que question, maybe not so much related about pricing specifically, but more so about, um, I'm looking at the pricing page, which is causing me to have this question. One of the little option check marks here says it works with d Dev. I'm wondering is there like a Drupal Forge, uh, like starter package in D Dev or is it more just that like you can integrate with d Dev?

Like how does that, how does that piece of it work?

Darren: Uh, let me see. Which one is it that says it works with D Dev?

John: It's actually, I think all of [00:22:00] them. Yes, it goes straight across the board. Oh, okay. Personal business package.

Darren: Okay. I think that's talking about, um, local development then not, uh, um, d dev in the cloud.

We don't have d dev in the cloud yet because, um, it requires a huge amount of memory in. Processing power to run Docker in Docker and, uh, we have a solution which would involve running, uh, using uh, d dev in a container and connecting to a remote, uh, Docker server instead of, uh, running Docker in the same container.

But we haven't had time to work on yet.

Nic: Yeah, that's, I see sort like having kind of a central container for running d dev demands that block. Yeah.

John: Yeah. I was wondering 'cause 'cause I know a lot of hosting vendors have like, um, [00:23:00] like specific d dev packages where like you can push and pull to your environments from the, the d dev container locally on your machine.

I wasn't sure if that's kind of what, what you were, what you were getting at there.

Darren: I want to, um, we, we have a, we do have backups that are compatible with DE that are stored in Amazon file storage. Um, we don't yet have an API for DE to, to push and pull with. Hmm.

Nic: Got it.

Darren: Okay.

Nic: All right. So Drupal Forge, you've mentioned a couple times already, is kind of a way to demo Drupal with one click.

Uh, maybe a couple. 'cause you have to enter, um, you have to enter a caption, so maybe two clicks. But, um, we've only really talked about Drupal CMS. Is that the only thing that you could install on Drupal Forge, or are there other, uh, distributions or, um, vanilla Drupal [00:24:00] sites that you could install in Pess?

Darren: Uh, you can install, you can do anything on, on Drupal Forge. We've got, uh, just today we've launched a. Service said, lets you take a site that's running in a dev panel and turn that into a template on, on Dral Forge, so you can turn any site into a Drupal Forge template. We've got, uh, we've had a lot of contributors.

We've, we have, uh, Bernardo who contribute, uh, to our mid camp and our, uh, Drupal camp, uh, our Florida Drupal Camp demo sites. Um, we've got, uh, um, Izzy, who contributed our, um, um, backdrop, um, demo Oh, and yeah, a bunch of, uh, a bunch of other, uh, demos and e and you can also sign up on Drupal Forge and get a space where you can decide what demos are, are [00:25:00] featured in your space.

I.

Nic: Just to quickly read through the list, like it's, you know, vanilla Drupal for the currently supported versions, Drupal CMS, you can technically do Drupal seven, but please don't.

Darren: Um,

Nic: backdrop CCRM, umami Digital Agency. I don't, oh, backdrop Digital agency. What is the governor?

Darren: That is a, a government, um, um, website template.

Nic: Okay. Then there's a couple of campsites and starter guides and other other gov. There's contenta and triple food gov as well. So it looks like there's, um, there's been quite a bit of contributions on that front. That's, um mm-hmm. Pretty exciting.

Darren: Yeah.

John: So, one thing I noticed when, when looking at the Drupal Forge site is that, um, Drupal Forge uses the terminology of.

Templates. Mm-hmm. [00:26:00] I'm wondering if Drupal Forge was kind of an influencer of, of site templates from, uh, the latest drees note in Atlanta, or was it the other way around?

Darren: No, definitely wasn't the other way. And we did talk to, we did have meetings with the Drupal Association and explaining our, our vision and, uh, and seeking, uh, collaboration.

So, uh, I hope we had some influence there. There you go. All right. I like, I like it.

Kathy: Why offer templates for Drupal camps? Uh, like for Florida Drupal camp and mid camp?

Darren: Yeah. I think too that we depend a lot on talking, usually more traditionally to explain people what Drupal can do, and people don't have enough imagination to take those conversations and really get excited about through what it can be.

