Talking Drupal #544 - World Cancer Day

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 5 44, world Cancer Day. On today's show, we're talking about World Cancer Day, how they use Drupal, and why Drupal is the right choice. With our guests, Charles Andrew Revkin and Diego Costa.

We'll also cover PDF Ally as our module of the week.

Welcome to Talking Drupal. Our guests today are Charles Andrew Revkin and Diego Costa. Diego's currently Chief Operating Officer and Solution Architect at Onex Internet specializing in bridging the gap between commercial strategy and technically technical execution. With over 20 years of experience across Brazil and Canada, he moved to Germany in 2019 and has been building high value Drupal solutions for global clients like the UICC ever since.

He's a husband and father of three who love traveling and exploring the different cultures he has called home. Diego, welcome to the show and thanks for joining us.

Diego: Thanks for having me.

John: And Charles Andrew Kin is a senior digital strategy manager at the Union of International Cancer Control, or the UICC, where he spends his time untangling digital complexity and turning it into tools people actually enjoy using.

He works across websites, online communities, CRM and email marketing, and adds in a growing dose of ai, often acting as a translator between technical teams and non-technical colleagues at heart. Charles is driven by one question. How can smart human-centered digital solutions make global cancer control more effective, more inclusive, and a little bit easier for everyone involved?

Charles, welcome to the show and thanks for joining us.

Charles: Thanks for having me.

John: I also will say that your your bio there really, really speaks to me as a, as a solution architect. I feel like, I feel like that last part there about just, just making things easier for people is is super, super super appealing.

So thank you for Thank you for that.

Steve: Yeah.

John: I'm John Zi solutions architect, DD Pam, and today my co-hosts are joining us for his second week. Steve Wirt, tech Lead at Civic Action. What's it going, Steve?

Nic: Good, thanks.

John: Happy to be

Nic: here again.

John: Glad to have you. And last but certainly not least, Nick Laughlin, founder at Enlightened Development.

Nick, is snow melting up there?

Nic: Finally, it is melting. I was telling Steven Martin, I think the show that my roof finally has no snow on it for the first time in probably three months. Mm. Last night it finally finished melting and the yard is only about half covered. I still have about. Two feet of snow in the front yard, but

John: there you go.

Yeah. I was happy to be able to see grass. I mean, it's, it's you, it's funny the things that you, you're like, get excited about when you, when you get older or you're, you've been in the house for a while with a lot of snow outside. You're like, yeah. So anyway glad, glad you're you're thawing out up there in, in the upper, upper parts of Massachusetts.

And now to talk about our module of the week, let's turn it over to Martin Andersons a senior project marketing manager for Drupal at.

Martin: Thanks John. Have you ever wanted to check PDF files for accessibility as they're uploaded to your Drupal site? There's a module for that. It's called PDF Ally really PDF, and then a one one Y. So sort of the commonly used eronium for accessibility, and it was created in February of 2026. So. You know, just in the past month by Joshua Mitchell, a friend of this podcast, it has a 1.0 0.1 version available, which works with Drupal 10.2 and 11.

It's actively maintained and is in the process of getting security coverage, and it does have test coverage as well. There are no open issues yet and it is officially not yet in use by any sites according to drupal org. Now with the PDF Ally module installed, you can set its configuration, including whether to enable or disable automatic checking on upload, whether to block uploads that failed checks, or just show warnings a minimum PDF version requirement and which accessibility checks to run the module.

Also sets or creates three new permissions, administer PDF, accessibility settings, run PDF, accessibility checks and view PDF accessibility report. Each PDF media item has an accessibility tab where anyone with the necessary permissions can view the results. And under the hood, PDF Ally uses the SLO slash pdf parser library to extract data from PDF files.

Now, many sites rely on PDFs to make available content that they aren't able to migrate directly into Drupal content. So making sure that doesn't introduce its own accessibility regressions is an important step. But let's talk about PDF Ally.

Nic: Yeah, I'm, I'm actually really excited about this. I haven't had a chance to test it since you posted about it, but a couple weeks ago.

But PDFs are one of those things that are notoriously hard to get right. And having an additional tool for editors to be able to quickly vet them is, is very useful. I, I think there's still a piece to this where. Where there's some education on like how to make something accessible. But if they can, if a editor can upload a file and then if the organization takes accessibility seriously, then there's probably somebody who can help with that.

They can then take that file and go to the person and say, Hey, I uploaded this file, I got these notes. Is this something that you can fix? And then they can replace it, right? Whereas without a tool like this, all of the responsibility lies on the person initially creating the file. There's nobody else to kind of keep an eye on it.

The other thing that's nice about having tools like this is as additional as tooling gets better, you can kind of re-scan old files as well, I'm sure. So you can kind of, maybe in 2026, you made the file, it was perfectly accessible. You put it up, it passed the checks. But six months from now, we find something new or the new WCAG rule set comes out.

And if the module's updated, you can now re-scan it and see like, okay, is this something that we should. At least for the ones that are commonly used, maybe you can update them and, and keep them in sync. So this is kind of like a, it's a perfect type of module that helps that shared responsibility aspect of making sure things stay accessible.

John: Are you, you might have said this Martin, but, and I might have missed it, but are you able to block the upload of the files if, if they don't meet a certain criteria? Yeah.

Martin: Cor correct. So that is one of the configuration settings is to say if it finds an issue, should it just sort of, you know, flag a warning and, you know, log that as part of the reporting or you can have it so that it will actually stop that from, from being uploaded if it has accessibility issues.

