Talking Drupal #560 - Content Sync

[00:00:00] 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 560, Content Sync. On today's show, we're talking about content syndication and syndication between Drupal sites with Thimo Mueller. We'll also cover Drupal Core 11.4, hey, that rhymes, as our module of the week.

Definitely, I guess I should have said core version of the week, but hey, whatever. Welcome to Talking Drupal. Our guest today is Thimo Mueller. Thimo worked as the technology lead in a German Drupal agency before founding Content Sync to support enterprises and universities with sharing and reusing content in Drupal.

Today, he focuses on AI search optimization and supports the Drupal Association with GEO and AEO, which we'll talk about later. In his free time, he plays the drums and would love to have an open mic night at all DrupalCons for the community to jam together. I think the community would love that as well.

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

[00:01:18] Thiemo: Thank you so much for having me.

[00:01:20] John: My, uh, my son also plays the drums. Right now, he's just on, like, a snare drum, but maybe we, maybe we can talk about that a little bit later.

[00:01:29] Thiemo: You should bring him to DrupalCon. Yeah.

[00:01:31] John: There you go. Yeah, there you go. He would, uh, he would love, he would love that.

I'm John Picozzi, solutions architect at EPAM, and today my co-hosts are, joining us for his four-week stint as guest host, Ashraf Abdel, tech lead and product owner at Drupaldo and, uh, of Debug Academy fame. Ashraf is the founder of Drupaldo, a platform that's making Drupal easier to adopt and manage. He worked as an architect at Acquia before teaching at Debug Academy for over 10 years.

Today, he's focused on making Drupal competitive in the age of Replit. That is no small task. Ashraf, welcome to the show.

[00:02:16] Ashraf : Thank you so much. Pleasure to be here. Excited.

[00:02:19] John: And last, but certainly not least, Nic Laflin, founder at nLightened Development. Nic, how's it going?

[00:02:25] Nic: Happy to be here. Glad to be back.

[00:02:28] John: Staying dry?

[00:02:31] Nic: In the house at the moment, but outside is pretty drenched.

[00:02:35] John: Yeah. It's, uh, we got like flood warnings going on. It's raining. It's been raining for like two, three days here, which is good 'cause we're in a drought. Um, so a little bit of, little bit of water hopefully will go a long way. All right, we have a, a big not so much module of the week, but core version of the week for you.

So let's, uh, turn it over to Martin Anderson-Clutz, a product marketing manager for Drupal at Acquia and a maintainer of a number of Drupal modules of his own. Martin, what are we talking about this week?

[00:03:05] Martin: Thanks, John. Are you excited for a feature release of Drupal Core that delivers even more performance acceleration, a modernized developer experience, and a slew of administrator and editor improvements?

Drupal Core eleven point four delivers all of that and more. Now, it was created on July 1st, uh, by Catch of Tag1, and there's a lot to talk about. We'll start with performance improvements because when Drupal 11.3 was released just a few months ago, we talked about what a massive performance jump it represented, the biggest improvement in a decade.

Now, 11.4 has done it again. Database queries are reduced by half across a range of requests due to optimizations in how entity fields are loaded. Overall, that represents a nearly two-thirds improvement for database and cache lookups on a cold cache compared to Drupal 11 or 10.6. Entity listing queries have also been refactored to use fewer table joins, reducing slow queries.

Additionally, the link field introduces a resolvable URI property and token which returns a ready-to-use front-end link, like main content, right out of the API instead of raw internal URLs or URIs, which will be a huge benefit for anyone using Drupal for decoupled and JSON API-based use cases. Applying a recipe in Drupal 11.4 is also sig-significantly faster, reportedly twice as fast, and that includes installing Drupal CMS.

Drupal now also supports Brotli compression, which should yield a 15 to 25% better compression of CSS and JS assets. For

security, Drupal 11.4 offers a new password hashing algorithm, Argon2id, that will become the default in Drupal 12 later this year. Also, the Drupal Core recommended package no longer strictly locks minor versions for critical dependencies like Guzzle, Twig, or Symfony polyfills, making it easier to immediately receive important security updates.

Drupal's default robots.txt now blocks well-behaved search crawlers from indexing search queries, helping to solve a potential source of traffic overload on sites using faceted search. For developer experience, there's been a significant shift towards the adoption of PHP attributes in recent Drupal releases, and 11.4 is no exception.

You can now define application routes directly w-within your PHP controller and form classes using the Symfony Route attribute. This drastically reduces the need to jump back and forth into routing .YAML files. The new Bundle attribute allows developers to define bundle classes directly, eliminating the need to write old-school EntityTypeInfo or EntityTypeInfoAlter hook implementations.

All core .theme and .themesettings.php files have been moved entirely to PHP classes. Support for legacy .theme files will be dropped in Drupal 13. Furthermore, dozens of core .module files have been fully converted into clean PHP classes. Uh, front controllers now leverage the Symfony runtime component to isolate bootstrapping logic from request handling, preparing the Drupal core architecture for advanced environments like FrankenPHP, known for its blazing fast performance, among other features.

Drupal 11.4 introduces a native extensible command line tool, a DR, built in partnership with Drush maintainers. This kicks off a transitional period where Drush commands will gradually be migrated into the core native binary. Also, the new HttpKernelUI helper trait for kernel tests lets developers make mock HTTP requests and assertions without running the full Drupal site installer.

This allows many traditional browser tests to be rewritten as much faster kernel tests. For editor experience, Drupal 11.4 includes the new default admin theme, a version of the popular Gin admin theme now in core. The navigation module is now enabled by default, replacing the legacy toolbar, and CKEditor once again has a full-screen button available without a contrib add-on, allowing editors to fully immerse themselves in a WYSIWYG Elements content, great for working on long format pieces.

Now, there are a number of deprecations in 11.4 as well. So the initial 11.4.0 release actually removed a number of core recipes. They were since restored in an 11.4.1 release, but they are deprecated and will be removed from Drupal 12. Also on their way out are a number of modules including Ban, Contact, Field Layout, History, Migrate Drupal and its UI, Search, Settings, Tray, Shortcut, Telephone, Toolbar, and a flag module called Layout Builder Expose All Field Blocks.