So we need. Something that's fully formed to fire their imaginations. So you [00:27:00] start with the beautiful Florida Drupal Camp website and you say, that's what I want, and you make it your own.

John: I see. So like it's a starting point for like other event websites or, or the, the intention there is to take it and, and transform it from the Florida Drupal Camp website to the, you know, Saskatchewan Drupal camp website.

Darren: Yeah. And May and a lot of people, they're just looking for pretty things. So start with something pretty and, uh, make it what you want it to be.

Kathy: And how could someone, um, donate their, their site template to Drupal Forge?

Darren: Okay, so what you do is you sign up for an account on um, drupal four.org, and, uh, then you can, that gives you access to, to a workspace on, on dev panel.

And that, in that workspace you can, uh, [00:28:00] create any kind of custom site that you want. And then once you have that habits ready to, to be distributed, you, we have a, a form that, that you, uh, put in the, all the information about that template and, um, it gets, uh, spun up into, in a GitHub repository, um, and Docker image.

And, um, those are together are what make a, a Drupal for template. Alright.

Nic: You said Drupal Forge is a community project, so I assume Drupal Forge is open source. Yes. Is that correct? Okay. So here's my question. Because this is, this isn't a typical open source project, meaning that there's infrastructure involved.

So like for most open source projects, you can pull down the code, turn it on, test it, run it. But it sounds like part of Dral for is the integration with dev [00:29:00] panel and Digital Ocean, I expect. Yeah. Um, how do you, and, and to be clear, those,

John: those parts are not open source.

Nic: Exactly. So how do you, how do you test?

Like if I'm looking to contribute something like the piece that I talked about earlier where I wanna be able to customize the hosting plans, how would I go about testing that and contributing that back?

Darren: It's on our roadmap to make it a, a project that you can download and, uh, spin up locally your own copy.

For right now, I. I have to, I, I can run it locally if I pull down the database and the files, um, archives. Um, so yeah, that's, uh, making it to something that anybody can, uh, spin up their own or, uh, copy of is, is, uh, requires, is gonna require a little more [00:30:00] work because right now it's just a, you just get a copy of, of dupal four.org.

Nic: Okay. And so who, and to be clear, I, I don't know that I'm volunteering at the moment for this. I have a lot on my plate, but if I was, sounds like volunteering

John: to me, but, okay. Keep going.

Nic: If, if that was something that I or listener wanted to contribute with, is that something they could work with on you or is that more like, Hey, we, we'd have to contribute something else and, and you is, is that something that you would have to focus on?

Oh, I,

Darren: I would be happy to focus on, I, I think I need to provide some, uh, documentation to get you started because, uh, I haven't, uh, haven't, uh, kept that updated. But, uh, yeah, if you, if you wanna take the time to do it without help, you could, but I'd be happy to help.

Nic: Okay. Very cool. Like I said, and, and just to be clear, I I, [00:31:00] I wasn't volunteering because I also don't want you to go off and do all that extra work.

Yeah, I would, I would certainly send you a message separately if I'm planning on doing that, but, um, I

Darren: need to do that anyway.

Nic: Yeah. It, it needs to happen. But I, and, and the reason why I am really interested in this, like I said, is I have, I do have several clients where they just have a small site and, you know, they, they still, they still Bach it, like, Hey, you know, platform.

SH is, you're gonna look at 75 to a hundred bucks a month. If you're on lineo or digital lotion, you can get that down, but then you're on the hook for the maintenance of the infrastructure, right? Mm-hmm. If you're mm-hmm. On Aquia, it's gonna be a few hundred bucks a month. So having an option that is, um, on the lower end there, but still providing some kind of value for something that's really low traffic and is kind of just an intro archive.

I think there's, that's something that the Drupal community has been missing for, for a long time,

Darren: and [00:32:00] we want this, we, I can imagine an agency running their own, uh, version of Drupal Forge, but we want this to be a good solution for freelancers as well. So, so we're going to, we're working on the ability for people to set their own prices in Dr.

Drupal Forge and, uh, decide what, what gets, what services get included when, uh, people buy on their websites. So we don't really want people buying. Their websites from us. We want to be partnering with resellers who will provide the customer support and, and, um, whatever other services go along with the website.