John: I feel like that would be like a little bit of torture on your content editors because PDF. Accessibility is, is, is not easy. But I can understand, you know, you know, being pretty strict about that. So I like, I like this, this module for that aspect.

Martin: Yeah. I could see potentially maybe, you know, there might be value in having like a, a special permission that's like bypass you know, accessibility warnings.

John: I feel like it would be cool to be able to set it per role so that you could say like, Hey, this role, no, no, we're gonna hold them accountable, but this role, like, eh, we're gonna, we're gonna assume that they got some sort of override or veto power.

Nic: I think there's two reasons why this is useful, right? One is if you, if you've ever had a client who cares about accessibility because they've had a judgment against them, right?

This is one of the ways it can help enforce that and prevent future judgments, because obviously with accessibility, things like if repeated judgments, they get more and more severe. So it can, it can help. That, like somebody saying, Hey, I'll fix this later, and then forgetting about it. No, you just gonna upload it.

John: You shoulda have a whole class of modules that are like qu quantified under like the, the Target and Domino's pizza modules. These are the modules they're gonna keep you out of, out of penalties. Legal penalties.

Nic: The other thing is, I mean, it's permission.

So inherently it, it's gotta, if it's gated behind a permission, then you can set up different level of tooling, right? If you have somebody who's not as much of a trusted editor, or if it's an automated tool or something, you can have more strict guidelines. So, you can have somebody review it.

Because we've all known, we all know accessibility, automated accessibility tests are great signifiers and warnings, but they're not, you know, just because something flags as an accessible doesn't mean that it actually is an accessible, right. My go-to example is ALT tags. Any accessibility tool will say, Hey, you have to have all tags.

But the truth is you have to have good alt tags. But if it's a, if it's a, if it's a decorative image, you're not supposed to have all tags at all. So just because something, flags something doesn't mean it's actually the most accessible it could be.

John: I mean, what do you do if it's a decorative image inside a PDF?

Steve, you're gonna say something.

Steve: I'm just, I'm really excited about this module because we've got, you know, a bunch of government sites. We've got hundreds or thousands of editors, and to have a, a bit of a gig check on PDFs is fantastic. 'cause we, I dunno, government likes their PDFs. Fortunately.

John: Government's not the only, government's not the only one.

But I hear you. Well, Martin, thank you for bringing us a wonderful module of the week and if folks wanted to connect with you to suggest a module of the week or discuss this one, how could they go about doing that?

Martin: We are always happy to talk about potential candidates for module of the week in the Talking Drupal channel of Drupal Slack, where folks can reach out to me directly as man clue on all of the Drupal and social platforms.

John: Awesome. Thanks Martin. See you next week.

Martin: See, see you then.

Steve: Thanks.

John: All right. So Charles, for those of our listeners who may not be familiar, can you kind of tell us what World Cancer Day is and, and the role that the website plays in, in supporting that campaign globally?

Charles: Sure. So World Cancer Day is a Global Awareness Day. It's marked every 4th of February, and it's led by my organization, UICC, so Union for International Cancer Control.

We are a membership organization, so we developed the, the campaign in close collaboration with our members. And in the US for instance, we have American Cancer Society. We have Cancer Research UK and in the uk. And we have a variety of organizations. So it's not only cancer societies, but it's research institutes, patient support groups even ministries of Health in some instances.

So it's a very diverse membership. And so we developed this campaign to raise awareness, improve education, mobilize action around cancer prevention, detection, treatment, and care. And specifically world cancer day.org or our website is the central point of the campaign. It really is there to enable the global movement that happens on, on on 4th of February.

It's not just a repository of content and resources. There's a lot of functionality where there's a lot of user generated content that gets added to, to this this website. So, as I said, it's a central hub for learning engagement and advocacy. There's a lot of resources, toolkits that they can download, social media and materials, but then there's a space, space for them to share their stories a space for, for them to share activities.

So we try to use that to kind of showcase the impact and everything that's going around the world on World Cancer Day. So we have a map of activities where you can kind of find out what's happening near you. And you can also see how you can kind of take part, if that's possible. And so, yeah, that's in a nutshell is world Cancer Day org.

John: So wondering we're recording this on March 10th, which is, you know, about, about a month or so after World Cancer Day. I'm wondering you said it was February 4th. Is there some significance to that date?

Charles: So that is some something that comes up and there was I'm probably gonna get this wrong because I haven't checked that in a while, but there was a summit or some kind of summit I think it was, in which there was a, a resolution that that ha that took, that was decided.

And basically it was just decided by that date that we would mark it on fourth February. So there's no. There's, until that decision, there was nothing special about fourth February that I know of.

Nic: And, and what year did it start? How long has this been going on?

Charles: I think it was year 2000. It's, I, I could actually check it because I'm pretty sure it's on the website, but from my memory it is.

I'm just gonna quickly look,

John: that's, that's okay. We can give listeners homework and then they'll, they'll go to the website and they can kind of see all the great things we're gonna talk about.

Charles: Did Charles get it right?

Nic: So I'm, I'm curious what led your team to choose Drupal as the platform to kind of host the resources for this outreach?

Charles: Well, to, to be honest USCC has a long history with Drupal. I joined the organization back in 2012 and we were already using Drupal. But I would say it. For me the early days.

And and, but what I can say is, so we, we are on Drupal on four different websites. One is an event, a campaign website. One is a congress website. So our event, another is our institutional website. And finally there's one which is around resources for cancer control planners. So we've built all our websites on Drupal because we really feel like it's been a solid platform to build on.

And it's proven to be very flexible, robust. And so all of these sites serve different purposes than are more or less. Big and complex depending on, on, on their mission. And we felt that Drupal has been able to scale to whatever we needed it to be. That being said, we did do some exploration with other CMS platforms like WordPress, but.

