Talking Drupal #520 - Dripyard

John: This is Talking Drupal, a weekly chat about web design development from a group of people with one thing in common. We love Drupal. This is episode five 20 drip yard. On today's show, we're talking about drip yard, what they do and why we need them. Now with our guests, Mike Herchel and Andy Giles, we'll also cover content first as our module of the week.

Welcome to Talking Drupal. Our guests today are Mike Herchel and Andy Giles. Andy Giles is a veteran web developer and Drupal specialist. In 2012, he founded Blue Oak Interactive, a development and consulting agency focused on complex Drupal site builds, particularly in e-commerce and data pipelines. In 2025, that's this year, he partnered with Mike Herchel to launch drip yard.

A premium Drupal theme designed to reduce the cost of ownership and enhance the developer experience for modern Drupal projects. Mike Kersch is the founder and dev at Drip Yard, as well as a maintainer of Drupal's core CSS subsystem and default theme. He is a big believer in free open source software and the Open Web.

Mike and Andy, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us.

Mike: Thanks for having us.

Andy: Yeah, thanks for bringing us on.

John: I'm John Picozzi, solutions architect at EPAM and today my co-hosts are joining us, uh, for his third week, I believe James Sandsbury, CEO at Tugboat. How's it going, James?

James: It's going great. Thanks for having me

John: and filling in for Nick this week.

You may know him from the module of the week. It's Martin Anderson Clutz, principal Solutions engineer at Aquia.

Martin: Great to be here

John: wearing his Drupal GovCon shirt. I see. That is correct. I'm part particular to that color green. It is lovely. All right, Martin, as I teased in the intro here, uh, let's do what we do usually at this part of the show and talk about our module of the week.

What do you have for us this week?

Martin: Thanks John. Have you ever wanted to give your content teams a simple way to review the content of a node in raw markdown or unile HTML format so that they can focus on the writing and its structure? There's a module for that. It's called Content First, and it was created in March, 2025 by Jorge Tutor of Meta Drop.

It has a 1.0 0.2 version available, which supports Drupal 10.3 and 11, and it is actively maintained, has security coverage and for documentation, has a pretty lengthy, readme, actually has no open issues, which is pretty good considering. It is officially in use by 38 sites according to drupal.org. Now with the module installed site admins.

Or anyone with the necessary permissions will see a new content first tab on nodes. When you click on that tab, you'll see an uns styled version of the content in either markdown or uns styled HTML, with only the headings labeled with the heading level and any embedded media shown in a sidebar on the right.

It will also display an outline view of the heading structure, which makes it easy to identify if any heading levels have been skipped with a single click. You can also copy the uns styled content or downloaded this content. First. Display of the node can also optionally include one or more meta tags, such as title, description, abstract, and keywords within the site's.

Content overview display. This module also adds an option to bulk export many or all of your nodes into a zipped archive for review using local tools as well. So let's talk about content first.

John: Well, this is cool. I mean, I think, you know, I'm not much of a content specialist, but if I were, this seems like one of those things that I'd want, want added just to make my life a little bit, uh, a little bit easier, especially on those longer, longer pages that have a kind of a lot of headings and a lot of images.

Um, this kind of simplifies it quite a bit, which is nice.

Martin: Yeah, I've definitely heard of some companies that have sort of, you know, a large team because they're creating a lot of content and I've heard of them using sort of specialized tools, even sort of upstream from a Drupal site to be able to do some of these things where it's more focused on the writing itself.

So I think being able to, to bring that into a tool like Drupal, uh, potentially, you know, is gonna simplify their architecture.

John: Yeah. I wonder, you see, we see usage statistics, 38 sites using it. I wonder what the gist of those sites are. I would imagine they're prob primarily like editorial type sites, but I mean, I guess this could be used in a variety of different, um, different ways.

Uh, e-commerce kind of comes to mind too. Those typically have some, or can have some longer pages.

Stephen: Sure.

John: Interesting. Well, Martin, I appreciate you, uh, bringing us this, uh, module of the week and, and you, uh, as we said, are sticking around for the whole show, but if somebody wanted to suggest a, um, a module, how could they go about doing that?

Martin: We are always happy to talk about interesting candidates for the module of the week 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. Now, I did also want to mention a public service announcement, um, for our listeners about a supply chain attack impacting a variety of NPM tools, including the debug chalk and other libraries.

Apparently a maintainer was fooled by a convincing password reset phishing email, and then the attacker published malicious new versions of all the projects for which they now had access. The malicious code will intercept crypto transactions and Web3 API calls in browser environments. Changing the recipient, a simple rep command, can help you quickly identify whether or not your site has been compromised.

So for all of our listeners, please take a minute to make sure you haven't been impacted. We'll include the command and a link to the thread about the issue in the show notes.

John: Well, thank you for, thank you for alerting us to, uh, to that, uh, potential issue. Appreciate that. And, uh, yeah, like we said, look in the show notes, uh, for more information.

All right, bad camp is coming. Um, let's turn it over to Badc Camp President John Keeley, um,

BadCamp: to tell us more. Are you ready to innovate and connect with the best of the Drupal community? Then mark your calendars for Bad Camp 2025. Join us on Thursday, September 25th, and Friday, September 26th, 2025 at Oak Stop in downtown Oakland for two days of learning and networking.

This year, bad Camp is focused on how to leverage AI Drupal discover exciting talks like Accelerating Innovation, the Dral AI initiative at Kristen Poll, getting hands on with Dral AI building s Smart sites with zero code from J Math Sanders, and explore three ways to use AI and Drupal Chatbot Smart Search and Code Generation with Sami Back Camp is a free community run event focused on learning and I inclusivity, bringing together hundreds of Drupal users, developers, markers, and content specialists.

Our camp includes technical trainings, industry focused summits, like higher education summit conference sessions, and exhibit hall and crucial community contribution opportunities. Don't miss this event. More information. Visit bad camp.org. Interested in supporting this amazing community event. We need your help context for sponsorship opportunities at [email protected].

That's badc camp.org, your destination for Drupal and Innovation Register. And we'll see you in September. Take care.

John: Awesome bad camp. Sounds like a really good time. And, uh, when you're listening to this show, if you listen to it right when it comes out, it bad camps the following week, so, uh, if you can make it to California and or, or in the area, you should definitely check that out.

James: I'll be there. This is James.

John: James.

James will be there. Yeah. You can look up, you can look up James. Mm-hmm. And, uh, you know, have, have fun. You'd

Mike: be offering free beers. Is that for tugboat customers? Is that right? Yeah, yeah, for sure. All right. All right. You just

John: one, you just plus one to for, for tugboat customers. There, there you go. Yeah. Yep.

Um, and, and you know, if you sign up on the spot, I'm sure James will buy you a beer there too. So there you go.

Mike: Yes. In that case, he gets you a shot.

John: Your, your, your, uh, your, your plus plus one of choice there, I guess.

James: Yeah. And also you don't have to drink to use tugboat, so

John: there you go. Actually, it's probably, um, suggested but

James: to use Drupal.

You do.

John: I'm kidding. I'm kidding, I'm

James: kidding.

John: Sometimes that's,

Mike: yeah.

John: Sorry. Alright, let's jump into the primary topic of today's show, which is, um, drip yard, which is not, um, ab probably abundantly clear to a lot of other people other than the maybe the five of us because it's, it's brand new. So look, it's like breaking news.

We're breaking news right now, which is, um, which is super exci, super exciting. So, uh, Mike Kersch, what is Drip yard?

Mike: Yeah, so, uh, basically it is a company and we are going to, uh, produce and sell, uh. Very quality Drupal Premium Drupal themes. So right now, um, like, like we all know, like we can download Drupal, we can build a very complex content architecture, uh, with complex workflows.

And you can do this all while clicking around your browser. And this is something that, that is Drupal's power. This is what makes Drupal Drupal right here. But as soon as you wanna make it look beautiful, um, it costs a lot of money. And, and so that's, that's kind of where we're, where we come in. Um, you know, you can maybe pay a, a front end developer, you know, north of 10, $20,000 to do a beautiful, accessible, uh, website that supports all the, uh, interesting Drupal iss.

Or you can pay us a fraction of that site, a fraction of that amount and, uh, kind of be up and running a lot quicker. Um, and yeah, that's basically the gist of it right there.

John: I have so many, so many questions about this, this concept, and I'm sure we will cover, uh, most, if not all of them throughout our conversation today.

Mm-hmm. Um, but, uh, follow up to my original question, um, drip yard, is that, um, is that some, some newfangled, uh, slang? Is that, uh, co you know, coming back to the Drupal drop analogy there, uh, where, where did the name come from?

Mike: Yeah. Kind of Yes to both, you know, so, uh, obviously, uh, Drupal is kind of a play on the word drop, so is drip.

And, uh, so, uh, drip is also like what kids these days use to describe like the way they look, you know, so I can, I I, I can say to John here, Hey, that's a nice drip you got going right there. And, and you know, that include bull

James: shirt.

Mike: Yeah. And, and your hat and your glasses and all that stuff. So that's kind of the way you look, you know, so that's what the drip refers to.

And then, you know, and we're not just drip, we're drip yard, you know, as in the shipyard, we build the stuff, you know, you're

John: building, you're building drip for the drop. I got you. Hey. Yeah,

Mike: yeah, yeah, yeah. That's it. And you can

John: take that, that's free. You can take that, that building drip

Mike: for the drop. I'm gonna write that down.

John: If it ends up on a, uh, uh, Drupal DrupalCon T-shirt, I expect, I expect at least a free one.

Mike: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll have James give you some beer.

Martin: Yeah, so cool. So Mike, what made you decide that this was the right time to launch Tripy Yard?