So Oh, that's an interesting

Nic: business model. Yeah,

John: that's interesting. So, so now I have, now I have like six other questions related on, uh, related on what you just said. Right? So like, one, one question for me is like, you talk about resellers, right? And like the ability for agencies to kind of like use Drupal Forge as, as like [00:33:00] a, a resale opportunity.

Where where is the split between it makes sense to use Drupal Forge and it makes sense to use dev panel. I imagine like if I'm, if I'm like thinking about this in my, in my brain, right? Like I imagine the split is. I'm gonna use Drupal Forge. If I want specific site templates available to my customers, that then I can use spin up using dev panel and, and hosts, you know, either on Digital Ocean or wherever.

Wherever I, I want. Right?

Darren: Yeah.

John: Um, so like, there's the use case for Drupal Forge, I imagine, like if I'm an agency and I just want site management and I don't need the template kind of layer there, then Dev panel on its own would, would do, would do the trick. Is that fair assessment?

Darren: Yeah. So Drupal Forge, if you wanna sell ready-made Drupal sites use Drupal port.

John: Got it. Okay. So now my next question, um, before I actually [00:34:00] ask my real question is, um, how do you. Drupal Forge. And this is kind of like a look into the future, right? How do you think Drupal Forge is going to, um, change once the idea of, um, site templates is more widely used within, within Drupal and Drupal CM Xs?

Darren: Well, we'll use whatever is the recommended way of building a Drupal site. Um, we, it won't be a problem. Right now we're using a, um, composer and recipes. So, so it's not gonna be, yeah, whatever's the, if a better Way Co is developed, that's going to be available on Drupal Forge also.

Nic: Got it. Okay. So go ahead Nic.

Go ahead. Sorry John, I need to break in then. 'cause you, you mentioned something. So one of the big [00:35:00] problems with this whole automated hosting bit is. The DNS and domain registration.

Darren: Mm-hmm.

Nic: And is that solved by dev panel and Andrew Forge? Like in combination. So like, if I, if I did what you said, like you, if you wanna cater to resellers and I decide I wanna become a reseller, is that problem solving me already?

Darren: We don't, I don't, we don't have a, a way to purchase domains, but once you, if you do purchase a domain, you can put that live domain into your, uh, dev panel workspace.

Nic: Okay. So there's still some work. 'cause the, the piece that made me question this is you mentioned like if you wanna resell preexisting templates to customers and that, that's something that I've thought about for a long time.

But the piece that's really difficult, honestly is that domain piece. Right? Um, so if there, but if there's the opportunity to kind of work on that, [00:36:00] if you see a future for that. That might be a really interesting place too, because

Darren: yeah, I can imagine it being another web form on People Forge.

Nic: Yeah. Because, and that's the piece that I'm wondering about because you can grab, like, you know, for example, if you're, if you're selling pre-built restaurant sites and you, you just find a way to allow people to choose it, throw up their menu, choose the domain, put it up, and now they have, you know, now they have a website, then, um, you, you have to cater that piece to the less technical user as well.

Darren: Yeah.

Nic: Um, and yeah, webform sounds great. You just need to integrate it with some servers that can handle that as an api.

Darren: Yeah. And another, another, um, cool, uh, certain thing you could do, which might not require its own domain is having little, uh, AI utilities. So we, we could have those as, as, um, templates [00:37:00] for, for an AI utility that, that does some task for you.

And if somebody could just spin that up, buy it, and, um, might not care whether, whether it's publicly accessible or not.

John: So let's, let's jump into a little bit of the, the roadmap for Drupal Forge, right? Mm-hmm. So, open source project, clearly you guys are actively, actively working on it. I'm wondering like, what's, what's coming, what's coming in the future for Dral Forge?

Darren: Well, what's coming really soon, um, is an AI demo. So we've already got, uh, figured out how to put limited AI keys into every environment as a environment variable. And so the AI demo is something I've been, was, uh, working on this morning. Oh, and, and if you wanna see, uh, [00:38:00] experience Builder, the Experience Builder demos not on the Drupal Forge front page, but it's on MySpace.