We still felt that Drupal had that important place in our hearts, and we also felt that we've seen the technical kind of evolution of Drupal. So what I started was Drupal six, I believe. And I would say it was, or at least it felt more technically complex to me at the time, less user friendly. Maybe it was also because I was, it was new to, to me as well.

But I do see that it's evolved quite significantly in the editorial experiences a bit more streamlined. You know, we, we do feel that there's, there's a great community out there that supports the, the platform. And so there's no point in time where I felt like, I've asked the agents, agencies that I've worked with, can we do that?

And they've never come back and said, no, it's the whole, how much funny do you have? No, I'm kidding. But it is a bit about how much time and how much you wanna spend on this. But there's always been a, a solution.

John: I think it's interesting. I, I think it's interesting that you highlight the, the usability and, and the interaction.

And you mentioned that you started in Drupal six and now you're, you're at, you know, 10 and 10 and 11, and you've, like, you've seen the progression because I, I think folks, you know, a lot of us on this call have been in the Drupal community for a long time, and we've also seen that progression. So it's, it's, it's interesting for me to hear you, hear you highlight that in your, in, in your response.

Nic: But before we moved on, I wanted to, can I give Diego a chance? Do you, can you tell us a little bit about like, when you got involved with this project and, and how you see maybe Dral fits in as well?

Diego: Yeah, so, it was back in 2020. I had just started with one X internet and we had UICC contacting us.

They were looking for potentially another partner. They already had all the sites running in Drupal, but for the World Cancer Day specifically, they were looking if there was something else out there. And I, I remember that was kind of one of my first introductions to Drupal as well, when I started talking to Charles about the project.

And, and it got me really excited about being part of it. And, and that's when we started, was after the World Cancer Day campaign 2020 it was around April, may, I think, a few months after. And then. We took over the, the site and before the next World Cancer Day, I actually got news that my mom had cancer, got cancer, and, and that was a real big, like, impact for our family.

And it became even more personal working with World Cancer Day and the message and, and, and never since I have been working with them. And it's great to see the, the reach and, and the, all the resources out there. And it, it's a really close to my heart project.

Given the, I think you asked also about the, the fit, right. I think as Charles said there's nothing there that Charles asked us to do that we don't.

It, it provides a lot of the features that we needed out of Outta the box, let's say from the contribute modules. A lot of it we just use modules that exist and, but also gives us when we need to do something a little bit different, it's also easy to build on top of Drupal. And that's, I think makes it a, a really good fit for, for UYCC.

Steve: Yeah. Given the global reach of World Cancer Day, can you describe or expand a little bit on how you leverage Drupal to, you know, hit and make accessible so many language, you know, variety of languages across the globe?

Charles: I'll start answering that and maybe Diego can contribute. It's a great question because language is one of the biggest barriers I would say, that we're constantly trying to overcome and.

Just before that it is 'cause, so I'm in the communications team at the organization and I'm in charge of the websites. And one of the things when we develop a new campaign is where we think about the theme. And one of the things that is often a barrier when we're developing that theme is how does it translate into different languages?

And sometimes that is another challenge in itself, but just to say there's a lot of re reflection that we do when we were talking about the, the different languages currently the website is translated in three primary languages. So it's well the main language is English and then there's French and, and Spanish as well.

And these translations are human reviewed and kind of vetted by, by internal staff members. And, we always want to be able to translate into more languages, but it's, it's quite a workload to manage a multilingual website, as you probably all know. So we've tried to find alternatives to this barrier.

Well, first of all, we, we do have a lot of the actual resources which exist in many more languages. I think there's up to 64 different languages for 2026. That doesn't mean that all of the, the materials are translated in all those 64 languages, but we have at least a few items like the logo, which exists in a lot of different languages.

And then there are other things that we've tried to build, build in to, to make language not being a barrier. So I'd say like we. There are certain pages that we've and this Ja will probably explain better than I, but we have a third party translation service hooked up which enables us to translate certain pages into even more languages.

So like the about world cancer data page will be translated in Hindi and Arabic in Russian or, or Chinese or whatever. Just to give a so that people reach the site at least have a reference in the language. They, they understand this is machine translated. So it's not, I mean, we try to review if we have the internal capacity to do so, but those are some of the, the ways that we try to make the website as accessible.

And then I. I'll say that there is, it's not Drupal technology per se, but we do have an AI chat bot that's integrated into the site, and that is also able to converse with the, the different users or the visitors in their language. So we've, we've, we, we've seen that they can, the AI chatbot can also serve cer certain information in, in the language of that person.

And I, I dunno if you wanted, maybe I'll let Diego talk, but then I did wanna mention accessibility, which you were talking about earlier, earlier with the PDF module. But maybe I'll let Jago go first more about the language.

Diego: I think it's just a lot of core functionality. We use translation management, suite of modules connected with depot and Google Translate for automated translations in those extra languages that are not done by the team at UYCC.

And so we have the core languages that are available when you go into the dropdown of the language switcher and you see the three only, but depending on the page, if you, if you land on a page that has been translated to more languages, then there is just a section that says this, this page is also available in, and then it shows the list of additional languages that are not in the dropdown.

John: So,

Diego: or from the technical. Yeah.

John: So more on the technical side, not specifically using like a translation management service per se. Just using, just using Google Translate, it sounds like. And then No, in-house, in-house translators.

Diego: They the, the Google translate to still go, goes through the translation management module.

Mm-hmm. So they still send for translation, get it back, but there is no user review. It goes, comes back, it gets approved and displayed. So machine translated content.

