Talking Drupal #504 - The Marketplace

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Nic: This is talking Drupal, a weekly chat about web design and development from a group of people with one thing in common. We love Drupal. This is episode 504, the marketplace. On today's show, we are talking about the Drupal marketplace, how the community is reacting, and what the working group is finding with our guest, Tiffany Farriss.

We'll also cover views CSV Source as our module the week.

Welcome to Talking Drupal. Our guest today is Tiffany Farriss Tiffany is the CEO and co-owner of palantir.net. With almost 30 years of technical consulting experience, Tiffany serves her team and her clients through strategic and agile mentoring, facilitation and coaching. Her work currently focuses on creating sustainable environments that enable high performing diverse teams to solve complex problems.

Tiffany has served on the board of directors of the Drupal Association for [00:01:00] over 13 years. Welcome to the show, and thank you for joining us.

Tiffany: Thank you for having me. Excited to be on.

Nic: I'm Nic Laflin, founder at nLightened Development, and today my cos are as usual, John Picozzi, solution Architect at EPAM.

John: Hello, internet Friends

Nic: and also joining us for the next four weeks as guest host Norah Medlin, director of Delivery and program operations at Bluefly io. Norah is the mid camp lead organizer and director of delivery and program operations at bluefly io Teknorah brings her technical program and process improvement expertise as a certified SAFE and C-S-S-G-B.

Welcome to the show.

Norah: Thank you for having me. Okay, good to be here.

Nic: And now to talk about our module of the week, let's turn it over to Martin Anderson Klutz, a senior solutions architect at Aqua and a maintainer over a number of Drupal modules and recipes of his [00:02:00] own.

Martin, what do you have for us this week?

Martin: Thanks Nic. Have you ever wanted to present data within your Drupal website that comes from a CSV flat file without having to import that data into your Drupal database? There's a module for that. It's called Views, CSV Source, and it was created in March of 2024 by Daniel Coran of JSI.

I met Daniel at MIDC Camp earlier this week and he was emphatic that his colleague and Coer Nia Cat deserves significant credit. Now it does have a. 11 version available, which works with Drupal 8.89, 10, and 11. It is actively maintained. In fact, the latest release was just last month. It has security and test coverage, and for documentation there is a pretty robust Read me on how to get started.

The module does have four open issues, none of which are bugs. And according to drupal.org, it's officially in use by 56 sites. Now with [00:03:00] views CSV Source installed, you can create a view that uses a CSV as a source instead of the Drupal site's data. You can point to a file within your site's file system, or it can be remotely hosted.

If the file requires authentication for access, it is also possible to include encoded credentials in a header. Now, you can use CSV fields to specify the columns You want to pull into the view, and you can use the group buy to specify data sets to represent, for example, to plot as lines in a chart. You can also create filters either as a CSV field that acts as a standard text filter or a CSV field options filter that creates a dropdown of all the unique values in a specified column.

Your assembled data can then be shown in tables or charts and can be manipulated using standard view configuration or using contributed modules like View Simple Math Field. The module also comes with sort [00:04:00] and contextual filter plugins, and I was impressed by a demo of use CSV source in a Lightning talk at mid camp yesterday.

We'll see if we can get a link in the show notes. So I thought it would be fun to talk about today. So let's talk about views CSV source.

Nic: This sounds amazing and terrifying at the same time. I mean, just the way that, yes, it's CSV, but the way that Excel just mangles CSVs and we know everybody's gonna be using Excel or Google Sheets to modify them.

It, it just terrifies me. What, what, what's the validation look like?

Martin: Yeah, I, I can't say I've looked too much into the, the validation aspect of it specifically. I have to imagine that the cleaner your CSV is to start with the more reliably it'll work. But it sounds like there's been quite a bit of work that's gone into it, so I imagine that it's, it must have some ability to handle things that may come [00:05:00] from, you know, suspect sources.

But yeah, it would be interesting to hear from anybody who's used it in in that kind of use case specifically.

John: Yeah. I wonder like, you know, to Nic's point, like one of my, one of my thoughts while you were describing this was like, can you get like a a flat URL from Google Docs to be able to just use your Google Docs sheet as a CSV and then, you know, you, you know, you don't have to actually have like an Excel file.

I mean, I guess you could if you, if you really wanted to, but, the other thing there too is like, I, I'm happy to note that they have the the, the authentication piece figured out and the ability to kind of lock this down a little bit because it feels like it could be a, could be a little bit of a security issue if, you know, you just have A-A-C-S-V file living somewhere that, that powers, you know, content on your website.

I guess I'm wondering more about the views integration. Like does it pull in the headers and stuff so that you can use like views, filters and things to be [00:06:00] able to filter your, your content? Yes. And in fact you can expose filters using the, the filters that we described, so it can actually pull out all of the unique values in a particular column and then make those kind of a dropdown so that it's easy for users to be able to select from, you know, the values in the actual data set that way.

Martin: Oh, that's, that's very cool. I mean, there, there is a use case for this. Like I, I feel like. I would want to use this in like, internal, like, like almost as it go between for like importing the data into like Tableau or something. Like you have some prebuilt charts and you just need to really quickly filter through some stuff in a way.

Nic: But the, you don't want them doing it all in Excel. You don't want to import the data yet 'cause it's not final, but. I have questions.

Martin: Yeah. Well, the other use case I've run across is customers who [00:07:00] have data sets that they manage elsewhere. Yeah. And there isn't always a lot of value in just bringing that into Drupal, either as, you know, a custom table or just having it, you know, sort of duplicated on the Drupal site and then having to sync data back and forth between.

So oftentimes if those systems can just dump a flat file and then you can display it in a nice way within the Drupal site, I think there's a lot of value there. In the past when I came across a similar requirement, I was looking at sort of, JavaScript based ways to sort of ingest some kind of a flat file.

And then, you know, within JavaScript, do it a similar thing. But to have the power of views, I think is gonna be pretty valuable for the community.

Nic: I, I suspect the real use case is having not read the full issue. Or the full project page is more. Unique columns. 'cause honestly, writing, writing a flat migration of from CSV to a custom table isn't a huge [00:08:00] burden.

But if you have to do it for, for somebody who's capable of writing the views, plug in to do, you know, I mean for, for a site builder, yeah, that might be a pretty big ask. But for somebody who's capable of writing a module like this, it's not that much of a leap to say, putting that into a table play isn't hard.

But I bet you this is more about having dynamic columns and content and being able to test there. 'cause having something generic that can import an arbitrary number of columns with arbitrary content somewhere, and then build views on top of it, it's probably a lot harder than doing this. So you just point at the CSV, identify the file, the column types, set up those exposed filters, and then you can kind of create those charts just in the views ui.

And again, very powerful. Very, I I, it, it would, it would take a lot to convince me by a client that this is something useful, but man, it does feel like it, it really solves that, that edge case [00:09:00] really well. I mean,

John: I, I, I think it's a, I think it's a pretty easy sell for, for a client to tell me that this is useful.

'cause I, you know, I, I used to work for a, a healthcare system and they had a lot of legacy systems that like, did not have APIs and did not have easy ways of getting into, into the data, but the data needed to be available on their intranet was, which was the Dral base site. Right. So, like right there, I see like a very easy to Martin's point way to kind of like sync data from that external system into their Drupal intranet that, that, you know, people would need to, to be able to provide, you know, dosing instructions or whatever, whatever it may be.