So go to Drupal Forge slash uh, you slash darren o and you can, uh, see it there. Um,

John: so talk, talk more about the ai, uh, key, like limited use AI keys. How is that, how is that, uh, working out and like, what, what are you guys, what are you guys doing there?

Darren: We're running a light LLM server and that to, um, proxies, um, requests from, uh, from our Drupal Forge sites to open AI and the other AI providers.

And it generates, uh, uh, keys for us that have a limited, um, spend on them. So right now we're, we're, uh, we're putting 25 cents on each key so you [00:39:00] can, uh, get into the AI demo and you can do 25 cents worth of experimenting with it. Which, which

John: for, for somebody that's like, well, 25 cents does not seem like a lot of money.

A lot of it is quite a bit in, uh, in AI spend as like, you could literally build a hold dribble site and like, you know, ping the AI about a hundred times for like, I don't know, 3 cents or something like that. Right?

Darren: Yeah. You'll use it up pretty fast if you try to generate images, but, uh, otherwise you could,

John: that that's, that's pretty, that's pretty cool.

Kathy: I noticed that. So you, you brought us to your Dr. Forge page and there's the experience builder there, but it's not on the homepage. There's every like user get their own, like user template. Yeah.

Darren: Yeah. So these are the templates that I manage. Experience Builder is a very expensive, uh, demo to [00:40:00] run, so we're not really putting it on the homepage right now because.

Twice as much as the other, as the other demos

Nic: specialize for talking Drupal. That gives me just, yeah, sorry Kathy, that gives me just a little bit as a developer, if, um, I expect, I expect that in my future, then having to increase boosting plans just to support experience builder sounds like.

Darren: Yeah, it could be.

And then the Drupal Star shot is, uh, a template I created that lets you contribute to Drupal CMS from within the, the, um, your, uh, Drupal forward site. So other things are that are on our, our roadmap is the ability to embed our launch widget in other pages, so you can get it into, I'm hoping we can get it in Drupal project pages so that, uh, uh, project maintainers [00:41:00] can get some revenue for their projects.

That way, um, we can, uh. Have it in, maybe even in a banner ads to get, to get, uh, Drupal more exposure. Um, and I'm working on a, i, we've got a, an alternative to, to Drupal pod running now. So you can create, um, Drupal Forage links, the way you could create Drupal pod links. And that's been, and we've also got our, our, uh, browser extensions, uh, ready for that.

So when the GI pod stops providing hosting for Drupal Pod, you'll have a way to contribute in the cloud using Drupal Forge. Another thing that's on our roadmap is, uh. Checkout for, for resellers? I was, I was saying that resellers would be able to set their own prices when we do the checkout. Um, the [00:42:00] money that their share of the, of the money will be split between the reseller and the Drupal Association and whatever project maintainers they, they have designated as their, um, as being, uh, uh, that they want to contribute to.

Nic: Yeah. Can you dive into that split a little bit? Uh, has there been any, 'cause we had a brief discussion after the show for our patrons about site templates and the fact that it may be paid and there's some discussion about possibly splitting that with contributors.

Darren: Mm-hmm.

Nic: I mean, you, you kind of have a similar model here, you know, what kind of discussions have you had around this and have they been informed by anything related to site templates?

Darren: Well, they're our, what we call site templates. Yeah. So, uh, the, the, uh, the pricing plans that we [00:43:00] have are set to where for 40% of the, uh, of the, that price to cover the hosting cost to Drupal Forge and the remaining re remaining 60% or, or, or higher if the, if the reseller sets a higher price to, to be available to split between the reseller and, and, uh, the triple association and, and, uh, other contributors.

The way we're doing that is with, um, with, uh, Stripe Checkout. So, um, it'll go through our Stripe account, but when, but our Stripe account can, uh, can, uh. Designate additional stripe accounts that will to split the, the payment with, and, and, uh, we haven't, we're working on it and we haven't got it done. I talked to Ryan from Sentara at DrupalCon about it.

We're, so we're, we have, it's a work in progress. [00:44:00]

John: So you mentioned sharing funds with the DA is, are you currently sharing funds with the DA.