Mike: Oh, man, I read this whole article about that, so I'm super good at this, right? Um, so in previous years, like it, like there, there's, there's Drupal theme companies out there right now, you know, and, uh, there were more Drupal theme companies back when Drupal was more popular.

But the challenge with Drupal theming traditionally has been that theme had no idea what the markup was gonna look like, you know? And, and if you don't know what the markup is, you don't know what CSS selectors are. You can't really style anything, you know, and, and that, that changed, uh, in Drupal 10.1 with, with, uh, single directory components, where now a theme can ship a whole, whole badass library of components that has markups.

Then all, all you gotta do is you just gotta kind of route your data to the, to the, uh, appropriate part of the component, and then it'll look good and place that component on the page. And, and, and so the technology is finally caught up with, with this point where we need to do that, but at the same time, Drupal's starting to change a little bit too.

Like, uh, like Drupal's, uh, Drupal cm S's product strategy has, has explicitly indicated that, that they're going after the mid-market. You know, like, like Drupal seeded the mid-market, um, many years ago, you know, when we were kind going from seven to eight and et cetera, and intentionally, yeah. Mm-hmm. And, and we, and we said, we wanna do enterprise 'cause that's where the big books are, you know?

Mm-hmm. But, but now we realize, well, you know, there's, it's, it's important to focus on the mid-market too. 'cause that's where developers come from. That's, that's how people hear about Druple, you know? And, but part of being competitive in that mid-market is lowering the cost of develop the cost of development for Drupal.

And, and as I said earlier, you know, like you can pay like front end development, like a quality front end developer costs a lot of money and it takes a lot of time. But if you can get that head start, you know, head start, that takes you like right about to the finish line, that will drastically lower, lower your cost.

And, and so that's, that's kind of, that's kind of what we want, you know? And, and, and, and we're looking, you know, we're not into this. Only for the money, although like being sustainable is obviously important. Like we want Drupal to grow, like we want Drupal to, to, I, I want, we want people that we're looking at other solutions like WordPress and being like, why would I do WordPress when I can do Drupal?

You know, Drupal has these themes too, you know, so, so that's, that's kind of what we're hoping and, and it's gonna take a lot. It's not gonna be like this outta the gate, you know? But yeah.

Martin: So one of the things that Dres talked about at DrupalCon Atlanta this year was this new idea of site templates. How does that fit into, you know, sort of the roadmap that you guys have planned?

Mike: Yeah. Yeah, that's a good question. I, I mean, I, so, so for those, uh, the listeners who aren't familiar with what it, what it is, the site template's basically gonna be like, like you install it and it pre configures your site for whatever use case you want. You know, like, let's say I'm a church and I want, you know, uh, I want a content type for sermons, maybe a podcast, an event calendar.

I want a theme and all this other crap, you know? Um, instead of building this out way, you can, you can get a site template either for your paid and be off to the races and even comes with default content, right? So, so, so that's what site templates give you. And, and, and I think that's gonna go a long way to make Drupal competitive.

So, so how do we fit into that? Well, like, I, I do believe that probably the most significant part of a site template is, is literally the theme. People judge a book by its cover, you know, people judge a website by how it looks, how fast it loads, you know? Um, so I feel that we have a head start here, so we're, we're, heck yeah.

We're gonna be doing site templates, you know, um, and, and we're gonna make some awesome site templates, and we have ideas. Uh, right now, the, uh, requirements for site templates are, uh, are kind of being discussed. There's, there's some issues in the Drupal CMS issue queue that I was looking through earlier.

Um, and, uh, trying to put our heads around that and comment as we see fit.

James: I'm checking out your website right now. Drip yard.com. Mm-hmm. It looks really nice. Does it have a nice drip?

You would say? It's a nice drip. I don't know that I can say that without my kids, like cringing or eye rolling or something. Even if they, so as, as a father, whatever, listen to this, but still, you know? Yeah. As

Mike: a father, it is your responsibility to make your kids roll their eyes. Yeah. Yeah. So, so

John: that's where, I don't know if you guys just noticed that, but that's probably where, um, you, Mike and Andy differ a little bit.

Um, the way that Mike said it was like, cringe the way that Andy said it was like, cool and hip.

James: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, Andy, can we, can you give us your best Gibby

Andy: Gibby? That sounds kind of su man. I dunno.

John: I can't wait to play this section of the show to my kids. Yeah. Having reco re recoil and, yeah. Yeah. Oh boy.

James: Yeah, yeah,

John: yeah.

Andy: I, I was gonna, we just, uh, we just launched this what yesterday, mike? Uh, drip yard.com.

Mike: We launch it over the weekend, but we didn't tell anyone about it. Oh, that's right. You know? Yeah. Um, just so we could like kind of screw around, like, Andy and I have been going over this themes page for a while 'cause we're not super happy with the sliders and stuff.

We wanna, and, and, and, and, and there's a couple, couple changes we're gonna do, but overall we needed to get it out and, and, and, and we're happy with it. But, uh, yeah, and it's cool.

Andy: I mean, we, we built this, obviously we're, we're dogfooding here and building it with our own tooling, right? So we have like a, uh, suite of, uh, single directory components that we're basing everything on.

And so as you'll see when we roll out our themes, eventually you'll, um, you'll be able to tell like, um, how much different you can make a site, um, across, you know, different verticals or, um, you know, design concepts, uh, just with the, what we provide you out of the box. So,

John: so just to be clear, is the big reveal on the 30th the website itself, or is it an actual drip yard fee?

Andy: Yeah, so we're actually launching sale, um, on the 30th. So we wanted to do a little soft launch. Um, some people obviously are close friends and others in the Drupal community knew we've been working on this. Um, but we've been kind of in the dark for about 10 months just, uh, going to town, building it. And so we've got our website, our branding, all that stuff ready, uh, some marketing stuff.

So we're just, you know, opening the door to that. And then, yeah, on the 30th, um. If all goes as planned, we're opening the, uh, payment gateway, so we'll be ready to, uh, so yes, to sell themes, um, you'll be able to purchase a theme, download it, install it, and um, hopefully like, uh, you know, prevent a bunch of front end development that you would normally have to do, um, by using our themes as a kickstart.

Yeah.

Mike: Save, save money.

Andy: Yeah, for sure.

John: And I think you mentioned the name, the name of the theme is what?

Mike: We have two themes.

John: Yep.

Mike: Uh, the first one is, uh, named, uh, ne Byte and Rolls right off

John: the Tongue.

Mike: Yeah, right. Uh, out of the box. It's kind of businessy, you know, like the initial mockups that we got in Figma kind of looked almost like Appley, you know, and, but the cool thing about these themes is like, they're so flexible.

I like, uh, Andy, um, has been, uh, needing to do a, uh, website for a studio for a while. And, and, and so we played around with Nam Byte, we changed color schemes. We, we started uploading different, like photos, you know, different assets and, and, and it fits that use case like so well. Um, and it's, it's pretty cool via the second theme that, that we have is called Great Lakes.

And, you know, the initial, uh, look and feel is kind of like an educational institution, you know, and it, and it's, it's pretty cool. It has a couple different components than NEBA has, uh, because we don't want. A lot of, like, they, they share a base library of components, but, but it's not a hundred percent, you know, shared and Yeah.

Great Lakes has like this beautiful large fix header that's, that's optional, you know, where like, as you kind of scroll down, you know, the header kind of disappears and then the navigation fixes in place and it has this big, bold, you know, uh, navigation and all that type of stuff.

John: Interesting. Yeah. So I'm gonna put you on the spot.

Mike, can you, uh, spell the name of your first theme? Yeah. No.

James: Okay,

John: cool.

Mike: I mean, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it, it's neon by, so N-O-N-B-Y-T-E. Okay, interesting. It's eight letters. I can do that. Neon.

Andy: You've only typed it a couple times, right?

Mike: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Like, well, I usually copy and paste it, but Yeah, yeah,

James: yeah.

So if you go to droopy yard.com, I just clicked on themes and then I've got this big countdown. Mm-hmm. Going, so, like, at the time of recording here, it says 20 days, 18 hours, 47 minutes. Right now it's 49 seconds. Oh, shit, man. I'm sweating. Yeah. I mean it, the countdown is real. I was wondering, like, if I want to buy a theme, should I start like, lining up outside of your house, Mike, or, and I'm also curious like how much money I should have in my pocket, roughly.

Yeah.

Mike: So. That's a good question. Um, so yes, you should start lining up and Okay. And, and, and you can like, bring tents and stuff and just Yeah. Tents and

James: beer. Okay.

John: Kind, kind a best buy before an iPhone.

James: Yeah. Yeah. It's like switch twos coming out and I've gotta get in line, you know?

Mike: Mm-hmm. So it's, it's like a Taylor Swift concert, you know, kind of.

Okay.

James: Yeah, yeah.

Mike: Um, so, uh, you can, you can line up metaphorically by, uh, by, there's a little call to action when you go to our website and to sign up for a webinar. And, uh, like as we launch at 11:00 AM on September 30th, 11:00 AM Eastern Time, um, we're gonna do a webinar and we're gonna kind of demo our themes.

We're gonna take some questions, we're gonna show, uh, show the theme in some suboptimal situations that other themes cannot handle, you know, and I'm talk about the accessibility of it, you know, does it handle things like forced colors mode? Uh, how does it handle, I don't know, how does it look as an admin theme, even though you've never used it as one, you know, and, and, and, and, and things like that.

Um, and, you know, uh, on our webinar, we're gonna, we're gonna give away some coupon codes. Um, so you can get a little bit of a discount, you know? Yeah, that's great. Um, Andy's in the process this week of building out all the e-commerce integration with that, you know, um, is, and it's how much it's gonna cost it?