So, you know, I, I definitely see. A very use, useful, useful use case. That sounds, that sounds like bad English, but I'm gonna go with it. For this you know, this module from the integration standpoint, you know, with other systems or just in reality like bringing data into [00:10:00] into an intranet or into a, into a site that you you know, you're managing.

Martin: Yeah. I think the other thing to mentioned on the project page is that there's actually a performance benefit because running all the data through Drupal, if you have a large data set, can actually be fairly slow, whereas ingesting a flat file can be much faster for PHP.

I've heard from an accessibility standpoint is that if you're presenting charts, oftentimes what they say is the best practice for people who are using as assist assistive technologies is to really make the raw data available. And so with this kind of an approach, it's really easy to have both the visual chart as well as the flat file that is based on, you know, available in kind of, you know, a single display as well.

John: So for, for, this is a dumb, dumb question, and I apologize. Like, we're, we're not loading this data through the database in Drupal it, so it's being loaded at, at time of display on the [00:11:00] front end.

Nic: Yeah. Directly from the C csv.

John: Yeah. Okay, got it. All right.

Martin: That makes sense. But, but then obviously using caching and all those other, you know,

John: ah, so it is getting stored in the Drupal cache to make it faster.

Martin: Depending on how you configure the view. Yeah. Right. Yeah,

John: yeah. Or, or maybe your, your CDN depending on what you're using or how, that's how that's set up. Right. Okay. So, okay. That makes sense. Got it.

Nic: Well, I have to say it's good to be back. We, we did have, I didn't really, we didn't mention this at the top, but this is our first episode back in a couple of weeks, so it's good to have you back, Martin.

This is a great module to start off the in the, in the five hundreds, I guess, for, for going forward. I'm, I'm definitely gonna have to keep eye on this. Like I said, it feels very niche when you personally, I would, like John said, you know, it feels like a, an intranet type of, of project, but yeah, very, very cool.

So, Martin, [00:12:00] if listeners wanted to connect with you or wanted to suggest a module week, what's the best way for them to do that?

Martin: We are always happy to talk about candidates for module of the week, or even just 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 channels.

Great. See you next week. See you then.

Nic: All right, so let's move on to our primary topic. So Tiffany, let's, let's start with the high level. Maybe not everyone has listened to the most recent Ries note and don't, don't know quite what it is, but what is what's the idea behind the Drupal marketplace? What is the Drupal marketplace?

Tiffany: I think it's a really simple idea.

It's to create a trusted place on Drupal where contributors. Very high quality, ready to launch Drupal site templates. Now, site templates is something new. No one's actually seen it yet. They're in the process of [00:13:00] defining it for Drupal CMS, but you can think of them as composer templates that bundle an experience builder theme.

Plus you know, obviously Drupal CMS and then additional recipes and demo content. So the idea is that this would help new users really get started fast and with confidence. I think one of the things I, I have been saying a lot to folks about it is to think of the site templates as a starter kit that aside from the theme, everything else that's in the starter kit is intended for one-time use, which, you know, recipes themselves are intended for one-time use as well.

So that's the idea. It's, it's not new. There are lots of marketplaces, other places but Drupal's never had one. So this is a an opportunity for us to learn from what's been done in other places and to really define how that can be done well and in a way that's very aligned with Drupal in our community.

John: I like the [00:14:00] idea or the, or the terminology of a starter kit. Because like originally I was like, oh, site templates are like themes plus plus, right? Right. And I'm like, that seems like kind of like, not a great way to describe it, but like the, the idea of a starter, starter kit where it's a theme plus, plus one-time use recipes and content make a lot of make a lot of sense.

A lot more sense to me, I guess I should say. So we have this idea of a marketplace. We have this idea of the marketplace being a place to. Have a collection of site templates, and we'll get into whether we sell those or don't sell those or, or how that marketplace works. As throughout the episode but I'm wondering if you can tell me you're currently leading a working group around this initiative and I'm wondering if you can tell me what the goals of, of that working group are.

Tiffany: So our goal is to [00:15:00] figure out how a marketplace might work socially, how it might work technically, and how it might work financially. The idea is that certainly the, in the drees note, Drees put this forward as an idea, but he was also really clear to say that we needed the buy-in of the community.

We needed to explore this more before we decided to commit to it. So what we've been calling the go no go decision. So what we're doing is the. Marketplace Working group is we're really doing deep research in the community and incorporating, you know, lots of different channels of feedback. We've got surveys, we have Slack prompts every week.

We have you know, competitive analysis, research. We're talking to the IP lawyers. There's just so many different components of this. And what we're doing is we're trying to bring that all together to draft a governance to draft some quality standards, to draft what the contributor workflows might be, and explore business models so that we can determine if this [00:16:00] is actually something we wanna invest in, right?

Every time you choose something, you are choosing not to do other things. So we wanna make sure that this is the right next step both for the community and for the association.

John: And you said something in interesting. Well, you said a lot of interesting things there, but one thing that I wanted to, to get a little more information on is you said you were, you were putting out Slack prompts.

What is, what is, what is that, and like, is it what, obviously it's something in Slack, but like, what, how is that being used? So I have this master roadmap of all of the different kinds of questions that we need to answer. And each week I have a theme for what we're looking at, and I want to go to people where they're at.

Tiffany: I wanna meet them where they're at. So, mm-hmm. You know, we go to the, the Drupal certified Partner quarterly meeting to get some feedback and initial insight on their hopes and fears. And then we know a lot of the most engaged folks in the Drupal community are on Drupal Slack. So we [00:17:00] created a channel it's pound Drupal dash cms dash marketplace, and every Monday I post just a prompt so that they, I can watch a conversation emerge between folks.

A candid opinion about what those different topics are, and they're getting much more specific as time goes on. So I think while I have a roadmap, it's an agile roadmap, so it changes over time based on what I'm hearing. And so the Slack prompts have been, I, I drafted an initial list of about 15, and already by week five, I had started to change what I was asking based on the feedback we were getting and what I was seeing in those surveys.

John: Got it. So, so the prompt is really, really a question or a talking point topic that, that you wanna kind of gauge community thoughts and opinions on basically.

Tiffany: Absolutely. Yeah. So this week's prompt, just to give you an example or like, so Yeah. You know, this will be the old prompt, but you're still welcome actually to answer any of the [00:18:00] prompts.

They're all still up there and, and. And coding them. But so the prompt for the week that we're recording this is what makes a site template worth paying a premium for, despite the fact that it's GPL and one time use. So want to really start to dig in on where we would be generating value.

John: I have a great answer for that one.

I'll have to go, I'll have to go find that prompt. I mean, I feel like, anyway, we're gonna go down, we're gonna go down rabbit holes here. Oh yeah. But yeah, so I mean, I think that makes a lot of sense. I think that you guys are, are doing are doing great work in including the community and making this really a community driven initiative.