Darren: Uh, we currently haven't had funds to share yet.

John: Ah, okay.

Darren: Yeah, our pri we're primarily being support supported by, um, sponsorship from dev panel, but we have, just before DrupalCon, we created, uh, an open collective.

So we've had a few individual, uh, sponsors joined there and were, and, uh, we had, um, Drupal Easy, uh, that, uh, sponsored the, um, con or, uh, hosting for contribution day at Drupal Con. So we're getting, uh, we're ramping up the sponsorship. Um, we are, we're hoping to have, uh, funds to cover more than just our hosting very soon.

Kathy: How can [00:45:00] people get involved more so than just, uh, donating to the collective, which obviously is needed?

Darren: Well, we have the projects on our roadmap when, one that I didn't mention yet is the, we want to as a catalog for a vendors, which will list each of the, the things that the vendors provide so you can be exactly matched up with the, the vendors you need for your site.

Um, that is, uh, something that, uh, we could use contributors to help make happen. Um, you could, uh, you could help us with the developing the reseller, uh, ecosystem. Right now you have to. You have to have the, your customers pay you directly and then you'd buy the, the, uh, hosting from Drupal Forge yourself.

We want, like I said, we want customers to be able to use Drupal Forge to check out, and then [00:46:00] the, the funds to be split up as, as you des designated. Um, we need marketing help. Oh, go ahead Kathy.

Kathy: I was gonna say in, in that contribution will would be done on the Dral projects, uh, DRAL Forge.

Darren: Yes. Yes. Right. Um, you can help us apply for grants, uh, which is not something I'm, uh, I know how to do and, but I, I need to work on, because this is used as an educational tool and, uh, and a contribution tool, so I.

We are, we are looking to at what organizations would, uh, would fund that

Kathy: And is that looking for people to, um, write grants or look for grants or both?

Darren: Both, yeah. Yeah. Not something I've got any experience with, with, [00:47:00] um, we can help get, we could always use more, uh, site templates. We could help use, uh, help maintaining and improving our existing site templates.

Um, if you've got hosting to run our, any of these demos and you can, uh, either offer to donate hosting for general hosting, or you can offer to donate hosting for a single demo. That means a lot to you. Um, yeah, go on. The hosting, hosting

John: front, I'm wondering like, I'm assuming it's like, kinda like bring your own, bring your own hosting with, with, with a, you know, with an exception, right?

So like, I'm, I'm assuming Dev panel isn't, is working on, you know, digital Ocean, it's working on AWS, it would work on like bare metal hosting that you kind of are doing yourself, right? But it's probably not working on something like Pantheon or Acquia. Is that fair [00:48:00] to say?

Darren: It works on anything you can get an SSH, uh, connection to right now, but we would need to, we would need to work with Pantheon, an aqui to get it to work on, on their hosting.

John: Okay. So if somebody is listening from one of those organizations and this is interesting to them, they should reach out.

Darren: Exactly. I.

John: Got it. Okay.

Darren: Yeah, we have a weekly, uh, zoom meeting that we announce in our, our Slack channel. So get on our Slack channel if you want to be involved. And, um, that's Usable Forge, Drupal Forge.

Yes. And we can, uh, could use some advocacy because, uh, I know there's, uh, we wanted to be part of the STARSHOT initiative. We wanted to be under the umbrella of, of the Drupal Association, but, uh, we ended up having to, to, uh, organize as [00:49:00] a separate to, um, nonprofit. Um, and that was because Yeah, go ahead.

Nic: Yeah, I was gonna, can you share a little more about that in know that there.

There were a couple of shifts. I know originally there was expiration of using web assembly. Mm-hmm. Then I heard that Drupal Forge was gonna be, was in contention and ultimately it ended up at Okia. Um, yeah. What, what did that look like and, and do you think there's still a possibility for Drupal Forge kind of becoming kind of a nonprofit system for, for managing those launches?

You know, what, what, what was going on in those negotiations?

Darren: There is a possibility if we, if we have enough people advocating for an open contribution platform to be the, to provide that, um, trial experience. Um, problem was we had our, [00:50:00] we had, um, Starshot leadership who was afraid to talk about a hosted.