That's a good question because we've been debating this like internally and then with some friends, you know, um, like, like right now we're, we're looking, you know, between like 400 and $500 per theme and that, that, that, that covers, you know, one site, you know, it does not cover like, you know, a suite of sites or anything like that.

Mm-hmm. Um, and that's, that's, that's gonna be introductory pricing, so it's likely gonna go up from there. Okay. And, and, and, and, and that sounds like a lot higher than say, like WordPress themes, that a lot of WordPress themes go for significantly less. But WordPress can do that because they have like 30% of the web, you know, so they rely on volume.

You know, Drupal has significant less volume than something like WordPress does.

James: Well, something I heard you mention, uh, right at the beginning too, is like a real strong emphasis on accessibility. Yeah. And I'm not sure all of the WordPress themes that you can buy for $20 have that same emphasis. Um, so I'm curious like about that you have like, is that true?

Is it, is a lot of the effort here in making this, uh, use, it looked like it said WCAG 2.2 on the site.

Mike: Yeah, yeah. Uh, yeah, 2.2 aa, uh, is, is what we're aiming for. And, and, and as far as I know what we meet, you know, there's always bugs. Um, but, uh, I, I, I have a significant amount of experience doing accessibility work and including like, you know, bringing a Vero into drup cores to, and, and a lot of work on Claro and stuff like that.

And so a significant amount of work goes into, goes into accessibility. And it's not just about making sure there's focus states, it's about, you know, making sure when stuff is not visible, it's not reachable. When stuff is visible, it's reach reachable. Managing those focus states, making sure there's proper labels on things, making sure it's robust.

So if people are using something like, um, prefers reduced motion or forced colors, we respect that. You know, we even have like an example of this is like the ne byte out of the box. Uh, the, uh, the header is, is uh, has kind of like that frosted glass kind of look, you know, which is configurable if you don't like that.

But like, we have a media query in there, there's a media query for prefers less transparency. We, we respect that, you know, so, so there's all these little things that most people will never know notice, you know, but the people who do notice are, are the people that need to use your website. And, and, and that's what makes it, makes it accessible.

And we're not just looking for a checkbox, you know, we wanna make this thing like. A joy to use. You know, accessibility is usability, really.

John: So one thing that comes to mind here as you're, you're spinning up a theme creation company. Um, I have, I have the question here. What's involved with making a new theme, which is like a really basic question, right?

Um, but, uh, the question I guess is more about the thinking and the architecture of the theme that you have to put in place in order to sell it to multiple people for whatever their use case might be. Right. And, and what I mean by that is like, if I'm just building a theme like theme development is, is is complicated and, and would require my time, but I'm building my theme for my specific use case, and I'm gonna do things that are, are gonna be very specific the way I'm doing.

You guys are building themes for the general public, right? Yeah. I'm wondering what, like, what's involved in, in building a theme like that and like, how complex is it?

Mike: Oh, it's so much more complex than, than we initially done. You know, and I even have like a little bit experience with this. Like, you know, when we were doing, um, when we were creating Alora, which is Drupal's default fame and bringing that into core, like, we obviously had no, no sense of a use case, you know, but Alora was even like.

In a, in a certain sense, like a little bit more simple than, than what Great Lakes and debit are because, uh, you didn't have components back when we were doing that, you know? And so we didn't have to support a bunch of stuff. So, so, so, so there's a lot, like when you think about a component, you know, let's say you have like a carousel slider or something like that, um, like number one, carousels sometimes can be a bad idea.

You know, how can we make these less of, but people want 'em, how can we make this less of a bad idea? You know? And like, so when I was creating Carousel and I, I need to write an article on this thing, but like,

John: you should, your article's title should be like, don't use carousels. People

Mike: I know like that there's a website out there like, should I use it, a carousel?

And it just says no, you know? But, uh. I hope it rotates through several nos. It

James: doesn't.

Mike: That

James: would be incredible.

Mike: That would be awesome. But, um, there are examples, see like, uh, out there, uh, on how to make accessible carousels, how to like, use the appropriate aria attributes so people can identify. So, so like screen readers, screen reader, you users just can identify these carousels and operate them properly and understand what's happening, you know, and, and so much work went into that.

And, um, and, and this is just one, right? But, but then a lot of times carousels are full screen, but we don't know if this is gonna be full screen. Maybe it's just gonna be on a sidebar. We don't know where the seizure are gonna put it, right? So we have to have this carousel, not use media quay, it needs to use container quarries, you know, where like, uh, how wide is its container and, you know, and it fit there, you know, so our carousel, like, if it gets below like a certain amount, it'll, it'll switch it just like one, one slide, you know?

Um, and to make everything responsive and, and, and, and that's just one. So. Outside of that, like triple has a lot of little weird things, you know, to it. Like there's things like messages, like a couple, you know, years ago, like a lot of people's messages in their themes broke because kind of triple started injecting them more, uh, through I, I think like big pipe and JavaScript and stuff like that, we need to handle like multiple types of messages.

There's things like the node preview toolbar, uh, responsive tables that views gives you outta the box when you need to support things like that. Um, lots of different toolbars and things, uh, and just a lot of like miscellaneous things that, that we need to do. We need to do it well. Um, and it all needs to be very accessible and it needs to look good, you know, and out on, on on the flip side of that, like we built this design system and this is another, I have so many things we need to write articles about.

There's not enough, uh, days into the week to do all this stuff, but, but we built this design system where, where, you know, you configure your colors through the theme settings page, and then you have another, uh, layer that takes the colors and makes variations of the colors and it uses, um, CSS relative color syntax to it.

And, um. Then from there we have a set of five different kind of themes that you can mix and match together on your page, you know, and uh, each of these themes, which is a CSS class, has multiple different, uh, uh, design tokens in there, like CSS variables. So we have like three, three variables for text colors, three variables for surface colors, multiple border colors, uh, some danger colors and air colors and multiple things like that.

And the way that we're structuring it is that the, uh, surface colors and the text colors, no matter what you choose, always have that 4.5 to one contrast ratio. The border colors always have 3.1 contrast ratio, everything like that. So what that means is when you have a component, like, let's go back to this carousel component, which is a very, probably one of the more complex components that we wrote.

Um, you apply a theme to this component, like, you know, out of the, out of the box is probably gonna be a white, uh, a white theme. And, and you know, as you all have dark texts, but if you give it a CSS class, call it theme dark or something like that, everything flips and it does it and maintains contrast ratio in a way that is very, um, it like, uh, you're confident it's gonna work.

You know, because the way we wrote these components, they use these design token and we are confident that all these token. Proper, uh, contrast ratios with that. So that by itself, getting that right was an enormous amount of effort. And, and I mean, I know I just explained it in like five minutes, but like getting to that point was, was very significant, you know, and, and, and, and still being reiterated, like for each of these, we have to set the color scheme, uh, CSS property.

Like no one knows what a color scheme CSS property is. Uh, but what that does is that affects your colors of your scroll bars or like the little number widget. You, you know, you have like a input type number and there's little arrows that go up and down, uh, that can change depending on your scroll. You, you know, and, and so we set all this and, and, and it, it's the details that matter with what we're selling, like, like there is so much amount of tender loving care just put into this stuff.

And, uh, gosh, like, like I, I, I, I, I was, I was kind of thi like, I wrote my blog article announcing this and I was like, we have probably over a thousand hours easily into this. And, and, and that's. That's like probably even low balling it, and I'm just talking about my work. Andy put in a significant amount of work, like, uh, he's gonna talk later about like all the recipes and stuff that we have integrated into theme and, and, and how he made sense and how he abstracted some of the, uh, the, the PHP and the theme and stuff like that, which is, uh, so clever and, and, and, and, great.

John: So, so Mike, let me, let me, you said something that Peaked, peaked my interest to steal a, a James Sandsbury. Um, there, so you guys developed a design system, you built com, uh, single directory components based on that design system, right? Mm-hmm. Is that like the secret, is that like the secret sauce of drip yard?

Are each, are each theme that you guys create gonna be a. I don't wanna say a version, but like, are they going to be built on that base of the design system and the components, um, to allow you guys to iterate faster?

Mike: Yeah, absolutely. You know, so like, you know, the variables that go into the system are, are, are easily changeable, you know, so we can, we can change it, we can change the ratios between 'em and, and, and, and, you know, like each of the, uh, each of the components has a number of individual tokens, uh, components, specific tokens that, that, that, that we can modify and, and, and it can make a, it can make these components look radically different per theme.

But in general, the markup is gonna be the same. The accessibility is gonna be maintainable. Yep. The design system is gonna be maintainable. Uh, the, the backend theme code that that sets, that sets it within the theme settings all does the same thing. And so like that is going to allow us to start releasing themes on a, on kind of a regular cadence, you know?

John: Yeah. That makes, that makes complete sense. As somebody who, uh, recently came off a project with a design system, uh, component library and like that sort of, that sort of architecture like definitely makes a lot of sense. And so one, one more question and then I'll let Martin jump in here. Um, what, um. So you talk about, you know, uh, design system, uh, component library, right?

And then you talk about the themes, being able to kind of switch colors based on the, the, you know, CSS token values, right? Are those going to be available to the end user? Like will, if you buy a theme, right? Will you have a certain level of kind of color customization the end user can make to that theme to kind of make it their own or change it down the road if they want to?

Or is all that stuff kind of locked down as, as like, Hey, this theme is like this, this color set?

Mike: No, no. Yeah. Yeah. That's a great question. So, um, the end user has a, a, a certain amount of flexibility built into the UI within the theme settings page. You know, like, like they, like, there's colors and stuff like that, but our themes are designed to be overwritten, overwritten, modified.