And, and you know, I think it's, I think it's important. It's kind. It's, it represents a big change potentially for our community. So, a lot of this is, I think, the technical pieces. Once we know what we wanna do, like those are again, gonna be the easy part. Figuring out what we should do and how we should do [00:19:00] those things, that's the tough part.

Tiffany: So we wanna be really thoughtful about it.

Norah: Awesome. Thank you so much for all of that and, and kind of maybe digging into that a little bit more. You know, I think we're curious to hear why you think that the Drupal marketplace is important to the sustainability or, you know, the continuation of Drupal CMS and the product in general.

Tiffany: Here's a really short answer to that.

It's because we, we need to lower the barrier to entry for Drupal. We want to grow the number of people who consider Drupal, who get started with Drupal and a marketplace we think can help us get those new users started faster. But we also think it can help to reduce the cost and the complexity for agencies, and we think it can give contributors a channel to showcase and monetize their work.

So that's, that's why the Starshot leadership team, you know, said, you know, we, we think a marketplace might be really good. Then independently, the Drupal Association, which is [00:20:00] tasked with maintaining the infrastructure of the product, drupal.org and you know, all of our technical infrastructure, we are interested in what are the ways that we can strengthen the sustainability of, of the platform, right?

We provide a lot of services. It's about $10 for every Drupal site in the world. The Drupal Association funds infrastructure to support them, and we don't talk about the fact that there's a cost to it. So part of the reason that I'm, that I came back for a second term on the board was to think about how we might make that more sustainable.

And this is a conversation that's, that's really broad and a lot of open source communities are wrestling with it. There's gonna be a conference at the United Nations next month specifically focused on how we think about funding and supporting digital public infrastructure in a more sustainable way.

So I'm looking for those opportunities that create these mutual wins where we're adding value for users, we're adding value for our contributors that we depend on. [00:21:00] We are nurturing our ecosystem, but that also are self-supporting. Because every time we add new sites, we are adding $10 worth of cost and services to to drupal.org.

So I need to think about how we can do that in a way that's actually sustainable.

Norah: Well, and you know, I think maybe just to expand on that a little bit, you know, I wonder. If you're able to dig into this, I don't know, but my thoughts go to immediately, you know, what percentage cut maybe would come out of a sale on, on the marketplace.

Has any sort of little discussions happened yet with those, maybe those probing questions in the Slack channel about how this, the sort of monetization piece would, would flow back to Al Association in that regard?

Tiffany: We haven't had those specific discussions yet around those percentages, but I think they're well known.

So we've done an inventory of how other marketplaces work, and in general 20 to 30% goes back [00:22:00] to whoever's providing the platform. So I think more interestingly for Drupal, we've been having conversations around, all right, well you have the, the site template creator who would get some revenue, but what about.

Upstream, you know, the folks who actually made the modules without which the site template doesn't work, what would be fair? So the community is very concerned about the, the questions of fairness in that. And, you know, I, I think what's been interesting, we, our, our most recent survey really started to dig into that what do people think about, and I don't see a, a consensus around paying back module maintainers, but maybe paying forward and some of the revenue that's brought in going into a module innovation or sustainability fund or something like that.

But there was a lot of concern around it. And so I think there's a couple of. Of ideas that are floating around there for how we might make sure that as Drupal grows and when these site templates are wildly [00:23:00] successful, that we're not overwhelming our module maintainers and our contributors with increased support burdens that are uncompensated, right?

So I think there's just, there's such care in the community around the nuance involved in these issues.

John: Go ahead Nic. I'll, I'll let you, I'll let you jump in there.

Nic: Yeah. I, I, I just wanna, I'm not sure if people have talked about this either, but one thing that's been on my mind too, beyond, I mean, that, that's one of the primary things that I, I think about is how, how do you equitably make sure that some of that flows uphill and, and make sure that, like, there's all sorts of things like, Hey, there's 10 maintainers on a project, but only two of them are active.

Or, you know, there's all sorts of questions, but we also wanna make sure that some of it also goes, we, we also want. Ancillary projects, right? So for example, DE you know, the Drupal Association's been doing a huge thing for d dev, you know, putting a banner, you know, mentioning the need to support DE, but [00:24:00] most contrib modules, maintainers and developers use it too.

And having a, you know, having some percentage for those or like PHP itself or Twig or like all the tools that we're building on top of having a way to to support those projects through an in initiative like this, I think is, is worth keeping in mind too. Obviously these, these aren't things that we can solve at this point, but I think, I think it's important to have a strong plan for how they'll get resolved before money gets involved.

Otherwise,

John: I, I, I both agree and disagree, so I think like I. I think this is a great question that or follow up question that Norah asked, right? I think that yes, things get com more complicated when, when we start talking about, about money and, and [00:25:00] how that money is, is divvied up. But I also think that, and you know, I mean, Tiffany, I'd love to hear, hear your thoughts or what you're hearing from the community in in this regard.

But like we have to, we have to be able to get to A MVP. We have to be able to get to that first plateau of like, do we have a marketplace? What does it look like? Do we have paid, paid site templates? Right? And I think the first, the first. You know, obligation is to what percentage of that, of that fee, you know, what's the fee breakdown of going back to the Drupal Association, going back to the, the creator of the site template?

Right. Because I, I, I think that's, that's the, I don't wanna say the most important thing here, but I think that's the, that should be the MVP. Right. And then, you know, from there, I mean, I think we can, we can talk about and develop, you know, some sort of, of, of fund [00:26:00] to, to provide module maintain or sustainability.

You know, definitely not opposed to that, but I feel like a lot of times what we, we do in the, the Drupal community, and this is more of a, a broad statement, is like, instead of getting to an MVP where we can build upon it, we, we talk and debate and discuss. To, to the nth degree, and we then don't end up making progress.

Right. So I I, I'd be interested Tiffany to hear, hear kind of your thoughts around that and like what you're hearing from the community, but like that's, that's kind of where I, where I come down on this. Yeah, no problem. The way that I'm approaching this is we're using a consent model. Is it good enough for now and safe enough to try?

Tiffany: Mm-hmm. And so when you, when you approach things from that perspective one of the things you think about are the harms. And, and that's essentially what we're talking about is are, are we causing harm with this? And ultimately a lot of what drove the Starshot team [00:27:00] to this conclusion that we needed a marketplace is that even if the things we're saying are true, right, that it creates additional burden on module maintainers, that harm isn't caused by the marketplace, that's caused by people using the software.

So they're not changing the status quo of what that looks like. But it does create that opportunity that we might actually have resources to resolve that. So that in itself doesn't become the blocker. But what I love are the system signals that people are thinking about this because one, it assumes that this is gonna be wildly successful.

So as someone who doesn't like to waste her time on things, I'm excited that people are just, you know, prima facia jumping to the fact that this is gonna be incredibly successful and we're gonna create these huge, you know, we're gonna get heaps of money and we're gonna cause you know, a lot more people to be using Drupal and show and, and the people who are, you know, low-code, no-code users are gonna be showing up in issue queues, which means that they've gone up the hill of our [00:28:00] engagement ladder.

Like I'm loving how far down the success track people are going. But you know, I think the important part of it that I also take away is. The first step to being able to solve some of these issues is to be talking about them, right? Sunshine is the best cure. So I think that we need to get clearer, and I'm trying to get clearer as a Drupal association by saying, you know, did you realize that we're providing $10 of services to every site that uses Drupal around the world every year?