John: Got it, got it. Interesting. Yeah, I, I I have a, I have a a lot of background on, on translation and, and the hurdles that I know you guys are probably, probably jumping, jumping over to get that site translated.

And you remind me again, you said, how many languages are you translating into.

Charles: So we have three main languages. So the website is, all of the pages are translated in English, French, and Spanish for nearly all. And then we have these additional languages that we only use on certain pages, and then the resources themselves are made available and not to, well, I, I think I counted 64, but sometimes it's just a logo that's available in, in or whatever language.

John: Got it. Got it. Yeah. That's, that's great use case for, for Drupal obviously with its, its multilingual capabilities. Diego, I wanna jump into more of them. Technical side of things, the architecture side of things for a minute. And I'm wondering if you can share with us particularly any Drupal modules or integrations that are specifically important to this, to this project.

And then also I guess. As much as you're comfortable sharing, but like you're kind of hosting approach. I mean, I'm assuming that, you know, the World Cancer Day website is one of maybe a couple of websites. I think that Charles mentioned the organization has like, is that set up in like a multi-site structure?

Is that, is that, you know, using just individual sites with a, with a common you know, core repository. Just kind of interested in kind of the technical architecture overall and, and any specifics to Drupal that, that are might be interesting to our listeners.

Diego: Yep. So we manage two of the four websites that Charles mentioned.

It's cc.org, the main institutional website and world cancer data org.

Nic: Mm-hmm.

Diego: Those are built separately. They have very different kind of use cases and information. Information. One is multi lingo. The other one is, is still only in English. So there are many difference that would make it more complicated to have it as a multi-site and they would benefit.

The UYCC website is constantly evolving. Why? Because it's used. Throughout the year, while the World Cancer Day website is more of a peak website, so we spend some time during the year planning what we're gonna do. Then we spend a, a couple, three, four months building it, and then the event starts around November.

So it's a, it's like a, it has a seasonality to, to it regarding the architecture. It it's a Drupal core with the standard modules for the uic for the Oral Cancer Day website. We use like web forms for the user generated content so users can submit their activities and their stories, cancer stories using web forms.

We have, I know you talked about it was the module of the week last week about address module. We use it on the activities because we then take that address that the user entered and we plot in the map with the styled Google map module. Then we use for the stories we implemented last year, some AI functionality using the core with some custom development.

So for the stories, when the user is generating like a, a long text story, we automatically summarize the story using ai and then we present to the user during the web form process so that they can check and say, yeah, this looks good. Piece that we show when we show the story cards the preview text, let's say.

And this year then we implemented additional functionality with AI for moderation of the stories. So we do already last year, because most of the stories, they, they get submitted right? E either on the day or the day before the event. A lot of people start submitting the stories and there's, there was a person at Y CCC that was manually reviewing every single story to publish, and that was a lot of manual work happening.

So we implemented this moderation that does the initial check and either reject if it's a flat out, like not related to cancer at all, or if there is a lot of. Bad language or that it gets rejected right away.

John: Links. Links to pharmaceuticals and stuff like that.

Diego: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

John: I got you.

Diego: Or, or there is like, it marks that manual review required, depending if the, I thought, okay, this kind of looks good, but maybe there is some bad word that in the context actually gets it's okay to use because that's how the person felt.

So if they say cancer, really

John: cancer stocks, like

Diego: Exactly.

John: Yeah. Well we all kind of agree with that. I think

Nic: we can, we can make an exception to our, our general rule for that. That that's fine. Here.

I'm curious about that moderation tool. 'cause this is some, or in the summary tool, because both of those are areas that I've had clients share some experience.

So maybe Charles, do you have more insight into this too? Like how, how did you go about vetting that. That it was doing what you were expecting. Right. Did you have somebody go through manually after and check and kind of double check the first year since this is, it sounds like this is the first year you did that.

Did you have somebody manually check everything and be like, oh yeah, it was 98% correct. Because I can imagine getting incorrectly, marking something as spam is a very sensitive subject here, right? So if people are sharing personal stories and something gets marked as spam and just doesn't show up ever, that could be, that could be something you would wanna avoid.

Is that?

Charles: Yeah. So well maybe I'll, I'll start answering and maybe Diego can so you're talking about more the moderation, not the memorization. And so this year was the first time we had the, the moderation set up. And, and I must say that we were quite pleasantly surprised at the. I mean, we made it quite conservative in the first place because we wanted, the thing that we wanted to avoid was for a story that we didn't feel should be shared to be shared.

'cause it got directly published. So we made it more on the conserv conservative ed. But we did have a person who was still checking every single one at first that the AI was already moderating. Just to be extra sure that the ones that were getting through were okay. And I would say that very few did or, or not any, at some point we had to refine the way it worked because there's two ways of submitting a story.

One is a free text and one is with the question and answer. And the AI was getting a bit confused by the questions and thought it was still relevant to cancer. But, so, so there were some adjustments along the way, is what I'm trying to say. But for the most part we were quite pleased. And, and we, we also had that kind of experience with the summary because there was also a lot of questions like, should it be summarizing in the third person, like saying, is it the third person or the first person?

And then there was also the language so there was a lot of, adjustments, I would say, well, at a certain point we stopped, but there was a learning curve. And so we, we got the, the right formula I would say. But maybe Diego, you also probably have your point of view.

Diego: No, I think you covered really well.

Yeah, it was interesting about the question and answer is that at, at first we were submitting the questions as well, but the questions are all related to cancer. So even if the user just answered blah in the answer, in the context of the question, that was a cancer story because all the questions had, how did cancer affect your life?