Like when you look at it there, like, like we write our components of, with vanilla CSS, there's no like crazy SaaS mixings that you need to dive into to understand or anything like that. You know, like this is pretty straightforward stuff. So, um, like, like the architecture is built that like, uh, to enable updates and if people wanna override variables, like, like they're gonna be sub themes and you can easily override these, um.

You could easily extend the libraries and then override the CSS as necessary and totally change, uh, design tokens that do not have a ui. And, and it's kind of like kind of a balance, you know, like, like we've talked to multiple people while we're doing marketing research to determine like, well, where's that level?

How much stuff should we bring into the UI versus how much stuff should stay in code? And the thing is, not everything could go into the UI, because if we did, it would just be overwhelming, you know? It, it would, it would be, it would be absolutely ridiculous. And so, so we bring the most important things into the ui, uh, at least what we consider.

And, and this might change going forward too, as, as we get additional feedback and, and then everything else. A a lot of, most of the other stuff is, is exposed as, uh, CSS variables that you just override. Um, and those CSS variables are, are generally attached at the component level. Um, and if you really want to change stuff, you can override a component.

SDC gives you that capability or you can override CSS too.

James: Cool.

Martin: So I wanted to ask, go ahead. Um. Seeing that, that these themes are really built on this sort of cohesive design system. If somebody, you know, bought one of the themes, but wanted to customize it and also present that to like, you know, let's say the, you know, the customer that they're building the site for, um, and sort of show that before they actually start, um, making some of these CSS changes, would they have access to like a Figma file or something that they could use to sort of like, represent how that'll look before they, they start making those changes?

Mike: Not really. Um, like as it stands, like right now, like we have, um, like, like we're gonna have demos, you know, so people can test driver our stuff, you know, so, so they can't do that. Like, as we got our Figma files from our, from our awesome designer whose name was Alessia, like, we got, you know, three pages.

But those three pages are not like representative. We, we use those as like, kind of like a guide to build out everything else, you know? So like, because like if you were to figma up the entire Drupal and all these entire components and stuff, that would be an enormous amount of money we would pay this designer, which, which right now we're making, uh, the grand total of $0 per month.

So like, like that's something that we have to be aware of.

Martin: Right. No, that makes sense. So I think you've already touched on a little bit in terms of, you know, some of the ways you've approached building the themes, like, you know, based on that design system using the single directory components and, uh, even the focus on accessibility.

But like, are there any other ways that you think the approach that Drip Yard is gonna take to, to sort of building and releasing themes is different from some of your competitors in kind of the Drupal theme space?

Mike: Yeah, so like the competitors in our Drupal theme space, like, I mean, there's like Drupal themes, IO and Drup, and I'm not quite sure if they're the same ones, like, uh, like, uh, like the, I haven't bought any themes from them recently, but I did back in the day.

I remember it was actually related to tugboat because we needed a, uh, a theme to demo tugboat back in the day, James. But, um, like a, a lot of these, uh, a lot of these themes don't make use of components. At least I haven't found any while, while looking at them that looking at the markup, you know, you see that data component ID or anything like that.

Um, they like the, the ones that I've seen, they, they advertise, you know, and uh, kind of a, uh, a page builder module, you know, which is their own thing. And like from my point of view, I don't wanna. I wouldn't wanna be kind of tied to someone else's page builder because I don't know how, how much that is, uh, supported, um, et cetera.

I, a a lot of the themes have traditionally, I'm not quite sure if they still do, um, like they ship a module, you know, that, that, that throws down some content types and some, you know, markups so they can then style it and, and obviously that kind of locks you into their content type. And if you do something different, you know, you're kind of on your own.

You have to extend it and, and, and, and so that's, well, I, I'm, I'm really hesitant to, I, I don't wanna talk bad things about these people because I'm sure they, you, you know, they're, they're great people and they, you know, they've been doing stuff and, and, and they're significantly less like that. Their themes cost like 40, $50.

So if you're looking for that, you know, I highly recommend you talk to them or, or, you know, but, um, you know, our, our stuff is, is a level above that, you know? Um, an example, an example of this, I, that's, I wanna say this and like, like Andy's, like last night he was, he was, he was a burning, burned to Midnight Oil doing his e-commerce stuff for, for drip yard.com.

And he was, he, he shot me some screenshots the middle night I was sleeping, but like, long story short, like. It, it looked good because I built stuff out the right way. Like, because like, you know, commerce uses, you know, some tables and, and, and, and like to get table. Drupal does tables weird by the way. Like we have all these like, weird, you know, sort things and table drags and, and all this type of stuff.

Like drip yard supports that, like, or, or drip yard themes support that. You know, like, like if you toss a drip yard theme and use them as an admin theme, which I do for like development, stuff like that. You can go into the menu system, reorder stuff and it looks good. You try to do that with anyone, themes, it's not gonna look good, you know, and it's accessible too.

Andy: I think that's one of the big things that differentiates us from the, the competitors honestly, is, is definitely Mike's experience with all the Drupal iss in building, uh, olive ero. And, you know, my experience in, uh, backend development, Drupal, like we're building these themes to be what you'd expect for Drupal.

Um, you know, when you install them, we're not making, uh, assumptions that you're gonna be using paragraphs so that you're gonna be using layout builder, like we're, um, putting the pieces in place so that no matter what you're using to build your site, it's gonna look good. It's gonna come with, uh, all the core things that you'd expect, um, out of the box.

I think like one of the things I used to experience, uh, as a backend developer is the in inability to really build a full Drupal site by myself. Um, because I would, you know, find a sub theme or find a theme, sub theme it, and then get to a certain page and this element's like completely off the layout or whatever, you know, breadcrumbs are broken or you know, just various things like that.

And our goal with our themes is to make it so that when you install it over Drupal core, like all the things that you would expect are there.

John: Yeah, I mean, for me it feels like it makes a lot of sense to stick to Drupal core and to, and to use the, the knowledge that you guys have to kind of like build themes in that way.

Um, you know, it's kind of like, almost like an extension of core as opposed to like a lot of themes that feel like, Hey, we just, we just kind of like did our own thing and added it on top of, of, of Drupal. Right. So I I can definitely, I can definitely see that. That makes a lot of sense to me.

James: Yeah. And you mentioned some of the work that went into, you know, supporting Drupal, the way Drupal does tables and stuff like that. And, um, I'm curious, you know, the artist formerly known as Experience Builder, which is now Canvas, uh, will your themes support Canvas as well? I gotta imagine that's a huge undertaking and also a moving target.

Mike: Yeah, it's de like, moving Target, but, but you made that joke, the artist formerly known as Canvas, did, did you see that logo I put in that issue earlier? No. No. So, so, so there was an issue that Darren o opened to create like a, a logo for Canvas and I totally submitted the print, the print sign with the DrupalCon on top of it.

Nice.

James: Yeah. That's incredible.

Mike: Any, anyway, uh, to answer your question, yeah. Heck yeah. We're gonna support Canvas. Like, like, like we really got to can like, uh. Canvas, uh, formerly known as a experience builder, is going to be the way that people build Drupal websites. And, and, and it is really what's going to allow Drupal to compete with like, modern page builders like, like Webflow and, and Gutenberg.

And, and you know, there's probably, you know, 20,000 of 'em by now and it needs to be good. And, um, so like our stuff needs to work with us and, and, uh, but it's, it's complicated because we, we need to work with experience build or canvas, but we also need to work with regular templates. And that's not always easy.

An example of this is, uh, when you're defining your, your schemas for your components, there's like a dollar ref and with like a long string where you, where you point to a, uh, yeah, a, a, uh, adjacent schema and, and the experience builder module, right? And, and that tells, that tells experience builder that, hey, uh, this is an image field and we're gonna load our image widget.

Uh, there, there, this is a text area. And so instead of a normal text, a small text field, we're gonna, we're gonna have a large text field and stuff like that. Um, so, so, so it's easy. We put the dollar refs in there, but if the experience builder module does not exist, what happens? Andy? What happens?

Andy: Uh, it dies,

Mike: blows up.

So, um. There's things like that that we're kind of working around. Of course, we opened up issues with that. And, uh, there's, uh, some, uh, uh, discussions and, and single directory components. Like, right, right now there's like an issue within single directory components, which I'm, you know, obviously I, I try to stay on top of this stuff.

Mm-hmm. Uh, talking about, like referencing other stuff, uh, similar to how XB is doing it. And, um, you know, I, I would just be happy if it doesn't blow up. Um, and, and, and Andy and I are, are talking about potential workarounds on that and, um, stuff like that. So it's a little complicated, but, um, we're plan, we are planning on supporting experience builder as it, as it gets, uh, as it is when it is released.

Um, in the meantime, we, what we do is we, like, on occasion, I probably have last on this, maybe like a month or so ago, we put our theme load up, the experience builder demo that, uh, that phpr put together and just kind of see what works, what doesn't work, et cetera. An example of this is, um, our, our base theme issue, like our, our component, our, our shared component library would package up into a base theme called, uh, drip yard Base.

And, and this allows it to be easily shared, updated across our multiple themes and stuff like that. So, so we threw this into experience building. We're like. Experience Builder is not loading components out of our base name, you know, and, and, and so we have to be, this was fixed, but it would not have been fixed if we did not find this issue.

So it's very important for us to make sure Experience Builder works with us as much were, as we were with Experience Builder or Drupal Canvas. And, and, and so there's a lot of give and take a a lot of, a lot of stuff like that. And, and I have a feeling, uh, leading up to DrupalCon Vienna where I will be talking about a lot of the stuff and, uh, Drupal Canvas will be launching.