I don't think people realize that. Right. You know, and so when you talk about, you know what, hey, all of these models on drupal.org use d dev, and this is the cost of that. When we start to bring those to, to the surface, that awareness allows us to start to think about the cost of the decisions that we're making, right?

I think that, you know, when, you know, we, we decided to do packages on Drupal. We didn't think about what that cost is and where that cost comes in. So I just am trying to create a [00:29:00] model where we're starting to think about the cost, the human cost, the technical cost of what we're doing, and making sure that we're thinking about it sustainably

John: before, before we move on.

And I know, I know we, we need to move on. But before we move on I'm wondering, like you just, you just said the, the, you know, the, the additional burden on a module maintainer, right. And I know that I am gonna, this is not, this is not gonna be popular, so brace yourselves folks, but I'm wondering like if there are a hundred, a thousand, tens of thousand more sites using Drupal, right?

Does the do, do we have metrics that show how, potentially how the burden on the module maintainer could change? And the reason I ask this is like. If you have a module and if it, if it, you know, [00:30:00] if it works, right? Yes. More sites using it means more issues in the issue queue that you have to kind of go through and triage.

So like, I definitely understand that, that aspect of it. But for me it feels like the ecosystem that we're proposing has a couple of, a couple of layers between the, you know, the average site builder and the issue queue, right? So like you have the site template creator because that person's gonna definitely be involved or that agency is gonna be involved, right?

In supporting, supporting their site template. And then that obviously that, that inter there'll be an interaction there with the, with the module maintainer. I just wonder like, you know, if we added 10,000 more Drupal sites. Based on site templates, like would a module maintainer really see that much more of a, of a, of an impact or, or a workload?

We'll say

Nic: I, I would say [00:31:00] as somebody who does maintain modules, it will,

it will, yes. Because from a few sides, one, there'll be more activity in the issue queue. There will be more there. No, that's, there's no question. There will be more activity in the issue queue. There will be there will be increased pressure from just users of the module and the site template maintainers to fix things that they care about, which may be like, right now, one, one of the things is you, you could put up a module.

It because it's free, because it's you, because you whatever. If there's a bug that you don't care about, yeah, some people might post about it, but you can kind of just ignore it. But again, with all things, once money's involved, that pressure, like now it's somebody's job to complain about it. It always

Tiffany: has been.

Well,

John: yes, but it's different. Well, right, so that's where I, that's where I [00:32:00] always get to like, listen, module maintainers are doing it for free today. And people complain about bugs because they're building enterprise websites with this solution. Right? So like a bug is a bug is a bug. Like if there is a bug, somebody's gonna complain about it, whether it's now or, you know, after a marketplace.

Nic: So socially is very different though I think.

John: Okay. So, but like my, I guess my point here is that like, let's, let's let, let's build out this scenario, right? So like, I'm a site builder. I pretend like I am not a community member. I do not know anything about the triple community, right? I'm a site builder. I say, Hey, I'm going to go to company X.

They have this great site template for Drupal that I wanna use for my NGO, right? Okay. I buy this site template from, from, you know, th this com, company X, and I install it on my, on my website and it works great. And I've set up my whole website, right? For my, for my [00:33:00] nonprofit. It uses web forms, right?

Okay. I am using web forms. I set up my web form. Oh, I find an issue. Or I want a new feature in my web form, right? I'm going, probably going back to the site template creator, right? To say, Hey, I want this new new feature, this new thing. Can you help me? Can you help me build it? Can you add it to the site template?

Whatever, whatever that conversation looks like, right? Like at that point, the site template creator is, it may go back to Jacob Rockow, the maintainer or web form and go, Hey, somebody wants this feature. Like, can we add it? Right? I would say that the site, the site template creator is gonna add that feature and provide it back to the module maintainer.

Obviously Jacob's gotta review the code and incorporate the code if it, if it makes sense for him, right? And there's conversations there. So I do see that happening, but like. I mean, he's probably having those conversations anyway, right? So like, but,

Nic: but if you just, if you look at the difference [00:34:00] between the scale, like it's the scale.

If you look at the difference in scale between a module that has a hundred users versus a thousand versus 10,000 versus a hundred thousand, it's extreme. And, and I think the funds that they're planning on do you know, they're thinking about, we're thinking about how we can use that to help solve that, that friction, right?

That'd be a great problem to have. But there's a lot of social stigma against paid stuff. And there's a lot of, there's a lot of, there, there's a lot of way, a lot of easy missteps I think that can happen with, with incorporating this back to the community.

John: Sure. I mean, I don't disagree with that. And I think like we, we could talk, talk about the cost, the cost and money aspect of this, like for the rest of this episode and still not come to a, come to a consensus.

Right. I, [00:35:00] I do want, go ahead. Sorry.

Nic: Sorry, John. I do, I do wanna ask Tiffany, one, one last thing about this before we move on, and it's not specifically about the cost, but you, you had mentioned something that I wanted to dive into, and it's something that Jacob mentioned on this, this shameless self-promotion, but on the TD Cafe episode that he had with Martin, he had mentioned this and it's had me thinking, so whenever you talk you said people are thinking about the success.

Right. And very excited about that. The same thing is kind of true of Starshot, but you, you do have to think about the failure state too. Right? And the thing is, I think about star Drupal cms, right? Drupal CMSI think we could say at this point so far has been as a resounding success, right? I think even in a world where it failed though, let's, let's just put on what's the opposite of rose tinted glasses.

Let's pretend that we're in a world where triple CMS failed for whatever reason. I think the [00:36:00] process still would've been a success for the community as a whole because it did something that Drupal hasn't seen in a long time, which has pulled all the different agencies together to talk about this is how we're using Drupal.

This is, these are things that we can do to fix, these are paper cuts that we fix on every project. Let's just fix it for everybody, right? Or even for somebody like me, like I'm probably not going to ha use Drupal CMS as a starting point ever. Like it just isn't when you're building a custom site. But there's recipes and things and a lot of core stuff that got fixed that makes my life way bigger.

Wait a second. Okay. Time. Time out there. Time out. If a client came to you and said, this is a site template I want you to implement for my site. Say, say template. I said Drupal CMS, but it a site template's built based on Drupal CMS. Right. So like No. Yes, only Drupal cms, you can't apply the recipes to. Okay.

Then that's concerning. But [00:37:00] let's set that aside for a second and get to my question. But Yeah, no, I mean, triple CMS has like 95 modules or a thousand modules. Like I'm, I'm not gonna be putting that on a client's site. I, like, I don't, I don't want my job to change from adding the stuff we need to taking away, away the stuff we don't need.

But anyway, maybe that will change in the future. My point here is that even if I don't use it, whether I use it or not, it's been a huge success and it's benefited me and, and my company, like it's a benefit. It's a net positive, even if it goes away tomorrow. It, are you thinking about how to make sure that that happens with site templates?

Because I, I feel like if site templates. If site templates were just a thing and didn't work out, I think everybody could accept that. If site templates get introduced and there's a marketplace that a paid marketplace, I think backing out of that and or managing the risk from that is, is much [00:38:00] harder and much more potential to be divisive, I guess you could say.