So they, I was saying, okay, this is a good cancer story. So I said, okay, let's stop sending the questions. Otherwise, it'll

Nic: Yeah,

Diego: always consider it a real, yeah, exactly.

John: So, so

Diego: that was a learning, but

John: Diego, I'm wondering. Is the user aware before they're filling out the questions or submitting these stories that, that, you know, AI is gonna be, it's gonna be sent to AI for, for summarizing and, and then it's gonna be sent to AI for, for validating.

Is there, is there a, a statement somewhere that says, Hey, just so you know or is it just kind of happening behind the scenes as like a administrative assistant tool sort of thing?

Diego: So in the summarization, we display a comment that it was summarized by ai, and that the user has the ability to change it, modify, completely, remove if they don't agree with it.

But there is no mention of being moderated. I think Charles, I don't remember. No,

Charles: not at present. And maybe that's something we could consider, but I mean, to add to that, we usually always, even after it's been moderated by ai, there's always someone human who's

Steve: Yeah.

Charles: Double checking in effect. But one of the reasons why we also went with the AI moderation was because, well, apart from the workload was that we also wanted the user to be able to share the fact that they, they shared their story on on the website, on social media.

And so by having it immediately go through a review process and be published, if it was deemed okay by the ai, they could immediately share the link that they to their story. Because otherwise we would usually. Say between 24 to 48 hours before the, the story could be published.

John: Yeah. I mean, to me it feels like you, you guys are, are doing it, doing it, right?

Right. You're keeping the human in the loop on the summarization part and saying like, Hey, if you don't agree with what the AI did, feel free to change it. And then on the, on the moderation part, I mean, you still have a human in the loop there to, to say like, ah, yeah, this was good, or, ah, no it wasn't. And you know, that feels, that feels like the, you know, the right, the right responsible way to go.

I was just I was just interested. I mean, I think it, those are two really good AI use cases and, and obviously you've, you've proven them out that they, that they work well because, because you're continuing to use them.

Nic: So, so I, I have a couple of clients that have an annual funding drive or annual awareness drive as well. And there's always a big burst in traffic right around the actual date. There's always a kind of a ramp up period and in a lot of testing and preparation. I'm curious kind of at one x how do you dig, how do you kind of prepare for, I, first of all, you can confirm if there is a traffic spike, but how do you kind of prepare the infrastructure to handle a surge in visitors from a campaign like this?

Diego: Yeah, starting with the spike. Yes, there is definitely, that's probably one of our most visited sites, but it happens only one day of the year, and that's February 4th. And I think this year we had about 500,000 requests in an hour around that was the peak at two gmt, which would be when the Americans wake up.

There's still people in Asia, and then Europe is in the middle of the day. So all everybody across the world is accessing the, at the same time. And that, that was the peak. So how we normally do there, there has been learning since we started working together in 2020, of course. And every year we do a little bit more or a little bit different.

We learn from what we've, we've missed. And this year I, I think Charles probably the, the, the least amount of. Like, there was no incident at all during the whole day. Right. So I think it was the calmest day for us at least.

Charles: Yeah. And for us, we, we do a lot of backend editing 'cause we're still also publishing content, especially the activities.

And, and I would say it was the smoothest experience also in, in the backend was because in previous years it was a bit, it could be a bit slow, but this, this year was very slow. Yeah.

Diego: Yeah. So, a lot of it was we have Fastly CDN and WAF in front, so we're blocking bad bad robots requests at the WAF level.

Then the CDN is providing a lot of the content without hitting the Drupal servers. Yeah. And then at the same time we did a lot of optimization of the caching in the, in, in, in Drupal and also. The days before the event, we normally do a scaling even though I don't think this year would have been necessary, but we scale the hardware like three, five the month before the event or close to the end of January.

We scale the hardware just in case. And, and then that also helps with some of the editing that Charles said in the backend of Drupal. And yeah, that's basically the, the main things we've, we've done and then we do it every, every year.

John: I think, you know, it's interesting, I I was gonna ask about the CDN, but you already, you already an answered, answered that question and, and it makes sense.

I mean, I think, you know, that's the CDN is very very pivotal in, in, you know, ma in the uptime. I'm wondering the site is using Drupal as a front end theme, right? It's not headless or anything like that.

Diego: No, it is yeah, Drupal, we, we do use a storybook design system, react web components in the, in the theme.

Nic: Hmm.

Diego: With the, we do have two parts of the site that are an embedded React app for experience. Like when the users do their custom poster creation as they are selecting the color and the text, it automatically kind of updates the preview that is a little React app embedded. And also for the search of the materials it's connected to elastic search for the search engine.

And then and. The actual results part is a mm-hmm. A React app. But the rest is all standard Toal seeming.

John: Makes sense. And I guess we, I guess we didn't talk about this, so I'm, I'm gonna, I'm gonna ask Charles, I mean, I'm assuming as people are listening to this, they can go to world cancer day.org and make a donation if they want to.

Right. It's not, it's not typically like, only happens on February 4th, right?

Charles: Yes. So, I mean, our, our website is not a primary or the, the primary use of the website is not for or donations. But we, we do have a donation button, and so any donations are welcome.

John: Mm-hmm.

Charles: And but yeah, it, it's currently live.

You can see all, you can read all the stories and see all the activities that took place. It's. It's, well, it's a great resource if I may say so myself.

Nic: I did want to say, so, so it sounds like the primary is like, evangelism or outreach, right? So, so maybe we can give you a second awareness.

John: I think it's

Nic: awareness. The second, maybe if we give you a minute, you can tell us like what this year's message was like what if people are interested in keeping an eye out next year, what, what can they,

Charles: So we developed a three year campaign. So this year was the second year of the United by Unique campaign.