Um, I, we're gonna be doing probably even, even some more significant amount of work to, um, uh, make sure it works beautifully and mm-hmm. Just as great as possible. I

John: feel like we're gonna have to develop like a voiceover where I just go Drupal Canvas and anytime somebody says xb, we just drop that in there and you get like a

Mike: little, like electrical shock every time you say experience builder.

James: So, I mean, it sounds like, I mean, I almost just said experience builder again, it sounds like, you know, Drupal, that's a, that's a big part of what's gonna make Drupal cms, you know, Drupal cms. Yeah. Um, and set it apart. So, but just broadly speaking, are, is. Are your themes triple cms ready as well? Beyond triple canvas?

Mike: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So like right now, if you install Drupal CMS 1.0 mm-hmm. Uh, and you plug a theme, if you had our theme and you plug it in, it looks good outta the box, you know, like we override a couple templates. Mm-hmm. Um, and we map some components. Uh, you, you know, we use these templates to, to map into our components and it, it works, it works pretty well.

We even go as far as to support some of the, uh, special recipes in there. Like, an example of that is like search API, uh, like, like there's an advanced search recipe that comes with Drupal CMS 1.0 and it gives you auto complete, right? So we make sure that this auto complete works, you know, because the auto complete and number one needs to, um, like be styled correctly, you know, and then, and needs and needs to just kind of work as expected.

Uh, so there's things like that that we do. Uh, like the, uh, coffee module. I don't know if y'all use the coffee module and allows you to jump around the admin pretty easily. Like we have some overrides some styles on that. Where, where, where we change like the, uh, the background overlay to, you know, the kind of the theme color and, and, and, and there's a lot of like little things like that that, that we don't.

Like our only dependencies are core. But if you have these modules and it sees these libraries, we do a libraries extend and, and we load just like some, like really nice CSS like enhancements mm-hmm. To kind of make it feel cohesive, you know?

James: Yeah.

Mike: And, and, and that goes into a lot of the TLC that we're putting in.

And this, this goes into a lot of the thousand hours I was talking about. Just like a little thing, you know, there, there's so many of these things. Another thing I was thinking about is like exposed filters. You know, your exposed filters that you have on your views, you want those to look good right out of the box, you know, so we do work on that, right?

Like, I did this cool thing, like one of my pet peeves with theming, and I'm gonna go off on a little tangent right here, is, is trying to get your exposed filters to line up horizontally, right? Because sometimes they have a label, sometimes they don't have a label, sometimes they have a description underneath.

Sometimes they don't have a description underneath. How do you do that? You know? So, so we solved that. We literally kind of like throw in an empty label and throw some CSS on it so it's not, you know, an accessibility tree and stuff like that. Mm-hmm. But, but it, it, it, it pushes everything down like the other labels.

So there's like some funky stuff like that

James: Yeah.

Mike: That, that we do. And it, and it, and it kind, it kind of works out.

James: Yeah. So, you know, part of part of Drupal CMS is, is project browser. Mm-hmm. And so like, I'm just kind of imagining someone going, purchasing a theme. They've got their triple CMS site set up, and then they go into project browser and they're browsing, you know, various modules and stuff.

Let's say they, let's say they install the Gutenberg module on, on, uh, a site with your theme. Like, what is that or where do you draw the line in terms of what, what you're gonna support for, for like, custom modules that, that people are installing, or not custom, but contrib modules.

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. And this is a good question.

Um, like obviously Gutenberg is its own beast. I've, I've actually done like a little bit of Gutenberg work. I needed to use an extreme example, right? Yeah. Yeah. And, and I mean, Gutenberg won't look bad out of the box. It'll just, it, you know, the components that come with it will look like the components that come with it.

We're not doing extra on that. Um, and, and a better example might be the web form module. Okay. So, so the web form module Oh yeah. Absolutely. Includes its own styling in certain places and doesn't in other places.

James: Mm-hmm.

Mike: An example of this, uh, so like when you install the, uh, web form module, uh, it comes with a couple sub modules.

Uh, like it comes with this webform example, submodule and the Webform example. Submodule has some example accessibility web forms that, that, that show all these weird configurations of webforms, like, you know, that have like nested divs and field sets and, and all this type of stuff that you need to support and, and, and, and let tell you like, I go through this stuff and our stuff is awesome.

James: Yeah,

Mike: but, but Webform adds its own CSS in there, right? So, uh, there's like an expand all collapse, all that I think maybe affects the details or something like that. And, and they style it with a color, like it's this color blue and it looks great, and something like Olive Vero. But like, when you apply this black theme, obviously that that won't, that won't meet contrast criteria.

And, and, and, and so the question at this point is, do I override that? You know, if I override it, I'm gonna be making a decision where I'm overriding a lot of this stuff.

James: Mm-hmm.

Mike: So my answer to that is I did not override it. And the reason is, is because, uh, I don't think a lot of people are gonna enable that advance or that, and that collapse and expand stuff.

Like people don't normally do that. And, and, and if they see that, and if there's this and they're using a dark theme, then there's nothing stopping them from doing that. You know, it's actually fairly easy. But an example where I do fix a web form thing. So, um, you like, like, you know, you have your Drupal messages that pop up and, and so the

James: Yeah.

Mike: And Olive Vero and, and, and the drip yard thing, these messages are dismissible, you know, they have that little X at the top right and you can close 'em. And then they're gone. Web form includes, includes their own X. So obviously you don't want two Xs there, you know, and of course the web four one looks kind of weird.

So. We do remove theirs. I just displayed on it so there's only one x. And you know, because that is something that we assume that, you know, they probably will be running into that. And, and that's, that's kind of weird. Like webform like is as amazing as a module. It is like they insert some funky, very specific CSS in very specific places and it would be a very tall order to get all of that and make it maintainable.

Because at some point Jacob's probably gonna be changing stuff around or adding or removing stuff and I'll never know. Mm-hmm.

John: So you, you said something, sorry, go ahead.

Andy: Oh, I was just gonna say, I think, um, what we would have out of the box is like a list of, of modules that we support and kind of, you know, publish that.

Like you'll be more than okay installing these modules and then of course, um, be available for consulting. Like if you have a specific module you need support for Well, yeah. And you're available to help you build that out.

Mike: Yeah. That's another thing that we're hoping to do is like consulting, you know, so like, let's say you, you buy a drip yard theme, but you're having trouble integrating it into your paragraphs site architecture.

You know, well, you can pay us money. We'll, we'll do that for you and, and we'll do it quick. You know, we're not gonna be, like, our hourly rate isn't necessarily gonna be the cheapest, but because we know what we're doing, we're gonna be, we're probably gonna end up being cheaper.

John: So going back to kind of the.

Customization aspect. Right. Um, it doesn't sound from our conversation to this point, um, that people will be able to kind of sub theme your, your modules. Right. Um, and it sounds like the customization is kind of done in, um, in through the Drupal ui, maybe some light additions of of a CSS, uh, file somewhere to override, um, some, some small tweaks.

Is that pretty accurate? Am I, am I describing that correctly?

Mike: Uh, no. Um,

John: not at all. Absolutely not.

Mike: Have

John: you even been listening, John? No, no. Please correct me.

Mike: So like, yeah, so there are some settings, of course, in the theme ui, uh, you know, but you can absolutely sub-theme our stuff and, and in fact, we're gonna be expecting people to do this.

Like our themes are gonna get you like 89, well, probably 90, 95% of the way. But it is entirely likely you're gonna need to create your own component, you know, for your own specific use case, or you, or you're not gonna, like, you know, the border radius of, of like the, the. Picture into author card, and you can even, you can override that in a sub theme.

So there's nothing stopping you from sub theme. And, and, and we're expecting people to do that. And, and in fact, like we're encouraging that because if you put all your changes in a sub theme, then you can accept, you can get updates, you know? Yeah.

James: Yeah. I was kind of wondering if that would be like, step one of this whole process is like, purchase your theme and then create your own sub theme.

'cause it's mm-hmm. Chances are pretty good. You're gonna have your own components. Gosh, I

John: love it. I love it when I'm wrong. Um, okay. It doesn't happen

Mike: very

John: often. Uh uh Have you listened to this show? It happens. No. If recorded prosperity, um.

James: Like only attends the show. He doesn't listen. There you go.

John: Um, that's okay too.

That, that's kind of my mo Um, all right. So yes, you can sub theme, yes, you can use the sub theme to customize. That's all Great. That's all good. So let's play the, let's play the what if game here, right? Say I purchased a theme from Drip yard and I do not have developers or any development experience whatsoever to make changes to that.

Um, I run into an issue. Um, will people get a certain level of support? Um, do you have development partners you're gonna work with to, to offer, Hey, if you need development assistance, we have, uh, you know, this partner, or will the, you know, you guys kind of step in and say, Hey, we're gonna, we're gonna offer you kind of like a, uh, a development plan of some sort.

Mike: Yeah. So that's a really good question. So like, first of all, even if you don't, like, I wanna, I wanna, I wanna state that even if you don't have development experience, like if, if you download our theme, you go to the theme settings page, there's a, a little area, like a little details element in there. You can expand and you can install recipes.

You check the boxes on what res recipes you wanna install. Right now, these recipes use, uh, layout builder, 'cause we don't have any dependencies outside of core. And we created a lot of custom block types and a lot of default content. And we set up your homepage for you. Of course, this homepage has our content.

It's not gonna have your content, and it'll get you kind of seeing what's possible out of the box. So that'll go a very long way. And, and Andy, you'll talk about that in a second, but like beyond that, um, like are, we're gonna, what are we giving, like, two free months of support, Andy, does that sound right?