So how are you considering that fail that failure to say, like, how do you, you said you're talking about consent, you're talking about is this safe? Is there go no go, but how are you planning those mitigations? Because that's the, that's the thing that really concerns me more than how you split the money.

The thing that concerns me is how do you handle kind of a rollback, I guess, for that? 'cause it feels different.

Tiffany: I wanna make a distinction here. Site templates are happening. So that's not part of this marketplace conversation. So I, I can't speak to that. That's, that's Starshot leadership team. The question about the marketplace, and I think what's implicit, again, I, which I take as a system signal, is that there will be commercialized.

That there will be a, like that, that we're gonna take money for these things. There is a world or a future in which we put up the marketplace and you know, it's just a beautiful way to, to get your site templates. Do I think that there will be a charge for them? [00:39:00] Most likely I do. But we're still working through what that would look like.

The question of if it is a failure you know, how would we know it's a failure and in what ways can it fail? Yeah. I'm a big believer in that kind of risk mitigation. And, and one of the things we've done in this process is we said, what are the assumptions? So we did some critical assumptions work around.

We're assuming certain things going into this project, what if we are wrong about those base assumptions and how do we mitigate those things? So, I think risk mitigation at every step has been part of what we're thinking about. And part of what I bring to the table in terms of how I'm facilitating this entire process.

So we're not to the point where we even know what the marketplace would be which I think we need to have before we create the mitigation strategies around them for how we have a, a safe failure state or what we might do if we start to see some of the key indicators saying that this, this isn't socially acceptable or this isn't technically acceptable, or this [00:40:00] isn't financially viable, right?

All of those questions remain and move forward with the project as we go to, to implement into this, this, and I expect that. There will be a pilot, right? First, and then the pilot would get built upon into sort of an MVP, right? Yeah. We know that there will be three site templates developed that are in development right now.

That's gonna exist. We may be able to do a, a very easy pilot version of just what does it look like, how do we present it to users, how, what is the contribution path? What about upgrade, you know, updates, and how do we actually monitor those things? Like that gives us a safe kind of sandbox to start to play in it before we get to the point where we have thousands of site templates.

So part of what I'm here to do is to introduce a very agile approach to how we might evolve you know, one of our basic community pillars, right? drupal.org and how we might invite folks in. So, i'm a data nerd. [00:41:00] And so I actually wrote down John's idea about why don't I go through and establish a baseline for what the module burden is and what the issue queue burden is based on growth of modern Drupal.

Like, now you have me interested, like numbers and spreadsheets are my love language. So hey, I would love to dig into that and I probably will. So I, I do think we can establish a baseline and then we can start to monitor, okay, what impact is this having on the module maintainers? And then we, you know, we sense, we inspect and then we adapt.

Nic: Yeah. I, one, one thing to add to your, sorry, John, I ke I keep interrupting today. One thing to add to that list might, that I think might be interesting and not super easy to pull out maybe is a graph of release versus number of usages too. 'cause that's the other thing too, like cutting a release takes this burden, nevermind just the issue.

Q and I mean. I have no idea if more users means more releases, more [00:42:00] users means less. It probably depends a little bit on the project and the, the maintainer. But it might be interesting to see, like if you have to, if you increase the number of releases, depending on how much, how many people are using the site as well.

Yeah. Is listening to this episode, sorry, he's where I go to get my numbers from, so Well maybe if he listens, he'll, he'll, he'll do some pre, pre investigation. What do you get, John?

John: Well, I just, I comment on the, the, you know, the failure case, right? Like, I, I think from a like broader perspective, like a community growth and and longevity perspective, like.

You know, I don't wanna say this has to succeed because like, you know, that's, that seems like a lot of, a lot of pressure. But I, I, I think that, like, there are a lot of other, [00:43:00] and Tiffany's, Tiffany's already said this, right? There are a lot of other communities and products out there that have a marketplace that, you know, there are free, there are free options, there are paid options, right?

And they're, they're very successful. And I think that one of my biggest frustrations, and when I first heard about the marketplace, I was like, what is this thing gonna look like? Because technically drupal.org has a theme section, and I'm not, I, I don't wanna be disparaging to anybody, but it is not great, right?

It is very developer focused. You get a theme installed and then you're like, now what? Like, it's not, it's not what I think that the, the marketplace. Well, well, I, I don't think I know, I know it's not what the marketplace is gonna be. Right. I, I think the, the advent of site templates is something that's very, very appealing and a lot of other [00:44:00] you know, communities, I'll use Squarespace as an example.

I know everybody hates when I.

You buy Squarespace, right? You don't necessarily pay for a theme on Squarespace, although maybe they do have some paid themes. I'm not really aware. But like once you buy the service, right, you have this access to these, to these themes, and the themes come with, you know, predefined blocks that you can put onto pages that give you an idea of how you can build your site, right?

It's very like, here you go. You're all ready to go and you can get, you can get a website. A website up and running, right? So, I mean, I think for Drupal to have something like that is, is, is super important. And I mean, I think like. Worst case scenario, right? We find out that nobody wants to pay for the open source, the site templates.

And, and, and, you know, organizations don't wanna build high quality site templates. I mean, I think we, we get to a place where we have a collection of [00:45:00] 3, 10, 20, a hundred, right? And like, maybe that's it. And like, that's what you get. And like, that's okay and they're free and okay, great, fine. Wonderful. And it's just kind of like everything else, right?

It's an open source, community driven thing. But I mean, I think like even in that case, we're probably better off than we are now, right? But I don't, I, I personally like sunshine, rose colored glasses. I don't think, I don't think we're, this is, this is gonna fail because I, I really think it's an important it's an important growth step for the community in order to be able to see longevity into the future.

Nic: I, I want, I wanna be, I wanna clarify too, something really quickly like. I think the, the, the best case success scenario is some sort of paid marketplace, right? That injects much needed resources into an open source community. I think that is, that is the best case scenario. I think that the, now [00:46:00] I think that's also the riskiest, which is, I mean, that's life.

Sometimes you have to take risks, but it's, it's different. I think it's different for a community than a company to make a venture like that and back out than for a community to start something. Like, like I said, you look at tons of initiatives across jule org. Some finish, some complete, some stall, some fail, and they don't necessarily like them failing.

While it's discouraging and it is a huge amount of effort that people put into it, I don't think inherently harm the community. I. Whereas I feel like there's, there's a line, this, there's something different about this one. That's my only point. It's not that, I'm not trying to say we shouldn't do it. I don't think we should try, shouldn't try to do it.

I think it's, we're at an existential time in development in general. We need to find ways to be more sustainable.

John: But there's, and failure, there's

Nic: something different about this.

John: Failure is how we learn and grow, right? So we can, we can, we can learn and [00:47:00] grow from, from a, from a failure. But let's, let's shift the conver I'm happy topics.

Let's shift the conversation to, to more, more sunshine and less doom and gloom. We've talked about a lot of the kind of intricacies of a Drupal marketplace. We've talked about what, you know, the working group and the initiative are, are working working on, and again, collecting the data to, to kind of make this decision, right.