For themes, Claro, Stable 9, and Olivero are all deprecated and will be moved from core. We'll include the meta issue about these deprecations in the show notes, and if any of these are important to you, it's worth tracking where they are on the path of moving to contrib. But let's talk about Drupal Core 11.4.

[00:08:17] John: Yeah, just a small update I will say I, uh, I updated my, uh, my site to, uh, 11.4 yesterday. Um, I had already kind of switched over to the Gin admin theme in a previous update, so I was kind of using that. It was great to get to the default admin theme. I will say it is, um, tagged as experimental, so you will get that experimental warning, but, you know, as long as you know what's going on there, you got...

You're okay. Um, I did find one bug with it with media library. When you go to select a media item, the CSS gets a little janky, but there is a, there's a patch to fix that. So, I'm gonna see if that works, and, um, I may comment on it in a future, in a future episode. But, um, was really excited to see, you know, navigation, uh, replace toolbar.

I do enjoy the navigation and, and then all the, um, all the improvements I think are, uh, are gonna be great, especially, especially those performance improvements.

[00:09:23] Nic: Yeah, I will, I will say Mike Herschel's been doing a lot of work to get default admin kind of up to speed, and there's, there's a lot of ground to cover there. Um, and yeah, I'm, I'm excited this, this release has so much. Uh, like the .theme deprecation is almost ready, but the fact that you no longer need to have a .theme file is pretty nice.

You can use kind of object-oriented principles and auto-loading. And of course, I have been doing a lot of work to eliminate .module files as well so that we can use, you know, dependency injection, all the nice object-oriented stuff there as well. So it's, it's a long road. I think we fully converted 38 modules, almost 40 modules, and I think there's six or seven remaining, um, that, that have some work to do.

Locale, user, views are all major undertakings. It's

[00:10:18] John: inter- it's interesting to me, like, uh, the deprecations and the number of things that are being removed. Uh, you know, going through this list, I'm kinda like, "Huh, okay." Like, this all, this all completely makes sense that this should live, like, in a con- in a contrib space as opposed to in Drupal core to me.

There's nothing here that I'm kind of like, "Well, why would you do that?" Um, you know, removing Olivero, like, also kinda makes sense to me. Like, I, I, I can see why we wouldn't necessarily want a, um, you know, a front-end theme packaged, packaged with, uh, Drupal core. Um, especially with the advent of, of, and the ability to enable recipes and things like that.

[00:11:01] Nic: Well, it's, it's more- Yeah ... I think it's more... Oh, go ahead, Martin.

[00:11:04] Martin: Oh, I was just gonna quickly say the one thing that, that was deprecated that I actually kind of like am sad to see move out of core is Settings Tray because I always felt like that was a, a piece that I th- I personally thought was really cool- Mm

and tried to make use of whenever, you know, I thought there was an applicable use case. And I feel like, you know, having it as a contrib module will probably make it, you know, just a little extra barrier in terms of like is it, is it right for a project, but.

[00:11:29] John: I, I, I'd actually like to see, if we haven't already done it, Settings Tray as a module of the week just 'cause I'm like-

I'm kind of like trying to remember where I, I saw it and used it 'cause I do- I can- ... feel like you're right, but.

[00:11:42] Nic: I can speak to that a little bit because, uh- You know, core maintainers are part of the discussion to remove modules. And let's just say, S- Settings tray is cool. It should be used more, but it never really got fully integrated, and part of the reason why we deprecated and removed it was we found out that it doesn't work with any of the core themes right now at all.

So if it's in contrib, it will have the ab- Like, moving something to contrib doesn't mean that it's not useful or that it shouldn't be used. It's just that- It's just

[00:12:15] John: optional ...

[00:12:17] Nic: well, it's optional, or there's a dependency that's tricky to keep up to date, or it needs to move at a different speed than core.

And moving settings tray to contrib will make it able to evolve faster than, than it does in core right now. So if people wanna use it, they still can, and they can support it more easily in, in contrib.

[00:12:39] John: Um- I, I have a, I have a question for you guys. You might, you might or might not know the answer. But, um, does navigation still require layout builder?

And if so, is there a plan to kind of, like, remove that requirement in future versions? 'Cause I see, like, it feels like with Canvas being so, so, um, tied into core now that, like, you know, you're probably gonna move away from layout builder i- in a, you know, a 13 or 14 version of Drupal.

[00:13:09] Martin: Yeah. I'll be honest, John, I, I sort of had the same question myself, and I don't know.

Like, I, I certainly would hope that it, because it's enabled by default, that doesn't mean you're sort of locked into having layout builder. Well, locked is probably too strong a word, but you're not ending up with, you know, sort of layout builder and, and I think there was one other module that, that navigation required.

So hopefully they've removed that dependency. I feel like that was one of the things that was on the roadmap. So hopefully that was sorted out before now, but yeah, that would be an interesting one to, to dig a little more into

[00:13:40] Ashraf : Yeah, I'll say, um, one thing that caught my attention was removing Migrate Drupal UI from core and, uh, heading in that direction in general.

I do agree with it. Of course, the further we get from Drupal 7, the fewer people that provides value to. Um, but, uh, I, I find that and a few of these other ones, um, such as the routing via PHP attributes, a, a lot of these are, um... How do I say it? Uh, they, they would pair really nicely with a marketing campaign.

So for example, get off of Drupal 7 before, uh, Drupal 12 be- or before Drupal 13, you know, um, because Migrate's on its way out. This is, it's not your last chance, you know, we don't say anything that's not factual. But at the same time, having it in core, um, you can have more confidence that it's going to be well-maintained.

[00:14:37] John: Yeah.