What, what Diego's hoodie is he's wearing. So that, that's the theme. And it's more about personalized care and it's, it's, it's about the fact that every experience with cancer is very unique. So that's the unit, unit, unique part, and everyone's. Experience with cancer care is very unique.

The united part is, of course, is that we're all united in our messages. That there's a lot more that could be done to improve personalized care and access to cancer treatment, cancer care, cancer prevention and, and probably not doing it the justice it deserves. But in a nutshell, that's what it, I mean,

John: I, I think you're do, I think you're doing great because, you know, we kind of just sprung that question on you or that, that reply on you.

The other thing I wanted to ask was around content. So obviously you say, you know, you're the, the, around February 4th, you're, you're updating content, but are you guys updating content on the website throughout the year, or is it really just, you know, in the, the weeks, months before or after that?

February 4th date?

Charles: Fourth. So we mainly update, I would say as as Diego mentioned before, it's we launched the campaign, I would say in, in October, November preceding the next world Cancer Day. And we do update the content. We usually like, wipe the map of activities clean because then new activities are organized.

We usually do a bit of new content depending on the social media activity.

I don't, I don't anticipate will, will change. We, we had a really fun social media, well, fun. It was a, a good way of raising awareness, I would say, because it was the upside down challenge. And so people would flip their, their photo on LinkedIn or post pictures of them upside down in, in various ways.

And that was a way to, to raise awareness around the day and cancer as a whole. And so we, we have that kind of content that we update that we get stories. I would say mainly in the months before and on the day itself. We will get content or activity submissions throughout the year. But I would say October, November to say March is the, the main.

Hardware, we we're really updating the website.

Diego: But I would say, Charles, that every three years you do a major rewrite. When, when the new campaign comes. So when the next one starts, then there will be a lot of work to rewrite because that's what happened when United Bio came.

Charles: Exactly. Sorry, I should provide that in that context.

Thank you. Yeah. So every three years we.

The kind of, in the year one, it's more about raising awareness. In year two, it's kind of understanding the problem. Year three, it's maybe, we'll, we'll package those, will analyze all the stories that we received. We'll look at whether recurring themes and some of the, the problems like maybe it's patient navigation and so as maybe I, I hope none of you had to find that out.

But in some countries it's really difficult to understand, you know, what's next in their cancer journey, who they can reach out to for what kind of care. And so, that may be something that comes out in the stories that is something that's continuously lacking in different in different countries.

And so then we will reach out kind of with our network of members to policy makers to see how, what they can do to improve that in their, in their respective context.

Sorry, I cut you, Diego. I dunno if you wanted to add to that.

Diego: No, no, no. I was just mentioning it, a three year kind of rewrite journey.

Charles: Yeah. And I would say, just to add on that, that is exciting in a way because every three years we have to kind of, well, we don't reinvent the whole website, but there's, the homepage is often where we see a lot of of changes.

And I was really excited about this year, this, this campaign because I really liked the, the branding and with all the emotions that are floating and, and crossing and with you have individual. Little pictures of individual stories and those are actually the, the user submitted content. So it's, it's real people's stories that are appearing on the own page and you can click through and, and read their story

Steve: has such a, a strong open source community if you've been able to collaborate with or benefit from the broader Drupal ecosystem while building and maintaining the World Cancer Day platform.

Charles: Can we all let Diego answer this one, or at least

Diego: Well, from, from our perspective, yes, we do. We, all the sites, we do a lot. The contribution, it's like we are. We heavily engaged with the community do a lot of work with the community. We learn a lot benefit from what has been going on in different modules and ecosystems.

Like, all the great work that's done on web form, on translation management or ai we can, we can use here. And we also contribute a lot back and we use a lot of our own modules that we are maintaining and we have a lot of maintainers in our team. So, yes, it's a great collaboration.

John: Hmm. I think

Charles: that's, I I can, I can just add that, that I really do enjoy the, the open source nature of.

That we have at UICC and it's all about sharing knowledge and, and, and kind of finding solutions together. And, and that kind of spirit is, is very much aligned with, with what we do.

Nic: I, I'm, I'm actually curious specifically about how in organizations such as yours approaches that, because I know generally in the scientific community, a a lot of people are about that.

They're about sharing knowledge, right? You get into science a lot of times because you're interested in, or medicine because you're interested in, you know, learning, helping other people getting information out there. But a, a lot of researchers get behind paywalls and and a lot of research, a lot of how do you say, research that has a negative result, like, doesn't have a, a positive result in the outcome, doesn't get published.

So is there an initiative to try to make information sharing and saying like, Hey, we studied this thing and it's not fruitful, don't go down that pathway. Is there, do you try to help with the research side too, or is it just

Charles: So I mean, we're very much, we cover the whole spectrum of cancer control. So research is one aspect, and medicines and treatment are a very specific aspect, but there's so much more to that, that, for instance, for national cancer control plans that's one of the websites, the IP portal that we run in.

In partnership with other organizations, I should say, we are trying to give access to all of the national cancer control plans. The, some of my colleagues in, in and in UIC and other organizations have kind of reviewed all of, or a lot of the cancer control plans and kind of said, you know, these are quite strong in these areas.

So there's a bit, a bit of that. There's about implementation science, so what works in different communities. We, we are also working with other, other organizations on tobacco control, which is also a big aspect of of, of cancer control. So more in the prevention side. Sharing of knowledge of how to best go about implementing that tho those prevention mechanisms in your different countries.