Andy: Yep. That's what we talked about. Yeah. So when you purchase the theme, it comes with two months of support, um, and then with an optional, um, option to have like a recurring support module, um, added to that as well. Yeah,

Mike: yeah, yeah, yeah. So hopefully we can get like reoccurring revenue and, and, and we're gonna have a, uh, a Slack instance that we're gonna invite people for.

It's gonna be very similar to tugboat support. Like, like we actually like, thought about this, like where you can jump into our Slack instance, ask a question, we will answer your question, you know, usually pretty quickly. Um, we can't walk you through the basics, like, you know, creating content types. So we can't walk you through the basics of creating themes, but we can point you in the right direction, maybe point you to different stuff.

So, so if you're not a Dral developer, um, like. We can get you a little far, but you're gonna have to learn to read some documentation, you know, because Yeah, because we can't handhold you unless of course, you know, like we saw consulting services and, uh, so if, if you need your theme hooked, hooked into something like paragraphs, uh, uh, Drupal Canvas or, or something like that, or some custom components.

I mean, you know, we, we can do retainer based business, you know? Yeah. And, and, and stuff like that. And like, we'll be happy, minimal,

John: minimal handholding, and then we will, we will, I'll gladly accept, uh, you know, a consulting gig to, to help you kind of get it over the finish line if need be.

Andy: Yeah. And I think Canvas is gonna lower that barrier to entry for everyone too.

Yeah. I mean, that's our goal of Canvas has always been our target of like where our themes are being built to. So when you have the ability to just drop components on a page, all of our props are exposed through the schema. Um, you know, the form will be built on those. So the, the long-term goal, I think, for everybody is to have more of that less developer, you know, requirement.

John: We're gonna invite Andy back 'cause he makes less, less edits to the show. He uses the right terms. Perfect. Drupal Canvas, uh,

Andy: yeah, that's right there.

John: Yeah. He don't need to beat me. And like, it, like it was always named that too. Like didn't he? I didn't even, I was like, Drupal Canvas. What's that? Oh yeah.

Right. Yeah.

Martin: . So, listeners of the podcast will know that recipes are sort of near and dear to my heart. Um, recipes have been mentioned a couple times already in this conversation. What can you tell us, Andy, about some of the ways that recipes have been utilized for these themes to, to sort of, you know, make them more capable outta the box?

Andy: Yep, for sure. So one of the biggest problems I've had, uh, in Dral for a long time is. Managing different projects for different clients and having different ia different, you know, even if it's the same field, the field name's different, right. And I think we've all been there. Um, so what we've decided to do is, uh, use, he heavily use recipes in our themes so that we can do things, uh, like block placement on install.

Um, we can do things like, uh, define block content, um, and fields and have them directly mapped to our, uh, design components. And so we have a series of, um, recipes that come with a theme that are basically inherited from the one above them. So, you know, there's like some, some theme settings and then there's, uh, a block config recipe and then a layout builder, config recipe.

And then all those things stack and the icing on the cake with it is like our demo content that, you know, installs all of them. Um, and so having recipes, uh, gives us the ability to, um, you know, just kind of build these things out quickly, know that they're gonna be consistent and then give you something to build out of the box, uh, with IA that we're expecting and supporting.

Um, and we've done that like, uh, as we've mentioned already, like we we're just using Drupal core. There's no module requirements. We don't even have our own like drip yard module. Um. Mike's idea initially was to have like a tar ball that you drop in your theme and unpack it and everything's there. And that's basically what we built.

So you have core and a drip yard theme. You go to the theme settings page, expand it. You've got all of our recipes. You choose the ones that are applicable to you, and a batch process start, uh, you know, kicks off, installs 'em, and then you go to the homepage and you have a beautiful theme. So recipes are definitely, uh, key to being able to do what we've done, especially with, you know, us waiting on Canvas to be ready and having to use layout builder to just basically get something out the door.

John: So I would imagine that you guys are, are based on what you just said, but you're pretty in interested in like core's, recipe, browser, like becoming a thing that is available to, to like end users, right?

Andy: I, I, I think we are. Um, I think, you know, having. Full control of that stuff too, was, uh, like, and not being dependent on that.

Like, we support back versions of Drupal, so we don't want to like roll out a theme, but then it's waiting on something to be committed, right? So we have to kind of do some of the hard work ourselves just to make sure that we can achieve it.

John: I guess I say that in more of a like, future, future forward sort of thing where like you guys could, um, you know, not only, uh, or well be a theme shop, but have, uh, additional recipes that add kind of like, uh, you know, like additional features to your themes.

Uh, either add a cost or Sure. Or maybe free.

Andy: Absolutely. Um,

John: right. So like, I, I feel like that we're kind of, we're, we're drinking the, like Drupal marketplace ecosystem sort of way of, way of thinking, which we, we are gonna talk about in a minute. But, um, I. Cool to hear that you're, um, using recipes. You're interested in recipes, I'm assuming you believe in them because you're using them For sure.

Um, I, I saw a comment on, in the Drupal Slack and the Talking Drupal channel the other day that was, um, kind of asking like, Hey, uh, our recipes like, you know, dead before they even got got started because of, because of ai. And, um, you know, I think you guys are probably proof that that's not the case, which is, which is reassuring.

Andy: Yeah. And I think recipes could provide the context for ai, um, more than anything. So, you know, you have certain recipe and you wanna customize it. Well have the AI look at the, the, uh, config and extend it from there,

John: or, or, or the opposite. Right. And I think Martin brought this point up, uh, and I'll, I'll let him speak for himself, but, you know, the AI then goes out and says, Hey, there's this recipe by Andy and Mike that's like, they built it, they know what they're talking about.

You should, you should use this, right? Sure. As opposed to like, the AI just kind of like cobbling it together on their, on its own. So.

Andy: Sure.

Martin: Yeah. I mean, the advantage that AI has is that you can have the conversation with it, right? So it's almost like if AI could be in a way, like the interface that you could use to customize the output of a recipe, to me that would be like the ideal state.

But hopefully we'll get there eventually. Yeah.

James: So, uh, one thing that occurs to me is like, I'm not, I'm not a, I haven't themed anything in, uh, I don't know, 15 years or something. So all of my knowledge is ancient at this point, right?

So if I were to create a theme nowadays, I would probably be looking for a framework or something. Uh, and I'm curious like what decisions you all made in terms of like architectural under the hood, you know, back in, in, you know, maybe 15 years ago it would've been like, oh, let's use Bootstrap or something.

'cause you get so much out of the box and stuff like that. Are y'all doing anything like that? Or is everything, you know, pretty bespoke under the hood?

Mike: Yeah, that's a, that's another good question. Um, so like, part of the goal, like as we're developing these themes is we wanna like really like limit technical debt.

Like, I ran into problems before where if like I'm using SaaS, like I, the old version of the Florida Drupal camp site that I did like SaaS wouldn't compile and I had to, 'cause it was Compass SaaS and then I, I had to update Ruby, but Ruby wasn't available and, and all the, like, all these NPM modules and everything.

So, um, it, it can be a lot to update like will your CSS compile in five years. Um, so we're writing vanilla CSS and our so modern CSS for those that don't know, I, I think you all have maybe had some like episodes with like, people like Aubrey and stuff on here. Like modern CSS is awesome. It, it can do nesting, browsers can understand that it has things like container queries.

So you can have, uh, components respond to the width of you can re, re, re respond. Components can adjust themselves based on the width of themselves as opposed to just the width of, you know, the screen. Um, and it has a lot of other like, super, super cool stuff. So, so we're all in on, um. Native CSS that doesn't require any type of a build process.

And that's intentional, you know, because there are, there's one or two things that, that we could really make use of. Um, we are not using any type of boot things like Bootstrap or Tailwind or jQuery or React or anything like that. And our, the reason is, is because we want you to be able to like, configure your theme and not have to worry about keeping bootstrap updated or keeping React updated and right.

Stuff like that, because that can be a bear, you know, depending on your other, your other dependencies. Uh, so our, our, our, uh, JavaScript's written in vanilla JavaScript, you know, we, we, we, we write mostly to Drupal core standards, uh, you know, with some improvements. Um, we are using like, like some, uh, carousel, uh.

Uh, we call it CC carousel, JavaScript, and, and you know, our tabs JavaScript and, and and, and stuff like that. But it's all, it's all vanilla. And what that means is it's gonna work forever.

James: Yeah.

Mike: You know, like, like as long as the web is around and you know, this is gonna work, it's gonna work in your browser like 20 years from now.

John: And it's so nice. It's so nice of you not to like overcomplicate it or make it Oh man. Like, so like Yeah. 'cause there's a lot of

James: bloat,

John: kitchy if you will, with like, new stuff that like Yeah. Could just disappear someday. Like, uh, like I know a lot of people will be like, well, you know, you should be using a framework because of this, this, and the other thing.

But like, I just, I really appreciate that.

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. It, it, it can be hard, you know, like I have a lot of experience doing, uh, U-S-W-D-S work, you know, that I, that I used to do, ask some of former employees, employers, and, you know, I, the

James: United States Web design system,

Mike: web design system. Mm-hmm. Correct. Yeah.

And one of the things that it was, it was, it was, it was drastically, in my opinion, over complicated and, and to, to understand what I was doing or how to do stuff. The USWS way, I not only have to understand CSS, I have to then dive into the various mixings that it has, like I had to mix in for Flexbox. And it's like, why do I need to mix in for Flexbox?

You know? Now, now in addition to doing Flexbox, I now also need to have space in my brain to know what, how this fixin works, and, and, and that be, and, and, and it's not just one level. You would dive five different levels. And I've seen, uh, so many front end developers that like to overcomplicate stuff in, in, in similar ways.