[00:14:38] Ashraf : Um, and this is something that I told to one of my clients actually who has been on Drupal 7 for ages, and it was one of the factors that led them to decide to finally, you know, uh, make the decision and move forward with the, the migration. Um- Mm-hmm ... PHP attributes and the, the others are of course a different category of, um, marketing messaging.

Um, but, uh, there are people doing great work in that category. Uh, I know we'll see videos from Web Wash where they show what's new with Drupal and, um, I do think, um, showing, uh, how, the fact that we're getting a little bit more similar in terms of developer experience, um, to something like Laravel, which people love, and, um, we're not losing what makes Drupal great.

Um, so I, I find, you know, we're not just benefiting ourselves in existing projects, I think we're making Drupal a lot more appealing, um- Yeah ... to work with

[00:15:36] John: So I have one, one last question, Martin. Um, what, what is FrankenPHP for those folks that don't know or it sounds scary to?

[00:15:49] Martin: So, uh, yeah, I'll... Did you wanna jump in on this one, Nic?

No, I just- You

[00:15:52] Nic: have a bit. Okay ... if, if, if you don't know I c- I can speak to it, but feel free.

[00:15:56] Martin: Sure. So, you know, a- as I mentioned, FrankenPHP, I think the, the primary reason people are excited about it out of the box is that it has, um... So it runs more like Node.js in the sense that it sort of like, uh, boots up once and then can, uh, handle multiple requests as opposed to like the way PHP works where it sort of like, uh, starts a new thread for, for each request that comes in.

And so as a result, it, it is able to, um, much more efficiently handle, you know, sort of like high volumes of requests. But it also has, you know, other features like, um-

[00:16:30] Nic: Long-running

[00:16:31] Martin: tasks ... support native s- sorry. What's that?

[00:16:33] Nic: Long-running tasks, things like that. Like if you need like- Yeah ... a cron job or something, it doesn't have to stop and restart.

[00:16:39] Martin: Yeah. And, and it natively supports HTTP/2, HTTP/3, and zstandard compression out of the box. Um, has different thing- uh, automatically handles HTTPS certificates, including Let's Encrypt. Mm. So there's, there's, you know, like I feel like, um, you know, sort of the speed is sort of like the marquee feature, but it, there are also a, a variety of other reasons why people are, are pretty excited about that potentially being something Drupal can run on in the future.

[00:17:03] Nic: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And there's, and issue for that if people wanna work towards it, 'cause yeah, there's, there's a lot more to, uh, there's a long way to go still until we can fully support it, but, um, this was a, a big step towards that.

[00:17:16] John: Going- Yeah. Going, g- going back to that comment on marketing, like FrankenPHP sounds like a scary thing.

But it's actually a very useful thing.

[00:17:25] Martin: Well, yeah, I mean, I can remember people talking about like trying to go in front of like a senior board of directors or something and, and talk about like .NET Nuke as one of the, you know, CMS options they were considering. They're like, "Really?" So yeah.

[00:17:39] Nic: That's hilarious.

Never heard of that.

[00:17:40] Martin: And

[00:17:41] Thiemo: I think the, the long-running PHP tasks are especially important for AI use cases, right?

[00:17:47] Martin: Yeah, a great point

[00:17:47] John: Yeah. I mean, having to, having to start and stop tasks is a, is, you know, everybody, everybody thinks that's annoying, so being able to long run them or, or, and have multiples run at the same time and stuff like that is very, I'm assuming, very useful.

Well, Martin, um, I would thank you for bringing us an on-topic module, but this happens to be a core version, so thanks, thanks for telling us all about 11.4. And, uh, you know what? Um, if you're not on 11.4 right now, stop listening, go update, and then you can just start the podcast where you left off. Um, Martin, if folks wanted to suggest a module of the week, how could they go about doing that?

[00:18:27] Martin: We're always happy to talk about candidates for module of the week in the Talking Drupal channel of Drupal Slack, or folks can reach out to me directly as mandclu on a variety of Drupal and social channels.

[00:18:38] John: Great. See you next week.

[00:18:40] Nic: Awesome.

[00:18:40] Ashraf : Thanks.

[00:18:41] Martin: See you then. Thanks.

[00:18:44] John: All right. Let's jump into the primary topic. Um, so just to, just to level set before we jump into, um, our first, our first set of questions here. Um, for listeners that haven't heard of, of Content Sync before, um, what is it? How is it different from content syndication, which is a, a module on Drupal? And then overall, what problem, um, are you guys trying to solve that traditional Drupal might not handle very well?

[00:19:20] Thiemo: Yes. So that, uh, traces back a bit to the origins. Um, so my own background is that I've worked for a Drupal agency in Germany, um, where BMW is one of our customers. Um, and they needed a way to share content across all of their different dealership sites to basically roll out content centrally, but then also to be able to customize it on each of the dealership sites, because everyone wants to then add their own little touch to it, uh, talk to, uh, talk to their own local, um, folks a bit more, um, custom.

And so that's basically the, the bridge that we wanted to, um, the gap that we wanted to bridge. Um, and there wasn't really anything out there, so that was, I think, about nine or eight years ago. Um, and so we set out to build our own, and then figured that basically every other larger enterprise and also universities in Drupal is facing the same issue.

And so that's when we started Content Sync as a service. Um, and so it's compared to what you can do with the open source modules on Drupal, um, it has a lot more configuration options, so it has a lot more things that you can do with it. It's more scalable, and it makes it easier to bridge this gap between the standardization needs that you want to roll out content centrally, but then also be able to customize it across your different, um, sites that you have in your portfolio.

[00:20:41] John: So, okay, so that, that all makes, that all makes a lot of sense to me. Um, so content synchronization, Drupal module, that is Drupal, Drupal solely, right? Um, Content Sync uses, uh, the, the, um, tag, uh, CMS_content_sync. Is that right?

[00:21:02] Martin: Yes. Did I get that right?

[00:21:03] John: Okay. Um, and basically Content Sync is a module and a service that allows for kind of a, um, content hub, if you will, uh, for your, for your content to kind of syndicate to your, to your, and synchronize between your sites.