So yes, you, you could say that in specific science and development of cancer drugs. Of course, there's a lot of secrecy and gatekeeping because of course there's proprietary aspects to that. But there's a lot of other aspects to cancer control, which are not gate kept and which are, we're trying to get the information out there and to connect the people together in different contexts and settings in which they could help each other or learn from each other.

John: Diego, I wanted to focus in on something you, you just mentioned. And it was around kind of like custom, custom module development. I'm wondering, has there been a feature or functionality that you wished was available in the contri space that you, you just couldn't, couldn't find and that you had to build custom?

Like, and, and if so, like any plans to kind of contribute that back maybe?

Diego: So, lemme think. I think the, the only real thing that we did custom was the. The AI moderation on the web form submission. Because we didn't find a ready module already, but we still use the underlying core AI core. Sure.

We use the open AI provider module, so it's still using some of those. And the summarization also, when we did, we did. So the summarization and the moderation, we did custom. I know a lot of work has been going on in that space. There's probably things coming out every every week there is something new coming out, so I'm sure that something will be there soon.

But that was mainly the only one. We did the custom poster as a React app, but it was more a front-end thing then. And it was more interactive, so not really something that we looked into the modules, but everything else we used existing modules.

John: What, what LLM are you using? Is it like, is it, is it your own kind of, you know, private LLM or is it, is it you know, one of the mainstream?

Diego: It's somewhat, well, it's a private micro, like it's still open ai, but it's in u Iccs, private Microsoft Makes sense environment.

Nic: Oh, so you're using like the Azure service? I think it,

Diego: yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Nic: Wait, so is this site hosted on Azure in general or is it just that tool?

Diego: Just just the ai

Nic: disguises.

Okay. I have hosted Drupal sites in Azure, and that is an exercise in pain and misery. I would not recommend hosting on Windows environments. Yeah. That is painful. It's possible. It's painful. I I kind of wanted to circle back to something that we talked about a little bit earlier before we we move on, which is the kind of three year cycle of campaigns that you guys had mentioned.

Because I'm, I'm curious if I'm curious how you came to that three year cycle. Was it, it, was there like a strategy? Is there a strategy behind it? Is it a resourcing thing you'd rather, you'd like to do more often? Refreshes? Do you find you get better data? Why do you choose a three year cycle? So,

Charles: so just to be clear, it's a three year cycle for the theme.

And the reason, so in, I think this is the third, third cycle of a, well, it's the third time we're doing a, a three year theme. Because before we would do, each year was a different theme. And obviously at that time we didn't change the, the website so significantly. I mean, we would update it, but not as dramatically I would say.

And there was multiple reasons. One was, as you pointed out yourself, it was more a question of resources. Once we develop all the material, all the branding, all the, all, all the, the copy, et cetera, it is quite an investment in time and money on our part. And we feel it always felt a bit a waste to only use it a year.

And we've also noticed that, in the yearly cycle, sometimes we would often see, you know, some organization in some country using one of the previous year's theme because they particularly liked it or because they didn't realize we had moved on to a different theme. And so we felt that having a three year cycle gave gave more, more time for us to talk about a certain problematic that we wanted to, to address.

The previous three year was close the care gap, so it was about, you know, giving access to, to certain parts of the community that may be, you know, out of the loop of healthcare systems or have, problems with access. So it's really, with this three years cycle, we felt we were investing a bit more time in addressing that that theme.

And also we were kind of, because we have all these over a thousand members across the world, it also gives them more time to invest into that particular theme in their setting and to kind of really explore all they can with, with that theme of how they can communicate about cancer in their context.

So, it's, it's practical and strategic, I would say.

Nic: Yeah, I think, I think that makes sense. It also gives you opportunity to refine a little bit year over year and, and make something exactly a little bit more poignant if necessary. Yeah, no, I was curious because I've never, I've never had a client that has an annual thing that they have like a, a thread like that.

It's just pretty interesting. Getting, getting back to the platform itself. So if you're looking ahead to the next, I, I think you said that this next year's, the third year, so you're getting ready to, you'll be getting ready to ramp up the next year. Are there, what kind of improvements or innovations are you considering to kind of help make these bigger transitions easier or more efficient?

Charles: I think e every, I mean, apart from the, the first year of a campaign, we kind of usually put more money in and more resources into reimagining the website and then the following two years, it's more about refining and improving incrementally. And I would say that one of the big focus is to make.

The experience for the user as frictionless and you know, as, as smooth as possible so that they can easily get to the information or to what they wanna do on the website as easily as possible. That there's no l like barrier that can prevent them to do that. So it's really about seeing how we can yeah, really use AI or other new modules to, to make that experience even better.

To be, to be honest, I'm, because of the fact that it's gone pretty well with the story moderation, I'm also looking at, we also get submission of activities and. A bit of work to go through those. So that's also where I could see potentially exploring how AI could make that process smoother. We're also very much interested in because we get a lot of user generated content.

The, the meta data and the, the tagging or the op text filling is not always done. So that's also where I could see ai perhaps doing that work for us. So it's, it's really a ma incremental I would like more languages and make, just making some things smoother for us also in the backend and, and for the user.

Nic: So, speaking of backend, Diego, how, how about you? What kinds of things are you doing to make these transitions easier so that you can, so the reach can be further?

Diego: Yeah, so I, I think what we, we do is, as Charles said, the first year is like we do this big relaunch of the team, not, not of the website, and then we kind of wait to see how users interact with it.

And, and then we, in, like last year there was a lot of interaction with certain parts of the website and then there was this excitement around doing the upside down challenge. So I implemented like a feature to all one of the custom poster options was they already upside down. So users would upload it straight and then it would automatically turn upside down.