And they overcomplicate stuff like, because they like to abstract. You know, Andy and I have all these discussions about abstract, and he's probably laughing, but like, because he likes to abstract stuff too, and I'm like, no, man, let's, let's not abstract. And we're doing it two or three times, you know? And, uh, it's, uh, it's, it's a fine line.

But, but I. Believe in like less technical debt, keeping stuff working, not having to work, not having to worry about stuff. Mm-hmm.

John: So let me, let me ask you this, 'cause you're not, you know, you're not using, um, like A-A-C-S-S framework. You're building like pure, pure CSS if you will. Are you using, like, are you using mix-ins and other tools to develop that code?

Like for yourself, like as part of your development process? Or are you just, you just sitting there writing CSS

Mike: I'm sitting there writing CSS and the reason is because if we want, I, I want our code to be understandable. Like, I could use SAS to write the CSS, but then what would happen is we would have a customer wanting to override this stuff and they'd be like, what is going on here?

What, like, what has generated this? It wouldn't, it wouldn't not make sense. Right. You know, we have a tagline on our website, and I know this is like turning into a freaking ad by now, but it says like, beautiful themes inside and out. But like, I believe that like, when people dive into the code, yeah. I want them to understand what's going on.

We have craploads comments, we have markdown files, you know, that, that, that explain architectural decisions and variables and stuff.

John: That just feels really nice. I like, again, like very nice. Like, 'cause the biggest, the biggest like. Issue problem, right when you get a theme is that like, it's not well commented, it's, it's compiled, it's, you know, you can't, you can't really get into it and make changes easily to it.

Um, Andy, you mentioned at the beginning of the show, like, you know, as a, as a backend developer, you'd install a theme in hopes that you'd be able to just like, use it easily and like it would make your life better. And, um, I'll honestly say like I am in the same boat. I'm not much of a front end developer and used to used to try to do the same things with my own personal site.

And, um, most recently kind of just went back to like Olive ero because it had, it had a lot of the like easier features to, to kind of, you know, set colors in, in, in the latest versions and stuff like that. So like, I can definitely understand like where you're coming from and I think a lot of people are, are coming from, from that, you know, that kind of mindset where like they wanna be able to easily kind of just, just do some really basic customizations with a theme and not have to worry about like, digging into code and stuff like that.

Um, so, you know, we've obviously covered quite a bit of, quite a bit of land here. Um, you guys are focusing on Drupal themes. You're focusing maybe a little bit on site templates once they become more, more widely accepted. Um, you're doing, uh, consulting, um, where it makes sense predominantly revolving around theming, um, and integrations.

I'm wondering like, for your themes and, and also your consulting, I mean, and there could be two different answers here. Like, what's the target audience, like what size company or what types of projects are you guys kind of focusing in on in the, in the early stages here?

Andy: Mike, I'm gonna take this one to begin.

Um, so when Mike first reached out to me, I guess going on about a year ago, you know, he knew my shortcomings and theming and he knew that I always ask him, Hey Mike, I'm about to do this full site build, which is something I don't, you know, I do maybe two a year. Like, what theme should I use? What base theme should I start with?

His, his answer was, I don't know. And so, you know, when he came to me with this idea of drip yard, um, he basically said, you are the target market. Um, and so it, it, it worked out and that, you know, we're building something that I can use, um, easily by myself if I needed to for personal sites or even client sites.

Uh, so, so that's like. People that would buy our theme. I think, um, you know, that's basically the, the first target audience. Um, I think we will also expand that into like government agencies and companies that wanna spin up a lot of sites and they want a consistent design system that works, um, you know, across different sectors of their brand.

Um, and, you know, they don't have to worry about accessibility and, and that kind of stuff. So I think, you know, that that's an opportunity for us as well.

James: Yeah, Andy, that, that makes me like, think of all, you know, I've been, I've been a part of a bunch of projects over the years and there's i's so many of those projects where, um, you know, maybe it's a, a, a local library or a, um, smaller university or something like that, and you've got this, this person that is like one employee that just wears a ton of hats at that organization or something, and they're, they're really sharp and they can do a lot.

And, uh, and asking them to also do, make a beautiful and accessible theme is that's, that's a, that's a big ask, right? Uh, and so having them be able to drop in a beautiful, accessible, performant theme and then be able to get in there and like nerd out and be like, oh, okay, you know, I can, I understand how this works.

I can read the comments, I can see like how to customize this and that sort of a thing. Yeah. Yeah.

Mike: So Mike, I, I was gonna expand just a little bit, like in the future too, like after Drupal Canvas comes out and settles down, I think we can start marketing toward like less technical folks, but like, that's gonna be dependent on Canvas.

John: I look forward to that day. Me too.

James: Me too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

John: Well, it

James: sounds like, sounds like if you're, if you're non-technical, you could still drop this in and, and be really happy, like based on the way you've described it, so Yeah.

Mike: Yeah, yeah. But you're still stuck with the layout builder interface. Mm-hmm. You know, and like all of us know, like using Layout Builder without like the suite of modules that like, you know, layout builder modal and all that type of stuff. I see. Like, it is a subpar experience, which is I gotcha. Kind of the point of canvas.

So, yeah.

James: Yeah. I'm dating myself here. I've never actually used layout builder, like, so that's, you know, that's how long ago I, my Drupal days were.

Mike: I, I, I have something that'll, that'll date. I, I don't know, John and, uh, Andy, if, if y'all, uh, know, and Steven, like, um, so you know, in Drupal seven you had the Dr.

Fu command for feature update. Yeah. And Dr. FU all command for feature update all. Mm-hmm. That was James. Yeah. Yes, it was.

John: I, uh, yeah, I, I tried to steer clear of the features, the features module. Oh yeah. If you're, if you're a long time listener. Um, Nick and I have had some debates on the features module, but we won't get into that here.

It was like

James: recipes Alpha. That's right. Recipes is what It's the OG recipe. Yeah. Recipes is what features should have been, basically. So from what I understand, again, uh, not a dral, uh, engineering either more these days, but, um, but yeah, Mike, there is sort of like one, perhaps elephant in the room for some folks, which at the, at the beginning you mentioned, you know, this strong value that you have for open source, the open web, and you even mentioned like free open source software.

And so selling themes, like how do these two things jab? 'cause Drupal historically has had a problem with this. And yeah, you look at other open source communities like WordPress and other things, they haven't had a problem with it. So, um, this may be a podcast all in and of itself, but like, what is that, what's the TLDR, uh, Mike and Andy version of, of that sort of elephant in the room Question.

Mike: Yeah. And, and there is a, like, people have done Drupal themes. People have tried Drupal themes for a long time there. I remember back when I used to do like the Lubo podcast, we, we had people on talking about the Drupal marketplace back then.

James: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mike: And there was a lot of pushback. I, I think the difference is now that people are realizing that Drupal probably could have taken a slightly different turn back, back when it did and, and maybe embrace it a little bit more.

Uh, like one of the reasons that, uh, WordPress and, and other, other systems, uh, are, are doing so well is because they have that lower cost of development. And the reason is they, one of the reasons they have that lower cost of development is because people can get up and running on the front end a lot quicker.

And they can do that through, through the equivalent of the marketplace. People are realizing that now, um, our themes are, have a split license model. Like, um, you know, per, per the GPL, there are certain parts of our theme that have to be GPL, you know, and that includes stuff that like runs in the same memory space as Drupal, stuff that's dependent on Drupal, you know, that includes Twig, PHP.

You know, and all that stuff. But there are certain things that do not have to be GP on, that includes the styles, some of the JavaScript and stuff like that. So, so we're doing what's called a split licensing model. And you know, and, and you can see this in the, in the WordPress ecosystem too. So part of our themes are our GPL 'cause of necessity part are not, and would I like to make everything GPL?

Yes. But I also wanna support myself and my family. You know, I, uh, like, I don't know if y'all read my blog post, I literally took out a equity line of credit against my house that now I had to dig myself out of this hole to, to fund this company. You, you know, you know, to help fund myself as, as, as we do this.

And that's, that's scary and good, but like the only way to do that is, is by doing

James: like the burden burn the ships

Mike: Yeah.

James: Sort of thing.

Mike: Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is it. And I told, like, Andy, I'm like, I'm making this happen. Like, you know, it's gonna happen. And, um, so like

commercial. Licenses are, are, are necessary. You know, I believe in that, that, that, that fine line, you know, and, and I also believe that by, by selling these themes, we will push Drupal as a project forward. You know, like by lowering Drupal's, cost development is going to, you know, raise that tie to raise all ships.

And, and I wanna, I wanna be part of it, you know? And I

John: think, I think like. There are. So it's not very different than an agency, um, selling Drupal expertise, right? Like the way I look at this is like, yes, I'm buying a theme from Mike and Andy, but I'm also buying their expertise in the fact, yeah. That, that theme is going to be as accessible as it possibly can.

It's gonna be high quality, it's gonna be built towards, um, uh, wi you know, with Drupal core in mind that it's going to work really well. And if it doesn't work, as I anticipate, I can reach out to them and they'll go, oh yeah, you know what? You just found a bug and we'll fix that. And, you know, no problem.

Right? Um, totally. You know, so I mean, I, I kind of see, I kind of see where you're coming from there. I, I think that, you know, you're, you're, you can still, I, I, I don't know, I think you can be in both camps, right? You can say, Hey, Drupal is a great open source system. It is a great free piece of, of software that people should use.

But, um, the reason that you're, you're buying our theme is 'cause it's of high quality and, and checks a lot of boxes and gets you a lot further faster. Um, if you were to hire somebody to build something similar, it would cost you thousands upon thousands of dollars. Right? Um, and, you know, there's, uh, there's years of expertise there that I think are, are, are pretty, um, important.