I'm wondering what, like an MVP. Goal looks like for the working group. Right. So what, and, and I'm gonna kind of double up on this question a little bit. Like with that goal, what is the, what is the finished state of the working group? Is it a report that says, here's why we should have a Drupal marketplace and the data that comes behind, you know, come that we've collected and, and, and to support this?

Or is it like, you know, [00:48:00] here's why we need the marketplace and here's how we start to build it. Like, what's that? What's that MVP where you're like, okay, this work is, is done, or at least at A MVP plateau?

Tiffany: Our MVP goal is to make sure that we have defined a trusted submission and review process that we have also validated that the marketplace is gonna deliver real value to end users, to contributors and to the Drupal ecosystem.

So for us, what that looks like when we're, you know, what success looks like is that we've validated that MVP scope, what that next step looks like. Here's the shape of it. We have a, a, a couple of folks who are gonna be ready to submit templates. I think that's already on track. So I love having a good goal, like checked off, right?

That we understand what the contribution UX might be. We understand and have, and this is really important to me, that it's a lightweight and credible governance and funding [00:49:00] model. So we're gonna continue to iterate, right? You, you wanna in agile, you wanna take that next increment, but make it small enough that failure isn't catastrophic, right?

I think we take some really big swings in Drupal, and that's kind of in our pattern. I'd really love to see us adopt a more agile approach with this, and that's part of why I'm involved in the way that I'm involved. And then none of this happens if we don't have the, the confidence of the ecosystem.

And so, you know, that MVP for us means yes, we do have we have the consent that this is good enough for now and safe enough to pilot

John: What? Well, well, so question on that. And, and, and maybe this is part of your MVP deliverable, but like, do you guys see yourselves developing a. Three year, five year roadmap for marketplace and saying like, okay, we have all the data, we have these three that are, we're gonna pilot.

We have a, you know, [00:50:00] the cost model figured out, here's the roadmap for the next, you know, like I said, three to five years,

Tiffany: our charter is to get to that go no go decision. And so looking out beyond that, you know, is catnip to me as someone who loves complexity. Sure. But I'm gonna hold myself back. You asked about the marketplace working group, and that is, our charter is very specific and very scoped.

And what next steps come beyond that I'm not gonna speculate on right

John: now. Got it. Okay. So that, that's, no, that was, that was actually the perfect answer to, to my question is like, okay, your, your charter is basically MVP and figuring out like, yes, no, let's, and what's next? Here's the data and what's next.

Got it. Okay. Perfect. Thank you.

Norah: You know, maybe expanding on that just a little bit. You know, I, I, this, I, I love that you're thinking about agile, you know, and, and kind of, you know, shifting some mentality here potentially as well. But, you know, I do [00:51:00] wonder if, and maybe related to that or not if, if there's some challenges and, and kind of, you know, getting this nailed down to, you know, what that sort of shape of the MVT really is.

Maybe, maybe thinking from a timeline perspective. I wonder if, you know, you can speak to like, we specifically goals on like when we're kind of gold timeframe, the MVP, or like at what point do we feel like we would have that good shape, I guess is what I'm looking for here. How, and, and maybe what challenges are around getting there.

Tiffany: So we're gonna have a point of view on the marketplace by Vienna, so that we know, what I think is so interesting about this particular initiative is that it touches on almost every tension in open source. So I, I love gnarly problems and I've got one on my hand, right? So I think there's like, there's four different things here, right?

So [00:52:00] talk about the ultimate in cat herding, right? I have to align all of the stakeholders who have different goals here, right? So I've got contributors who want revenue and recognition. I have agencies who want lower cost of delivery and visibility. I have end users who are like, just let me get started with this.

I don't care, right? I just wanna cite so I could talk about the things I wanna talk about, right? And then you have the Drupal Association, which is tasked with stewarding all of this and making sure that whatever is built is actually sustainable over the long run, right? So that's one, two. I have everybody coming in thinking that they know what a marketplace is.

So I have all these different mental models that I have to reset because everybody who I talk to about the marketplace is like, we're talking about themes and I have to reset. We're not talking about themes, right? And we're also not talking about distros either. So we've gotta reset that. And I have to kind of [00:53:00] align people to be able to talk about something that they've not yet seen, because site templates are still in development.

So I have to align everybody around that. And then we are operating under the constraints of the GPL, so that guarantees that anything we do is gonna be distributed freely, that anything we distribute is freely modifiable. Freely shareable, and then redistributable on the other side. So if I'm trying to create a business model around this, I really have to think carefully about what we sell.

Why would someone pay for it? Why would they come to us? What's the value add of getting that from drupal.org? So it's, it's just there's a lot there. And then you have a very, very well-rounded fear of in acidification, right? So if you're not familiar with that term, you know, it was coined by Cory Tro and it describes what happens to digital [00:54:00] platforms when they optimize aggressively for monetization in a way that erodes trust and the creators and it degrade the user experience.

There are valid concerns here around what people have seen happen in WordPress plugins or app stores or social media platforms, and everybody wants to avoid that fate, right? We wanna make sure that whatever we build is something that sustains open source values rather than undermining them. So what I have isn't a tech problem and it isn't a product problem.

I have a deep cultural and structural challenge. And so that's why as I think about the roadmap, just to get to the go, no go decision and what a pilot might be. I'm thinking a lot about governance, I'm thinking a lot about trust building and trust signals at every level to every one of those stakeholder groups.

And then, you know, fortunately, I, I do think I have a deep understanding and I of, of what makes Drupal unique, [00:55:00] right? We're not looking to get rid of the things that keep us here for this community. So it is a, it's a learning problem and yeah, I I

Nic: you'll have it done by next Tuesday.

John: Totally.

Tiffany: Abso,

John: I, I've, I've just, I've just, just now realized like I, I don't understand how Tiffany's head does the next explode.

There are so many, so many, so many. The, the, you know, it, it's, it's one topic, but there are so many different you know, different buckets and things to think about and like, I don't know, just, just listening to you describe that so eloquently. I'm like, yep. My brain is literally would be leaking outta my ears.

So

Tiffany: fortunately, this is how my brain works. This is like, this is the chat. I think the way I like to describe it's my mind is like a MongoDB, like it does structured in the, as everyone else I from.

John: So

Norah: I'll say that you're really hitting on a lot of concepts around change [00:56:00] management and really enterprise level, you know, something that like, could spend lots of dollars on like high enterprise to to implement some large changes that need to occur in large enterprise.

And the only way to do that, like you said, is getting, you know, to sort of trust building and consensus and, and, and breaking it down into, you know, categories of some kind. And, and you know, I do wonder like just expanding a little bit on that. I, you know, I do hear that, that there's some challenges and specifically getting folks like to understand even what it.

The community and or you know, maybe some supplemental documentation or messaging at events, or like how can or do you envision that, that the community itself can help itself, you know, understand what this is?

Tiffany: Well, there's lots of different things. So we're doing I've been writing share outs regularly just to kind of keep people in the loop and then when they find it, they can go to the marketplace page, which is [00:57:00] drupal.org/about/star slot slash marketplace initiative.

John: Thanks, Scott. Well. We'll put a link in the show notes for folks who are listening.