Um, trial experience. And, uh, they didn't want to to discuss that, so that's why we had to start this without them. And, uh, then, uh, we have to be featured on drupal.org. You have, you have to be one of the big donors and one of the big three, you know, uh, Acquia Pantheon or Platform H So we need support from those big donors.

We need those donors to, to be, um, working with us and so that the Drupal Association doesn't feel like they are threatening their, they would be threatening their relationships with those donors if they worked with us.

Nic: Yeah. That, that, that's an interesting perspective. And, and on its face, you would think that, you know, they're competitors to the service you're [00:51:00] providing, but since you're, you're looking to support resellers that could see a pipeline that.

You know, I could see a situation where the three of them support Google Forge and Al Forge surface as a pipeline to all three of them. Um,

Darren: that's what I would like. Yeah.

Nic: Yeah. And then, and then there'd be, um, you know, the community would get the open source version on drupal.org for, for testing, but you know, the eventual hosting

Darren: is with one of the, one of them.

Yeah. Go ahead John. What do you got? I see something. Yeah.

John: Well, I'm just so, I mean, I guess, I guess the. The Drupal Forge kind of like site templates, you know, library functionality piece of it Makes sense to me, right? In the, in the way that you described Nic. But I mean, ultimately I would imagine, and I, I do not speak for anybody, um, in the, in the Drupal community, but I imagine the, the big problem [00:52:00] here is that, you know, Drupal Forge is tightly coupled with dev panel, right?

So like having dev panel kind of in the middle of, of a pantheon or aqueous setup doesn't make a ton of sense because they have their own management utilities and tools, at least from where I'm sitting right now. Um, so like, I imagine that's probably a little bit of the hangup there, where it's like, okay, if, if Drupal Forge were kind of like backend agnostic or had, you know, connector to Dev panel, connector to Pantheon, connector to Aquia, then, then you could see, I could see that being probably a little bit more widely accepted.

Darren: We've got, uh, the ability to deploy from dev panel to any, um, host that offers Docker and, uh, and SSH connections right now. And I, so I don't think that dev panel would be, is, um, I think this would be, like you say, a pipeline. I don't think there would be a [00:53:00] permanent re um, relation relationship that I, I think DEF Panel would facilitate the deployment of the site to these other hosting providers, but Ah, I see.

Yeah. More, more of

John: A-C-I-C-D process, step that than like a, an actual site management step.

Darren: Right. I think the users would have, would have, use their account on those sites. Got it. Now I have, we have had, uh, one of those engineer, an engineer from one of those, uh, companies talk to us about. Could they u could we, they use, uh, Drupal Forge as, um, a way for their users to, to, um, test branches and, and be, and be and have that, um, cloud editing experience because, uh, their, their, uh, leadership was asking them to develop, [00:54:00] uh, an online editing experience and they're interested in, uh, using Drupal Forge instead of, uh, developing it from scratch.

Mm-hmm.

Kathy: That's nice having that option of, uh, that, that multi dev.

Darren: Exactly.

Nic: Yeah. Yeah, and I, I, it's been a while since I've used Aquia and I'm not sure how multi dev is set up there. I know that Pan, I know Pantheon has multi dev, but I mean, I think Platform has kind of the.

The most seamless experience for setting up multi dev, like quote unquote multi dev environments. I mean, you just create a pull request and you, I, I think Pantheon has gotten here. It's just, I haven't set it up in a while, but I,

John: I, yeah. Just like to add a aside Oh yeah. Pantheon has got multi

Darren: dev.

John: Yeah. I, I, I would just like to add a side note here that Nic is a huge platform fanboy, so,

Darren: okay.

Yeah. I, yeah, [00:55:00] they got multi dev, but if you want to be able to, to, uh, work on it in a, in a live site, you know, a live site with a, with an editing backend, that's, that's where, uh, Drupal Forge is a little different. Okay.

Nic: Can, can you dive into that a little bit more? Like what

Darren: does that mean? Yeah. So every one of our containers comes with a, with a online version of VS.