Did I, did I summarize that correctly?

[00:21:22] Thiemo: Yes, correct. Okay. More scalable, more flexible. Yeah.

[00:21:25] John: Awesome.

[00:21:26] Nic: Awesome. And is, is Content Sync Drupal specific, or can you synchronize with other- tools or CMSs or platforms?

[00:21:36] Thiemo: Um, so the, the central system itself is technology agnostic, so it doesn't really matter what kind of technology is used on the other end.

Um, that being said, the focus has and still is Drupal. So what we do is, um, that we mostly serve, um, Drupal to Drupal synchronizations. Um, but we also, um, have, have a way to basically, uh, customize or configure ContentSync to work with, um, external third parties. So that allows you to integrate different services with Drupal, um, in a more robust and scalable way that you, than you would typically be able to do if you work within Drupal only.

[00:22:17] Ashraf : Very interesting. Um, so correct me if I misunderstood. Uh, one of the things you mentioned is essentially, uh, customers may want to have, uh, this, similar pieces of content or they may want to reuse content almost in different contexts. So almost like having a different display mode for the same content.

One thing I'm curious about is, um, if you have this piece of content, um, let's say like an About Us, and you want to use it differently for different websites. Um, each website could, in that case it sounds like, start from the content and customize it, and if they customize it, can those customizations, are those, are they then owned by that website or do they send them back upstream?

Is there some sort of like merging process? Like, it sounds like it could get pretty complicated.

[00:23:07] Thiemo: It can. Um, and the thing is that it's usually the most complicated for editors. So we usually recommend to keep things as simple as possible. That being said, if you run a large Drupal platform, then you need to have a lot of options available to, um, to match all of the different use cases that you have.

Um, but Content Sync basically allows you to use it in different ways, and you can also, um, combine them. So you could have, for example, a central main, um, Drupal site where you enter global content, news articles that you want to be available across different markets, for example, um, or across different department and faculty sites for a university.

Um, and then you can share that centrally across your sites and keep that up to date. Um, or alternatively, you can also configure it to allow local changes, in which case editors can make their own version. They can maybe change a paragraph, for example. They can also add a paragraph. Um, and that's where merging also comes in.

So you can also add a paragraph locally, and then maybe remotely a new paragraph joins, and so we have to basically merge those, um, together, trying to preserve the original content, but also allowing and incorporating the local changes. Um, so that's where it gets a bit more complex. Um, but those are certainly use cases that become more and more interesting the bigger your platform is because the more things you can basically automate with content and syndication.

[00:24:35] John: Hmm. That's interesting. Um, so many, I guess many organizations kind of struggle with managing content across their, across their sites. They might have, you know, well, three sites, they might have a dozen sites or even 100 sites. Um, do you have any, like, real world examples? I know earl- early, early on in the conversation you talked about, uh, get- you know, kind of a start with BMW and universities, but do you have, like, any other real world examples, um, where Content Sync has kind of simplified, um, you know, that challenge?

[00:25:14] Thiemo: Yes. So, um, there are a bunch of different use cases that you can use it to, um, uh, use it for. So the, the first one that I mentioned before was for BMW, so that's, uh, basically a franchise kind of model. Mm. So they have a central site that rolls out all of the different pages, and you can centrally manage them.

You can also roll out articles that come in, um, but then still allow each of the, uh, tenants to basically have their own version if they want to.

[00:25:41] Martin: Mm.

[00:25:41] Thiemo: But without having the burden of having to customize and create and copy and paste everything between those sites.

[00:25:47] Martin: Mm-hmm.

[00:25:47] Thiemo: Um, for universities, the most common use cases are to, um, to share news articles.

So they either share that centrally across their sites to basically publish and provide relevant content at all of the different touch points that a user may be at. Um, or they may use it to, um, actually do it the other way around, so to basically allow all of the different sites to, to provide news articles, share that with the repository, and then providing that in a central news hub.

Um, so that's, that's one of the other use cases that we're seeing. But yeah, literally, literally anything that, that has multi-site or multiple, uh- And- ... content, places

[00:26:25] John: for content ... so it, it sounds like you're, you're talking about, so w- w- we're talking about synchronizing content, right? So you're talking a little bit about kind of a content hub model where- Mm

you know, you have a centralized site that's pushing out content to, um, or providing content to other sites, right? And then there's, like, a syndication model where you're like, "Oh, this news item has to go out to this site," and it's like a one for one, it's never gonna change. Um, with Content Sync, can you use both of those models together for, for your site?

Like, can you determine based on, like, content type which one is gonna be syndicated and which one's gonna be kind of like, uh, the hub, hub model?

[00:27:04] Thiemo: Yes, absolutely. Um, and that's also very common. So we-

[00:27:08] John: Mm ...

[00:27:08] Thiemo: uh, we can also share taxonomy terms independently, for example. So having taxonomies up to date and consistent across sites can become a real challenge at scale.

Mm-hmm. So if you have hundreds or even a thousand Drupal sites, it's very hard to make sure or ensuring that the terms that you're using on the sites are actually consistent and not confusing for people- Yeah ... going to different places and different touch points. Yeah. Um, but then maybe news articles, um, you may want to allow to customize and create your own version.

Uh, so that can be based on the entity type, the bundle. Um, it can be on assigned terms, for example. Mm. So there's, there's a lot of flexibility in how and how you configure it.

[00:27:47] John: Does it, does it work the same with media, like media types? Can you, can you sync images and stuff like that, too?

[00:27:52] Thiemo: Yes, absolutely. So the- Mm

the default is basically to synchronize snapshots of notes. That's the default setting. But then you can also customize it to, to exclude maybe certain things that you don't want to have. Sure. Or instead have taxonomies, media independent, et cetera.

[00:28:08] Ashraf : If it handles images and such, does that mean it also, uh, acts as a DAM, digital a- asset management system?