Tiffany: Thank you. That page captures everything. It captures the survey results, it captures all the share outs, it captures the high levels, it captures what you could do next links to all the Slack prompts, the past and current one.

So you know, whether you have five minutes or five hours to spend on this, I wanna be able to have some quick bullets for you. So go to the page, get the update on whatever it looks like today. So I think there's that. I was just at NIP Camp yesterday, which is awesome. Thinking more well done to all to you and all the mid.

Volunteers. It's an amazing event, always is. So I did one there. Doing the podcast. I've, you know, been trying to get out. I don't often post on social media, but I have been posting on LinkedIn generally every week when I, when I do these share outs. So I'm trying to make sure that for folks who are interested the [00:58:00] official Drupal channels are pushing things out.

All the blog, all the share outs, I do go out on planet. So I think there's lots of different ways that people can, can get there, but when we get to an actual lightweight governance proposal I, you know, I do expect that that will be done the traditional way. Once I have a draft, I think I'll put it probably in, in an issue queue.

And so we'll, we'll go, you know, the official channels too. So Nate doesn't heal me.

Nic: So you've, you've mentioned a, a couple times that there's going to be a go no go decision. Who are the stakeholders for that? Who's ma I mean, obviously it's product managers and leadership, but like, do, do you have that list of who the go no go decision makers are?

Tiffany: Mm-hmm. It's a working group itself.

Nic: Okay. Yeah.

Tiffany: So the members of the working group are Dre Tim Lennon Lenny, Tim Doyle, who's the CEO of the Drupal Association. And then [00:59:00] you have the Starshot leadership is involved. Tim Plunkett ham Lowry. Brian Rama is a former community elected board rep, and then a member of the CEO of Sentara.

He's involved. And then Alex Moreno, who's a community elected board member right now. He's also involved. We the working group and so. Okay.

Nic: Very cool.

John: So, sorry, I don't, did, did we ever get to like a timeframe as far as when, when we might be out here Vienna? That did, did I miss out before? Vienna.

Vienna? Okay. Okay. Clearly I missed that. I apologize. Wow, you guys are working, working pretty, pretty quick, pretty quick there, right? 'Cause I imagine like, I dunno, I feel like it's a lot of data and I feel like you're, you're doing a great job organizing it and, and getting it, getting it ready quickly, so that's awesome.

So where you stand right now, right? How Vienna is, when is that? September, October. October. October. So [01:00:00] you got like, I don't know, a couple of months. What, three or four? I'm wondering like if you can see what MVP version of a marketplace might look like? Maybe that's a little like, Hey, if you look in your crystal ball, what does this look like?

But I'm wondering if you have that.

Tiffany: So this would just be my opinion, right? And it is subject to change. It's going to evolve as I, as I learn more, as we learn more, this will evolve. But I think right now some sort of an MVP would be site templates, right? Which are happening regardless of the marketplace.

So I think that's my tip. Some sort of page on drupal.org, right? Mm-hmm. A way to submit and review those templates for minimum standards. So there was a conversation last week, the slack prompt was around. All right. We say we all want standards. What does that mean? Is that manual review? Is that automated review?

What is it? How many different dimensions? I, I have a list of at least 15 different dimensions where we could evaluate code quality [01:01:00] and accessibility, and. Not all of them are automatable. And so then there's a cost to that. So you're really just trying to understand what we might wanna do, what might be an MVP doable.

Thinking a lot about trust signals. So a lot of the early surveys we're asking both those who might be end users or agencies as well as those in the community. What would make you think that this is actually high quality, which is one of the criticisms of the theme listing right now on drupal.org?

Is it a hundred percent? You don't know what you're gonna get. So usage statistics, which we have for modules and things. What about reviews? How do we know that they even used it and how do we prevent slop in that space? Badges. Is there a badging system or self-certification? There's a lot of different things there.

So we would have some sort of minimum sense of what our trust signals are that we wanna launch with. We would. Obviously it's just a no brainer. We're gonna have some clear contributor attribution. Mm-hmm. Because we think it's really important that in [01:02:00] the site templates it's very clear not just what recipes are being used, but what modules are being used.

So all of that needs to be very clear and upfront. Some sort of basic review and appeals process. Mm-hmm. You know, hey, is it they just took my site template and republished it and they're not trying to sell it. Like

Nic: mm-hmm.

Tiffany: How do we prevent that from happening in the first place? And then how do we, if, if something were to slip through, how would we resolve it?

Mm-hmm. So all of those things I think are essential to have in place in a lightweight way for an MVP. It could be that we only have it free initially. Monetization could come in later. Dunno. That's really a, a whole kettle of fish because once you have. The monetization in place, then we have to deal with things like customer service and refunds.

And I mean, there's just a whole host of, of new issues that start to come in there, so. Mm-hmm. I'm not, I wouldn't bet that monetization is in the first round. [01:03:00] It could be.

Nic: Okay.

Tiffany: But yeah, I think we're just actively working on governance, quality standards, that business model, those three things start to really shape.

And there's still so many different questions in each of those, but you know, we're validating what would need to be in, you know, what makes it worth doing. We, we don't wanna launch the marketplace. It's kinda the inverse of what Nic was saying, right. I don't wanna launch marketplace, it doesn't actually create some value.

Yeah. Over and above just creating a, a views page. Right. Like I, I, it does need to be worth the time. But yeah, it also, I was gonna say, it just also needs to something that doesn't, we wanna make sure whoever we do doesn't damage trust, doesn't feel extractive. Yeah. And doesn't burden contributors or the association or the makers unfairly.

John: Yeah. I mean, I, I think just the, the idea of, of having a, a marketplace of site templates as opposed to a [01:04:00] marketplace of just themes to me feels like, feels like a huge win. Right? Because my biggest, again, going back to what I said towards the beginning of the show, right? My biggest, my biggest gripe with three themes right now is like, you get a theme and like, yes, you go to the theme page and it looks great, and like, hey, look at all this cool stuff.

And then you get the theme and it's literally like, alright, there's no content, there are no blocks, there's no real anything here that allows you to like understand how you get to what those beautiful visuals look like. And I think with. Drupal CMS in the addition of, of experience builder, like, we're gonna, we're going to need that site, those site templates, and we're gonna need a marketplace where people can easily, you know, get them and, and you know, apply them and, and, and start to use them.

So I definitely, I definitely think you're on, you're on the right track for what it's worth.

Tiffany: Well, thank you. You know, I, I really, what resonates with me about about site templates and their [01:05:00] potential is it's a path forward to make Drupal more accessible to new users in a way that doesn't reduce the complexity of Drupal.

Mm-hmm. It just makes it so that you don't need to know it all at once, all upfront to do anything with it, because, you know, four. Agencies and companies like mine that use Drupal and implement Drupal in very large enterprise context. It's because of the complexity that Drupal is able to, you know, to handle that.

We love it so much, right? But not everybody's use case needs that. So I think it allows us to have our cake and eat it too, right? We want lots of people to be using Drupal. But, you know, most people don't need to to dive in at the deep end, which is how we pretty much force people to do right now.

They wanna use Drupal.

John: Yeah, I, I, I see it as like, a both an introductory and a stepping stone, right? So like it's an in intro to new [01:06:00] people to easily get onto the platform and build, build you know, smaller to medium sized websites, right? But then it could also be that stepping stone of, Hey, I got in, I built, built my medium, going back to my, you know, my, my nonprofit org example, right?