Code. So you get, you, you log into vs code, you do live editing of your, of your branch, and you see those changes directly in, in that branch's, um, uh, live site or, and, and then, uh, you can commit those changes and, uh, and then from, from directly from within vs. Code that

Nic: is,

Darren: yeah. It's not just like logging

Kathy: into the [00:56:00] Drupal admin, it's, it's editing the code.

Yeah. Okay.

Nic: All right. Uh, I, I have to say that that does sound a little, like, that sounds exciting for certain use cases. Like when you have, especially when you have something like, uh, I would never want that on production, right? Mm-hmm. But it does sound nice to have on a test environment when you sometimes, occasionally have like things where.

Local doesn't exactly match upstream and you can't reproduce it locally, like the ability to tweak or debug or like even, you know, print debugging variables to the screen, but not have to like push from your local to clean it up. Just have a VS code right there. And, and I, I imagine that deployments are a little bit faster.

Could, uh, I mean, web books are fast, but do that much faster. But yeah, I, I could see some cases where that would be a real differentiator. I mean

Darren: Hmm, [00:57:00] that's, that's fascinating.

Nic: So before we, before we move to close the show, is there, is there anything else that you'd like to tell our listeners about Drupal Forge that is either coming up or an existing feature that you're just really proud of that people should know about?

Darren: No, I've mentioned what's, what's coming up and I'm, I'm pretty proud of, of what we've already been able to, to accomplish. So yeah, I just wanna add support Deb Panel, that's where, that, they're our main sponsor. They got into this hoping to, to, uh, be credited as, uh, star Shop contributors. And that didn't happen.

So let's let 'em know the communities behind them because, um, of their support for Drupal Forge and

Nic: Drupal for is

Darren: fully a nonprofit, right? Yes.

Yeah. We've got, it's, uh, [00:58:00] it's a, we, the official nonprofit is the ops association and Drupal Forge is one of the projects of the ops association.

Nic: What else is associated with the ops associ?

Darren: Nothing yet. But the, but the idea was maybe there would be others open source, um, communities that could benefit from a similar type of marketplace in the future.

Nic: Yeah, I mean, I could see, I mean, D Dev already kind of has its own foundation and is supported by platform, I think.

But I could see in another world where, um, you know, if the ops association had existed first, it may have, like that's the kind of tool it sounds like, would be a good fit.

Darren: Um,

Nic: yeah. Or something like this. Yeah. That, that's really interesting. Alright, Darren, thank you for joining us to talk to us about AL four.

It's been fascinating. P like, I always love these, uh, these [00:59:00] DevOps and like, like I said, these types of open source projects where you're not just a. Code for a module or for a site, and you're kind of building a system of systems, uh, because it requires kind of another layer of abstraction and testing and it's always, always fascinating to me.

So thank you for joining us to chat about Drupal four.

Darren: You're welcome. Do

John: you have questions or feedback? Reach out to talking Drupal on the socials with the handle Talking Drupal or by email with [email protected]. You can connect with our hosts and other listeners on Drupal Slack in the Talking Drupal channel,

Nic: and you can promote your Drupal community event on talking Drupal.

Learn [email protected] slash td promo.

John: Get the Talking Dral newsletter. To learn more about our guest host, show news, upcoming shows, and much more. Sign up for the [email protected] slash newsletter.

Nic: Thank you patrons for supporting Talking Drupal. Your support [01:00:00] is greatly appreciated if you learn more about becoming a [email protected], but choosing become a Patron.

Alright, Darren, if our listeners wanna get in touch with you, had any questions, what's the best way them to do that?

Darren: I'm Darren o on drupal.org on Slack. Those are the best ways to get in touch with me.

Nic: Great. And Kathy, how about you?

Kathy: Um, KC 3 0 3, um, on social media or [email protected].

Nic: And John, how

John: about you?

Uh, you can find out about me@ Picozzi .com. Uh, you can follow me on social media and drupal.org at John Picozzi , and you can find out more about epam.com.

Nic: You can find me pretty much everywhere at nicxvan N-I-C-X-V-A-N.

John: And if you enjoyed listening, we've enjoyed talking.