[00:28:16] Thiemo: Um, so what we do is that we actually synchronize the physical copy of the image. Um, but we do have enterprise customers who have a DAM, and so what they do is that they select an image or an asset in one Drupal site, and then we only synchronize the reference to that to the other site so that we keep the overhead on the file system low.

Mm-hmm. So that's recommended if you're-

[00:28:37] Nic: Okay ...

[00:28:37] Thiemo: really working with it at scale. Um, and what we do is to share the, the actual asset.

[00:28:42] Nic: Okay. So I, I wanna talk a little bit more about the local overrides. Um, what does the interface look like for editors if they, they have to merge content, right? Um, is it, is it done in the con- in the Content Sync platform?

Is that done in Drupal directly? Like, i- if I have a... If I customize the About Us page on my particular domain and there's a conflict, where does that get resolved?

[00:29:13] Thiemo: Um, so we, we don't, uh, allow for conflicts basically. So, um, the idea is that you can either, um, have Content Sync override the values that you want to have in a specific field, for example, or it can allow it to merge if it is individual entities.

So if it is paragraphs, for example, um, then you can add your paragraph, you can reorder paragraphs, you can remove a paragraph, and that's mergeable. That's always mergeable. Um, and so that's the kind of customization that we allow, um, while avoiding, um, the, like, conflicts between, or where you have the same field value, for example.

So you do have to decide whether that specific field is local or it is remotely managed.

[00:29:55] Martin: Mm.

[00:29:55] John: And is that like a, is that like an overall governance structure for your organization? Like, are you, are you determining that at the, at the point of implementation where you're like, "Okay, here's how the governance is gonna work here.

Like, local site, you can, you can edit this and that, but you can't edit these things over here. They're always gonna be, like, on the Content, uh, Sync environment," and, and like, you know, uh, syndicated basically?

[00:30:21] Thiemo: Yes, absolutely. So content governance is probably one of the, the major reasons to use Content Sync, so that you can control how content flows, and you're also able to, um, to unpublish content, for example, across sites or keep it consistent- Mm

which becomes increasingly more important in the age of AI.

[00:30:40] John: Yep. Yeah, that makes, that makes a lot of sense. Okay, cool.

[00:30:45] Ashraf : So nowadays we find, um, a lot of Drupal sites, they're built in a composable way. Um, so you have your pages that maybe use Layout Builder or Drupal Canvas, and they may not get all of their content from the fields on the current page.

They might get the content from blocks or a view you drop in the page, or, um, different sources. Some of the blocks could even be decoupled and pull in content that way. Um, and of course, Drupal has its thorough, robust data model with, uh, you know, various entity types and bundles and, and all of that. Um, how does Content Sync integrate with that type of data model, the blocks, the entity types, the bundles, um, and, you know, uh, enable a editor to work with tools such as Layout Builder and Drupal Canvas while benefiting from, um, you know, managing the content through Content Sync?

[00:31:50] Thiemo: Yes, absolutely. So, um, one of the, one of the main time eaters for, for larger organizations is actually content governance and publishing content, approving content, um, and also having approved snippets that you can just use in your content. Um, so that's definitely one of the, one or, or a good reason to, to use Content Sync, um, to basically be able to share individual blocks, individual paragraph library items, um, individual bricks.

So we have bricks users as well. Um, and have basically have a central library that editors from, from across the ecosystem can pull in relevant content, but also relevant individual snippets and pieces that they can then recombine and use locally with the same, um, governance behind it. So you can have blocks, for example, that are a specific, one specific product that you maybe want to lock and you don't want to allow local changes to it.

And then there may be other blocks and parts where maybe you do want to allow, uh, local changes. And so there's, there's a lot of flexibility in, in how you can use it.

[00:32:56] John: So Bernardo's actually asking, this is a pretty, pretty good question, Bernardo, thank you. Does Content Sync support Drupal Canvas?

[00:33:06] Thiemo: So we're currently working on the Canvas integration, so we're now starting to see the first people using Canvas, uh, in production.

Um, I think it launched five months ago, if I'm not mistaken.

[00:33:17] Ashraf : Cool.

[00:33:18] Thiemo: Um, but yeah, so that's what we're working on right now to support that as well.

[00:33:23] John: And then he's also wondering what the overlap would be with, uh, exporting a content recipe. Mm-hmm. And I guess I'm, I, I guess, uh, my answer to that would be, like, you're using kind of that syndication service where you're, you're in real time syndicating content and sharing content between sites.

So trying to do, trying to do all that with exporting a, a content recipe sounds like it would be probably be a lot more complicated, but, um, I'll let you, I'll let you field that one.

[00:33:52] Thiemo: Yeah, certainly. Um, so the, the big difference is that one basically lives in a file system, the other one is near real time in the database.

Um, and so that, what that means is that if you want to get a piece of content from site A to site B, um, you would, would have to do some kind of deployment if it's in the file system. Mm. Um, and there's also usually, um, more, more things around it because we have to calculate dependencies. We want to make sure that all of the things that are part of the content also get included, et cetera.

Um, and so there's, there's more overhead, but it's also a lot slower than, than if we do it in near real time, meaning you push a button to share it, and a second later it's on the other side.

[00:34:31] Nic: And would- Yeah. And I imagine the, the time lag is pretty low because you have a central place reading from, and I mean, do the, do the syndicated sites, is it like a web hook where they get a notification or is it a poll where just every 10 seconds they check to see if there's new content?

H- how does- How does that work?

[00:34:51] Thiemo: Um, so it's working asynchronously with REST interfaces on a technical level. Okay. Um, so what that means is that if you want to push a piece of content, then decide only ever pings our service, and it's saying, "You know, there's one piece of content we want to share and update."

And then our service asynchronously pulls that content from the site, and then distributes it to the other sites using REST. Um, what that allows you is, is for editors to basically be able to quickly navigate as well. So that's one short request for 20, 30 milliseconds to just ping our service, and they get immediately back into their regular workflow without having to wait for serialization and sending content, et cetera.

[00:35:31] Nic: Okay.