I get in, I, I say, Hey Nic, I need, I need, I want you to apply this site template. I built the site. Okay, well Nic, now we need more advanced features. Like, can you build us a module that integrates with our, you know, our donor management system? Or can you build us, you know, build and it provides that ecosystem of, of of growth for, for the greater community.

So, yeah definitely, definitely very positive on it. And, and I think like, you know, that, that's definitely a great stepping stone or introduction to, to the wonderful world of Dr.

Tiffany: Absolutely. I, I'm excited about that. The folks who are gonna continue up that engagement ladder. Yeah. It's where many of us started, you know, almost 20 years ago.

You get involved and you do a little bit [01:07:00] and then you kind of move forward. And as Drupal is the, you know, a very mature open source product we have we have years of accumulated history. And so it, it can be intimidating for somebody to step right into that. But there are always gonna be those folks who, who wanna start simple and who find themselves as engaged as those of us who are absolutely hooked and wanna find out more, wanna do more and, and have ambitions beyond what a starter kit could actually help them to do.

And there's also gonna be companies, as you say, who have more ambitious needs that go beyond it. And that creates the funnel for agencies who may not use site. Templates on their own, but they, you know, you, a site comes to you and they have ambitious next round plans. And what you can trust is that the site hasn't been built poorly.

And you're not gonna have to say to them, I'm sorry, we need to start over from that. [01:08:00] Right. I really want it to be easier to do Drupal well, for those who are just getting started

Norah: coming from the agency world, I'll be honest, I, I really am very excited about the idea of a, something that is that is.

That an agency will wanna put more time into to, to be more intentional about putting this, this, you know, sort of best foot forward, not just having a good profile on org, not just being a certified partner and, you know, being exposed in that way, but like, this is, you know, not maybe even more than just a case study, to be honest with you.

It's a, something that you can see right now that is how my, you know, organization, how my agency you know, thinks of what a template should look like and, you know, what we would normally do. Like get the feel of like what that agency is. Right. Really, really take that portfolio a.

A lot of agencies that either [01:09:00] have done distributions in the past before or have, you know, something similar will participate more, we'll see more participation basically in the agency side of the world in order to attract, you know, more folks in effect too. Drupal of course. But, you know, I, I'm wondering in that regard you know, maybe just to round this out in general, I know that we talked about people Slack and how people can get involved there on that channel but also documentation.

Are there any other ways that you feel like, and maybe I'm being a little bit biased here with events I, I wonder, you know, can we use our slide deck and, and we'll take it on tour around to other events for you? I, what other ideas and ways could you think of that we might be able to get involved?

Tiffany: Well, I'm excited to have as many outreach. Coordinators and and, and those who can amplify the message as possible. So if you want a deck, I'll make you a deck right now. There's the survey share out deck. You're welcome to take that and dig into that. There's also an intro [01:10:00] to the marketplace deck.

They're welcome to take in remix. You know, we, we do have a share out, so I just want people to first of all be up to speed that this is happening. And if it does seem like something that you wanna participate more in or just follow, then you know, keep up to date on any of the share outs that go out on planet.

Join that conversation in Drupal Slack. It's Drupal dash cms dash marketplace channel. On the Drupal Slack. Look at the, for the weekly prompts, they change every week. And then I summarize back what we're hearing them. So if you're just a follower and you don't wanna. You don't wanna read the a hundred messages or the, the 200 messages that come in, just wait for the following week and you're gonna see posted back up in here's the summary of what we heard.

Right. And there's the surveys. The surveys don't take more than like 10 minutes, but they really do help us get a sense of of the direction and the temperature of the community on different issues. So, you know, as you were just saying a, a lot of what we heard in [01:11:00] the, one of the surveys was about the value to agencies and the value to dcps of these site templates and what, what they said, which was a little bit surprising to me and a little bit of a relief, if I'm honest, was that lead generation is actually the most important thing.

That they're not really looking at these as, as the new business model for my business. I, I think that's probably wise you know, given. What we all know it will take to do a site template really well. You're probably not gonna capture it even if we are three to five times the, the kind of market rate for a theme to do a starter kit.

And you're not gonna make that back really fast, I don't think. But if you do it with some combination of I'm gonna use this for lead generation, then it, it may be worth it. For you. There's also the realtime collaboration sessions I've been hosting. So they're participatory. One of the ways in which we work at Palantir and that I'm trained in is using liberating structures.

So you've heard me talk a [01:12:00] lot on this podcast episode, and if you come to an RTC, you should not expect to hear me talk a lot. It's about the folks who are there working together and talking and telling me. I actually prefer to be in listening mode in those RTC sessions. So our next one is coming up on Thursday, May 25th.

It's at 1530 UTC I think that's 10 30 Chicago Time, my time. And it's specifically focused on this DCP and this agency ecosystem so that we can balance tension. So come to that if you'd like.

John: Tiffany, when's the next one after that? Because we're, this will be re released on the 26th.

Tiffany: So I don't know yet.

They're getting scheduled over time. So that's the next, so next Thursday is the the next one, so the 29th. So if you hear this and listen to it really fast, then come and register. Otherwise you can check the the initiative page on dribble.org to find out when the next one will be scheduled. Or pop in Slack.

I do posts in there too. So yeah, I mean there's a lot of different ways if if you are interested in kind of taking it to the next level and [01:13:00] being kind of a, an outreach coordinator and, and taking it to the events we have a different channel for that which is our volunteer channel. So you can pop in there and you're like, Hey, I have an idea and this is my need.

Just let us know and we'll be able to to kind of support that too. So it's marketplace volunteers in Dral Slack.

Nic: Well, thank you Tiffany, for joining us to talk through all these, you know, this was a much more I don't know how to word it, but this was, this was a much tougher topic than we usually have, so I appreciate you jumping into kind of talk through some of the, I'm sure you're, I'm sure you're hearing this in the community as well, so I, I really appreciate it.

Tiffany: Happy to be here. I appreciate it.

John: Do 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: You can promote your Drupal community event on talking [01:14:00] Drupal. You can learn [email protected] slash td promo.

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

Nic: And thank you patrons for supporting talking Drupal.

Your support is greatly appreciated. You can learn more about becoming a [email protected] and choosing Become a Patron. Alright, Tiffany, if people wanted to get in touch with you, had questions, comments, or feedback, what's the best way for them to do that?

Tiffany: Probably on Drupal Slack or on LinkedIn. So LinkedIn.

I'm Tiffany Farriss and on Drupal Slack I'm at Farriss, F-A-R-R-I-S-S.

Nic: Very good. And Norah, how about you?

Norah: Yeah, similarly on Slack and or LinkedIn. On LinkedIn, I'm under Norah and on Slack I'm under tekNorah.

Nic: John, how about you?

John: You can [01:15:00] find me on all the major social networks and drupal.org at John Picozzi. You can also find me at picozzi.com.

And if you wanna find out more about EPAM, you can find us at epam.com.

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

John: And if you've enjoyed listening, we've enjoyed talking. Have a good one, everyone. See you guys next week.