The, the text. We put a upside down text generator feature that the user would type would type straight and it would automatically invert for them to copy and paste into social media. So I. I think now we are still analyzing how users use the site and, and looking at, okay, what do you wanna add in terms of increments for the next campaign?

And as Charles said, we saw the, the benefits of using AI for stories. So we probably going to explore doing that also for activities. And then yeah, see how, what else the feedback we get from the, the people that were part of it.

John: Hey, I, I have a question about. How folks submit their stories. Is it currently just text format?

Like they fill out a web form with text? 'Cause one of the things that comes to my mind is like being able to kind of like, re record your story or have, or have the site kind of record it for you, right. And, and like almost interview style.

Charles: Yeah, we have, that's a great question. And actually, oh, sorry Diego.

Diego: No, you can go. You can go.

Charles: No, I was gonna say it was it was something we and thanks for reminding me the upside down text because that was quite an adventure. I can, I can tell that Onex spent some time trying to get it right and, and the result is, is great now. But to your question yes. So there's three different formats of answer submitting.

Sorry, either by text or it can be the video, or it can be artwork because we also saw that a lot of cancer patients, they express, you know, the whole experience of cancers through art. And I must say that's also a wonderful thing to, to go and explore all the artwork that you can find from, from diff different people.

But I would say the, your idea of the interview format, that's actually quite good. 'cause it's currently we can only, the, the, the users can only upload a prepared video file, but not not record live on the website. So thanks for that great idea. I hope we can steal it.

John: Take it, take it, run with it.

If you need more, more insight, I'm, I'm, I'm thinking, I'm thinking more about it as, as we're talking about it, but you, you go, you happy to see how it works out?

Diego: David, do you wanna add? No, just, yeah. When it's the, what we call it, the narrative then you have two options. It's either free text, so you write your story as, as you wish, or it's guided q and a.

So we prepared depending on what kind, like, because you, you say if you are a, a cancer survivor or if you're a family member, or if you are a medical professional, someone that's taking care of someone, then the questions that come to you are a little bit different because you, you, you experience cancer differently.

So that there is that guided also option. So it's four, I would say four options that you have, you submit.

Nic: So. Before we close out the show, I wanted to give you guys a chance maybe Charles give you a chance to do a little PSA if you can. So I know that early detection is extremely important. I'm, I'm curious if there's, if there are any recent advancements in early detection that you'd like our listeners to kinda keep in mind?

Charles: I wouldn't say, well, if I can just say prevention is is still the, the best way to to kind of, let's say reduce your chances of developing cancer. And I would say one advanced and which maybe, I'm not sure if people who don't work in the cancer space dunno about, but there, there've been great advancements in, in eliminating certain cancers like cervical cancer.

I mean, we're all men on this. Do you know that there is a vaccine against cervical cancer that was developed and actually a lot of countries are, are starting to, to use and in some contexts is also given to men because they can also transmit the, it, the h PV virus. I believe that can lead to the development of cervical cancer.

So I would say that I'm not an oncologist. I, what I can tell you in early detection, I mean, there's a lot that's being done with ai, more on analyzing, you know, scans there's been progress in in that, but it's more about looking at the imagery and, and not necessarily but I'm not, I, I'm, I'm afraid I'm not the greatest expert in that, in that field.

So. I'll

Nic: say, yeah, no, no problem. It was another last minute edition. I was just thinking it'd be a good, good thing to know. Yeah. I mean, prevention, prevention is the best medicine, right? That's the same for a reason. So,

Charles: well, it contributes to a, a big chunk of reduction of cancer risk. But yes, you should get checked get checked, and you should follow your, your doctor's recommendations for a screening, et cetera.

John: Well, Charles and Diego thank you for, for the important work that you're doing, and also thank you for joining us today to, to talk about it. Hopefully we've done a, a, a very small part in raising awareness and, and helping the cause. So appreciate you joining us today.

Nic: Thank you for having me.

Diego: Yes. Yeah. Thanks for having us. Yeah, it was good to share this with everybody.

Nic: Do you have questions or feedback? You can reach out to talking Drupal on the socials with the handle Talking Drupal or by email or show at Talking Drupal dotcom. You can connect with our host and other listeners on the Drupal Slack in the Talking Drupal channel.

John: Do you wanna be a guest on talking Drupal or our new show TD Cafe? Click the guest request button in the [email protected].

Nic: You can promote your Drupal community event on Talking Drupal. Learn [email protected] slash tvd promo.

John: Get the Talking Drupal newsletter to learn more about our guest hosts, show news, upcoming shows, and much more.

Sign up for the [email protected] slash newsletter.

Nic: And thank you patrons for supporting talking Drupal. Your support is greatly appreciated. You can learn more about becoming a patron at talking Drupal do com and choosing become a patron.

John: Alright, Charles, if folks wanted to get ahold of you to talk more about World Cancer Day or find out more information, how could they best do that?

Charles: They can reach me on LinkedIn or at my email kin at uscc org.

John: Awesome. Diego, what about you?

Diego: I am on drupal.org at Diego F, cost or LinkedIn.

John: Awesome. And Steve,

Steve: I'm s swt at

Nic: Drupal Slack and drup.org.

John: Nick,

Nic: you can find me pretty much everywhere at Nicks van, N-I-C-X-V-A-N,

John: and I'm John Zi. You can find me [email protected].

You can find me on the socials and drupal.org at John Zi, and you can find out more about EA [email protected].

Nic: And if you've enjoyed listening, we've enjoyed talking. See you guys next week.

John: Thanks a lot, everyone.