[00:35:32] Thiemo: And sites also delete a cron job or have any kind of delay in there, so that's, that's what makes it so fast.

[00:35:38] Nic: And, and so let's say I edit... I have a, 1,000 websites using this, and I edit a page. Oof. What's, what's the typical turnaround time where I can be sure all 1,000 pages have, all 1,000 websites have been updated?

[00:35:54] Thiemo: Um, it depends on the, on the infrastructure of the sites more than on our service. So we do have a couple of levers and settings that you can tune, but by default, we limit the number of requests that we make to your sites because we don't want to be an accidental denial of service attack by sharing too much at once.

Um, the service itself can handle even a million content updates in a single day, so that's what we've already done for migrating sites, for example. Okay. So that's... If you, uh, if your sites allow it, that's 10 to 20 seconds, um, to which you share that across 500 or even- Okay ... 1,000 sites. Um, but you need to have, need to have good infrastructure to, to serve that, yeah.

[00:36:36] Nic: Okay. Yeah. I, I was just curious because those types of, um, implementations typically also have the requirement that if I change something, you need to... It's important, it needs to go out within 30 seconds or something, and so- Mm-hmm ... the fact that you can support that is good to know.

[00:36:53] John: I would've, I would've been shocked if, if, uh, Timo was like, "Oh, you know, it's like five seconds."

Uh, you know, because like, you know, it, it, it really depends. But I knew, I knew Content Sync could, could support that. So, um, I like, I like, I like the answer. I like the question, too. But, um, okay. So- We talked in your intro about GEO and AEO. Um, and, uh, you know, obviously everybody's talking about AI. So first off, what is GEO and AEO?

And secondly, how is ContentSync helping people, um, with that, especially with their focus on AI?

[00:37:36] Thiemo: Yeah, so that's a great question. Um, so GEO and AEO, so we have Generative Engine Optimization and Answer Engine Optimization. Um, they're, they're very much related, um, but have two different meanings. So the, the GEO part, that's what most people are focusing on.

Um, that focuses on, uh, LLMs like ChatGPT, um, AI, Google AI Overviews- Mm ... Claude, using your content and then using that to construct an answer. Whereas answer engine optimization means that you have, um, have a direct citation so that the, the engine basically answers with exactly what you've provided it, which is kind of the ideal state.

Um, but optimizing for AEO is a whole lot harder than just optimizing for GEO, which already can be quite an undertaking

[00:38:27] John: And then how, how is ContentSync kinda helping with, with that GEO, um, optimization for folks focused on AI? Mm-hmm.

[00:38:37] Thiemo: Um, so our typical customer base has tons and tons of Drupal sites to manage.

We typically, um, have a, a platform or brand manager, for example. Um, and what they're seeing is that the number of site visitors go down, more and more traffic comes from, from a UTM source like ChatGPT. Mm-hmm. Um, and then they, they see their conversions dropping, um, and they don't know why, because it's basically a black box.

We don't know what is happening in the background. Um, and so what they typically do is they go to their agency, to their, um, to the implementation partner, and then they'll do an audit. So they'll do a GEO audit, which means the agency is probably going to use tools like Semrush to, um, to run a bunch of prompts across the different systems, and then see, does my target brand actually show up in the answer?

Are we visible where we want to be visible? Um, what's the sentiment like? So does ChatGPT talk good about us? Does it talk more negatively about us? Um, and then also the share of voice. So does it talk more about us or about a competitor? Um, which is one of the key things that you need to, need to get right, which is the, um, the, uh, measurement or the KPIs that you now- Mm

need on top of your SEO. Um, and then the other part of such a report is typically an assessment of your content health. So that means that, um, an agency, for example, and GEO experts, they will scan the site, and they will give you recommendations about specific things that you can optimize around different key pages.

So if they see that a page is cited by AI, for example, that's a key page. Um, and there can be semantic issues, maybe the wrong heading structure. There can be a lack of meta tags and descriptions, um, but also things that are much more related to how AI works. So that's for- Things that make it snippable, so that's things like, um, FAQ sections.

So do you have an FAQ sections, um, section that answers follow-up questions of users? Is that complete? Does it answer all of the things that people may be asking- Mm ... about your content? Um, and do you have a top page answer, for example? So do you answer what people are looking for immediately at the top?

Because that also makes it much more likely to be cited. Um, and so that's basically what you get from such a GEO audit or analysis report. Um, and then typically such an enterprise would go in and start implementing it, so they'll use those insights, they create a board from it in Jira, and they'll assign that to their editorial team.

They'll work through it, and then it's, it's time again to measure, and so they'll run another, um, round of these, these prompt monitors basically to see what does ChatGPT say now about us. Um, and then hopefully they'll see a positive change. Um, but what we're seeing more often is that it's some fa- some parts are going up, some parts are going down.

And so-

[00:41:27] Martin: Mm ...

[00:41:27] Thiemo: the whole analysis process starts again. So you're now figuring out that maybe, uh, your competitors are actually doing the same thing. They're also started optimizing their pages, and so now they're more visible in that area. You're more visible in that area, and so you then have to fine-tune and, um, basically have kind of a loops.

You're doing the analysis, the assessment, the optimization, and then measuring that.

[00:41:50] John: So one, one thing I may have missed, um, these scans, are you doing them directly to your site or are they integrated into Content Sync so you can do them, you can do them there?

[00:42:01] Thiemo: Yes. So what we do as Content Sync, um, is that we basically help you analyze all of that and also, um- Okay

to connect all of the dots. So you can use Content Sync to do the health assessment of your pages, so that would give you a report, um, about all of the pages that you have, um, prioritized based on what's cited by AI, what isn't, et cetera. Um, and then basically correlate that to how well you perform in searches.

Mm-hmm. And then we'll give you a bunch of, um, recommendations for things that you can optimize on page, but also off page, so in third party, um, sites, other authority sources that ChatGPT, et cetera, use. Um, that's more actionable and more connected to Drupal because editors in Drupal, they get the information they need.