And a

Andy: significant amount of contribution to back to Drupal, uh, just to develop our themes. Yeah,

John: like

Andy: drew the issues that mentioned earlier. You

John: talked about, you know, the, the, the experience Oh, canvas issue that, um, you had, um, good catch you, you had talked about earlier. Um, and you know, and I know that you guys are, are in, in the issue queue, kind of putting in issues, talking about these things.

So I mean, that that's, there's, there's something, something valuable, definitely valuable about that.

Mike: Um, yeah, and both, both Andy and I have a history of con contributing back to, to Drupal projects. You know, like, like I've been involved, like obviously on a very, on the, on the front end of Drupal, Andy's done a whole bunch of contribution back in, into Drupal, including like, especially a lot in the, the commerce ecosystem, which is kind of it, bread and butter.

John: Yeah. I mean, that's awesome. And, and the contribution speaks for itself. I mean, you can, you can look you guys up, obviously you're doing quite a bit of, of contribution on the side. So we have about, uh, eight minutes left here in the show. I have two more, more questions. Um, and I think, uh, James has one. Um, so we're gonna try to, we're gonna try to lightning round, lightning round through this here.

Um, we talked about licensing a bit, right? Um, I'm wondering like how you, you said there are, you're using GPL for some of it, there's other licensing. Like are you, are you requiring people to get a license for your themes? How's that working?

Mike: Yeah, so the, I'm, I'm, I mean like, as we say, the theme, you know, at, at that point that gives you the license.

You know, we're not having any type of license server, you know, so if drip yard, you know, if, if Andy and I are both on an airplane that goes down, you know, over the Himalayas and we have to, you know, eat each other for food and snuggle for warmth and stuff, like your themes will continue to function. Um,

John: snuggle for warmth first, then eat each other, just order of operations.

James: Thank you. Um, sleep with one eye open now.

John: That's

James: right. So, um,

John: so I guess, go ahead. So that all makes sense to me. Um, but I want to go back to something you said early on in the show where like the expectation from your end is that somebody will buy the theme and use it on a single site, right? Yeah. So like, how are you, is that the honor system or, or are you, like, how are you guys gonna manage that?

Mike: Yeah, it's, it's basically gonna be honor system. You know, we are gonna have like some watermarking that goes into the theme, but like. You know, we could technically probably bring legal action, but against, you know, the cost of a theme, $500. Like, in, in reality, that's probably, and especially like, you know, if something's overseas that might not be financially worth it, it might be.

Mm-hmm. So we're, we're like really relying on good goodwill from the community. Um, just because, you know, if you're sitting here, you're making significant amount of money on Drupal, you're using our products, you know, like we contribute back, you know, we're not, we're not external from this community coming in, you know, so, so like,

Andy: we hope even if we did have licensing in the, uh, theme, you know, if, if you're wanting to abuse it, you're gonna find a way to strip that out anyways, so.

Yeah. Right. Exactly. And it just becomes more problems, you know,

John: I imagine for, for somebody, kind of, as Andy said earlier, right? Somebody in Andy's situation where they, um, you know, they're, they're just looking for it as like a, a starting point, right? They're, they're probably gonna bake in that, that cost of the theme and pass it along to their client anyway, right?

Like, Hey, this is saving you like 10 grand, pay the 500 bucks and like, pass it on to these guys, and I'm gonna use their theme as a starting point, right?

Andy: Absolutely.

John: Um, and then my, my final question, and you touched on this a little bit, uh, Mike, um, Drupal marketplace. Sounds like you guys are big fans or will be big fans once it's, once it's actualized, right?

Mm-hmm. Um, will you offer, uh, site templates as well as themes on there?

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah,

John: absolutely.

Mike: Heck, I, I mean I, yeah, I, I think site, I, I think the majority of the work going into a site template is gonna be a theme.

John: Yeah. We're

Mike: gonna have a, we're gonna have a head start on this 'cause we're gonna have these great themes.

So at, at that point, all we gotta do is just like, tell Andy to

John: bundle with some recipes, Andy, and send them out. I got you.

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. And Andy's a recipe master now.

John: Yeah. That's awesome. Um, I know who I'm coming to in my next set of recipe questions. Uh, the, so the last part of this question for me is, um, Drupal launches a marketplace.

I'm assuming Drip Yard is there as, as, as a, you know, a DCP, as a, as a as a vendor, right. Um, you guys are gonna offer some sort of free set of templates, or is it gonna be like, Nope, we're just doing, just doing the paid stuff for now?

Mike: That's a good question. Like, right now, we don't have plans to, you know, and, and like, like as, as I mentioned earlier, like a, a good chunk of our, you know, code is, is gonna be the shared library of, of, uh.

Of, of components and, and you know, we can't GPL that, you know, because this is gonna be like how we, how we make our livelihoods. Yeah. So, but that being said, I would like to just, to potentially get, you know, leads or something like that. Like, like as it stands right now, we're like, like, like we're gonna be looking for ways to market ourselves.

That might be a way if we, if we can figure out a way to do that, you know?

Andy: Yeah. And with single directory components, I mean, it is possible that we could only release like a subset of them for free, you know? Yeah. With our theme. And then later, you know, if you want more, um, functionality, you, you buy the theme to get the rest of it

Mike: might be something to experiment with.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

James: So let's say, um, I'm listening to this and I've, I'm a designer or a theme, maybe I work for an agency or something, and I've been mm-hmm. Really inspired by the, the focus on accessibility, the focus on performance, the focus on clean code and building out beautiful themes like this. And, uh, are you, are y'all looking for like collaborators in that, in that way?

Like where someone could say like, well, I've got a beautiful theme that's also accessible, clean code, you know, beautiful, all these things and like, can you all resell it sort of a thing? Is that, is that the long term vision at all for you?

Mike: That's not some something that we're planning on, you know? But that being said, like if, if you're out there and you're thinking this, like reach out and talk to us, like maybe we can find a way to work together.

James: Yeah.

Mike: Um, you know, because people like that, they're, they're amazing. You know? I, I, uh, but like, as it stands, like,

I, I don't think so. Yeah. I,

John: I, it's funny 'cause I, I, I would, I would like, I wanna one up or plus one that question because like, I feel like, I feel like it's not so much somebody who had already has a theme. Like, I can see a lot of designers saying like, Hey, I wanna build this theme. I don't really know how to do it.

Can we collab? And like, absolutely, I'll do the design. You guys develop it, and then we like mm-hmm. You know, promise it. Yeah.

Mike: We're, yeah. Yeah. I would be more interested in designers mm-hmm. Than, than other you, you know, than, than developers. Not to say I'm not interested because like, you know, the designer that we found, she's amazing.

But like, we talked to several other designers and worked with some other designers and spent money on other designers and they didn't work out for various reasons. Great designers, you know. It's hard to find. Incredible. Yeah. Yeah. It's hard to find. Maybe it's us,

John: you know? Dunno, I mean, I think if somebody's coming to you with a, with a design that they need developed, like that's, that's a, that's seems like a pretty good start to a relationship.

If I had to. Yeah. If I had to guess. Um, well, Mike and Andy, uh, wishing you the best of luck. I'm sure you'll come back and tell us more about, uh, drip yard as you guys kind of get, get out the door and get running down or up the hill, depending on how you wanna look at it. But, um, thanks for joining us today.

Really appreciate it. Yeah, thanks John, for

Mike: having us on. And I, I, I look forward to listening to my own voice on the podcast, which is always weird.

James: Yeah. And I'm packing up my tent, I'm heading down to Gainesville, so I'll be outside your door, but in 20 days, you know, so

Andy: That's right. Burst in line. Yeah,

James: that's right.

Andy: Yeah,

James: yeah,

John: yeah, yeah. You can help Mike. Fixes, fixes. Sink. Well, you're

Mike: ev, ev, ev. Everybody should sign up for the webinar if, if, if you go to, if you go to drip yard.com and click on the themes, there's a big call to action at the top that says sign up for the webinar. And, uh, like we'll be demoing the themes.

We will be talking technical challenges. You're gonna learn something. I guarantee you're gonna learn something. Even if you're not, you have no intention on buying the same.

John: There you go.

Mike: And, uh, I like that. It'll be awesome.

John: Cool. Well thanks for joining us.

Mike: Alright,

John: thank you.

James: Alexa

John: app

James: instead.

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, just like Bad Camp did today. You can promote your Drupal camp, uh, community event on talking Drupal.

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You can learn more about becoming a [email protected] and choosing the Become a Patron button in the sidebar. All right, Mike, if folks wanted to get ahold of you, how could they go about doing that?

Mike: Well, on LinkedIn, I am known as Mike Herchel's disembodied head, and you can also find me on drip yard.com.

And I'm m Herchel on on triple.org.

John: There you go. Andy, what about you?

Andy: I'm andyg5000. Uh, drip yard.com.

John: I wonder what the first 499,000 were like. Bunch of chumps. Yeah. There you go. James, what about you?

James: I'm sorry. I'm really curious if you search disembodied head on LinkedIn, if Mike Herchel is the top result.

I am gonna find out, but while you're there, if you search, uh, James Sandsbury, you can find me on LinkedIn.

John: That feels like a bad Google search. Yeah, somebody, yeah. I'm John Picozzi and, uh, you can find me on all the major social networks, uh, at John Picozzi, uh, as well as on drupal.org.

You can find me personally @picozzi.com or, uh, professionally. You can find out more about EPAM @epam.com, and as we say at the end of every show or almost every show. If you've enjoyed listening, we've enjoyed talking. Thanks a lot, everyone, and have a great day.