So they see this is actually used in this kind of prompt, this is why it's important, these are the guests that we have on this page. Um, or also to create new content and to provide that as context to editors, but also to AI to basically close that loop and make sure that it can run efficiently, rather than having a report again and again and trying to do it in, like, a project style.

[00:43:08] John: That's, that's super, that's super nice to have the tools built into the platform to be able to say like, "Hey, here's how we're scoring. Oh, we need to change these terms." And then, and then basically disseminate that out to the, out to the sites makes a, makes a lot of sense.

[00:43:22] Thiemo: Yeah. It, it basically bridges the gap between the central marketing teams that own the whole brand, but then also the individual, uh, editorial teams working on those sites, because AI does, just doesn't care about site boundaries.

It's going to cite whatever it thinks is most appropriate, and so that all has to be, uh, consistent and in sync.

[00:43:43] Nic: So we ha- shifting gears slightly here. We ha- we have another question from Tim. He's curious about the permission layers in, on the Drupal side. Um, w- are there extra permissions on top of what Drupal provides already for managing governance with the distributed team?

[00:44:00] Thiemo: Mm-hmm. Um, so that's for content syndication, right?

[00:44:04] Nic: Yeah.

[00:44:05] Thiemo: Yes. Um, so we do have a bunch of permissions to, uh, push and pull content. So you can define per role in Drupal which user is allowed to push content to the repository, which user is allowed to pull in content, et cetera. Um, and then everything else is just using the regular Drupal permissions because it's, it's a native entity across sites, so you can already use all of the, uh, native Drupal modules to, um, to customize all of that.

[00:44:34] Nic: Very cool. So you recently added Drupal 11 support, uh, to the module. Um, what are some of the biggest enhancements that you're adding to the module, and what's on the roadmap?

[00:44:47] Thiemo: Um, so what we've done the last 12 months is that we've added an option to, um, push translations back to the repository. So that means that-

[00:44:56] Nic: Oh

[00:44:57] Thiemo: you can fan out an English version of a news article, for example, across your sites, and then maybe the Spanish site translates that to Spanish, and they pushed only that translation back to the repository so that all of the Let M sites, for example, can also pull in and reuse that translation, so they don't have to start from scratch and can rather customize something that's already there.

Um, another thing is a clone mode. So you can, um, not just synchronize content, but you can also create a local copy that's disconnected from the source site, um, which allows you to have the site structure locally. So if you have something that's a bit more complex, which again, in enterprise environments is quite common, so you have 50 paragraphs on a page or even 100, um, and so you can clone that structure and then just customize the content, but having the same, the same layout, for example, um, in the background.

[00:45:49] Nic: Hmm.

[00:45:49] Thiemo: Um, or you can have overlapping, overlapping pull flows. So you can now also allow editors to, um, to clone or, or to decide when they're pulling, whether they want to clone a page and just fully customize it disconnected, or whether they want to have something that's still connected and receives updates.

Um, so these are the three bigger things that we've added. Um, and right now we're mostly focused on the, um, AI visibility and GEO, uh, features that we have in the platform. Um, and so the, the classics indication is mostly getting, um, like quality of life improvements for editors.

[00:46:24] Nic: Okay.

[00:46:25] Ashraf : All right, thanks. So we've talked a fair amount about, uh, GEO and AEO and, you know, visibility with AI and, um, I see you have a product content sync AIM or AIM.

Um, what exactly is that product and, you know, how do you use it? How much does it overlap with what you've already been sharing?

[00:46:52] Thiemo: Mm-hmm. Yes. So that's, that's exactly the, um, DGO basically extension to the product that we have. Um, so the AIM stands for assess, improve, and monitor. So that's what allows you to assess the content health, to automatically optimize it so we can provide improved pages, um, that editors can basically approve the individual changes, um, and then the monitoring side of things to ensure that, um, a brand is visible and well represented across, uh, different AI search engines.

[00:47:24] John: So talking more about, talking more about AI, um, 'cause, you know, everybody's talking about AI. Um, one thing I've, I've heard in the last couple of months is when you ask AI about Drupal, um, it, it basically doesn't necessarily reply favorably as far as, you know, what's the best CMS sh- for me to use? Um, I heard that, uh, ContentSync has been working with the Drupal Association around AI visibility and, um, the digital brand presence.

Wondering if you can share, um, that work with us and anything that you might have learned from it

[00:48:06] Thiemo: Yes, I would love to. Um, so first of all, I love how much, um, how much momentum there is right now with Drupal and AI. Um, I think Paul was on your, uh, on your podcast a couple of weeks ago, right? And he talked about- Uh,

[00:48:20] John: last week maybe

[00:48:22] Thiemo: Last week

two, two weeks

[00:48:22] Ashraf : ago?

[00:48:22] John: Two weeks ago. Two, two weeks

[00:48:23] Nic: ago. We talked two

[00:48:24] Thiemo: weeks ago. Two weeks ago, yeah. Um, and so what I didn't know is that there were, like, 15 or 16 people in the DrupalAI marketing team, which is a whole lot of people. Um-

[00:48:35] Nic: Yeah, that list was so long. He's like, "Yeah, there's a lot of people helping," and then went on a 10-minute, uh, thank you, thank you tour.

I, I was very impressed with how many people are working on it, too.

[00:48:46] Thiemo: Yes, and that just shows how much excitement there is and how much, how much opportunity there is. Uh, because I think historically, um, we probably know that Drupal has not been, uh, the best at marketing itself, so we, we're struggling with positioning, which is kind of normal for something that's open source and not, not like a paid service that has, like, a huge paid marketing team.

Um, and so a lot of the things that we're trying to do is to accomplish more, um, with basically the resources that we have, which are quite big right now with the DrupalAI marketing team. And so we're trying to support the DrupalAI marketing team, but also the, the n- the normal Drupal, uh, marketing team, so what you see on new.drupal.org.

Um, and so we've started talking to the, uh, to different stakeholders there, um, and we're basically doing the same things that we typically do for an enterprise customer. So we're, uh, running an audit to make sure that we understand where we are today. We're defining different goals, um, and objectives, um, to increase or improve, um, how Drupal shows up so that, as an example, we don't have competitor comparison pages.

Drupal just doesn't have them, and so if you look for how does Drupal compare versus Sanity and Contentful and, and all of the others, um, there's not a lot of influence that we have right now. Um, and so that's one of the things that we can improve to basically make sure that AI gets the kind of information, um, that it needs to provide, um, an answer that's, well, not just favorably speaking about Drupal, but that it's actually factual.

Because right now there's, there's this kind of baked in sentiment about, uh, the old Drupal, I would say. Um, and so I think it's, it's super important that we, um, that we align on, on, like, a shared messaging and making sure that Drupal itself represents itself well, but also to make sure that every, that the whole partner ecosystem, everyone working with Drupal, everyone wanting to support Drupal, knows what they can do exactly to contribute, and then basically telling the same story to make sure that this is, this is what AI also understands about Drupal.

[00:50:56] John: Do you have any insight based on- your, your work with your clients or even the work that you're doing with the Drupal Association, right? So like, we... Well, this might be mean, but like, let's assume we've started at zero, right? AI is like, "I don't know much about Drupal. I can't compare it to anything. I- when somebody asks me, I'm gonna say, 'Hey, Contentful's great.'"

Right? Um, like, how long, once we make these changes, does it take for AI to learn that like, "Hey, Drupal's actually pretty good at these things," and, "Oh, it can actually compete with, you know, Sitecore and Adobe and Contentful and all the other things"? Like, what's that, what's that, you know, um, you know, gestation period, if you will?

[00:51:44] Thiemo: Well, that's probably a very technical answer, but it depends.

[00:51:48] John: Yeah, that's perfect. We love that answer.

[00:51:51] Thiemo: Um, so the, the thing is that sometimes, so what we've seen, um, including for ourselves, so we've done GO ourselves, and we've added a com- a comparison page to one of our competitors. Mm. And we started seeing AI cite that, like, two days later.

And the whole answer was completely the opposite way, where before it would say, you know, "This, this thing is more enterprise, and ContentSync is more for simple use cases." And that changed completely to saying, you know, "If you're using that competitor today and this is just an extension, go use them. For everything else, go use ContentSync," which is a perfect, a perfect result, basically, and that took two days for AI to catch up.

[00:52:30] Martin: Mm.

[00:52:30] Thiemo: For something that's as big and as complex as Drupal, um, the answer is probably much more nuanced. So-

[00:52:37] Martin: Mm ...

[00:52:37] Thiemo: one of the key challenges is, is not just to control on page content and provide, like, the information that we want to share, but to also make sure that your whole partner ecosystem is aligned and can contribute to that.

[00:52:49] Martin: Mm.

[00:52:49] Thiemo: Because when you ask ChatGPT, for example, "What's the best CMS?" Um, then it's going to look across a lot of different authority sources. So that can be, um, forums like, uh, Reddits, uh- Mm-hmm ... or Stack Overflow. It can be, um, blog articles from, uh, agencies for example, and from implementation partners, like the big, big agencies including EPAM.

Um- Mm-hmm ... and so if there's a listicle, for example, which is one of the key things to optimize for that says, "These are the top CMSs for 2026," then we need to ensure that Drupal is listed in there, and we need to make sure that the, in the partner ecosystem, for those who have the traffic, um, that ideally they also contribute to that so that we can shift that narrative and ensure that we're represented at least equally so that it knows this is from the Drupal ecosystem and this is from, um, maybe the Sitecore ecosystem, Contentful ecosystem-

[00:53:47] John: Mm-hmm

[00:53:47] Thiemo: that we do have that content that has a high visibility, that is trusted, um, and then influences that result for Drupal. And that's taking a bit more usually because aligning with a lot of different stakeholders, that's the human part of everything that we do. Um, and that usually takes a bit more time than just writing one article on drupal.org.

[00:54:08] John: So y- that makes a lot of sense to me. So it's not like, hey, the DA can just start updating drupal.org and, like-

[00:54:14] Ashraf : Well- ...

[00:54:15] John: AI's automatically gonna be like, "Oh, Drupal's the greatest." It's gotta get- Well, it, it- ... kind of that signal from a wider, wider m- set of folks.

[00:54:23] Nic: I, I think it's interesting, though, to think about w- one thing that you said is, a- and we've been talking about on the show for a couple months now, um, is just having the information on the page is, like, w- what are things that Drupal is- Best in class, right?

Role and permission management, I mean, nobody else does roles and permissions like Drupal does. Caching, like both the layers of caching and the cache tag system, uh, I think a couple people are starting to do it, but Drupal, light years ahead of anybody else. Translations, Drupal is second to none. I don't think any other enterprise or open source software comes anywhere close to the ability to customize or manage translations than, than Drupal, right?

And just having a page that somewhere, a Drupal org that says, "Drupal is the best in the business," whether it becomes a comparison page in the future or not, the best in the business for these 10 things. Uh, I don't know where that is, but it should definitely exist.

[00:55:31] Thiemo: Yes, 100%.

[00:55:33] Nic: But, but yeah, but I, I think getting consensus across, the, I think getting consensus across the partners is, is a communication problem more.

That, that's the other thing that's really nice about the Drupal ecosystem and, and community, is that, yes, there are competitors, um, but the competitors in Drupal generally understand that the Drupal side of it isn't the competition, right? So getting consensus on how to, um, talk about the strengths and, and benefits of Drupal, I don't think will be that hard because the, the competitors aren't g- they're not competing on the Drupal side, they're competing on the service side or the specialty or the niche or one particular aspect of man- you know, like ContentSync, right?

You're, you're competing specifically on how to manage broadly distributed Drupal systems and manage that content, right? But you're not competing about Drupal itself against other Drupal, uh, maintainers. Um, you, you're more of a, a Drupal agnostic, uh, service. Um- Yes. But yeah, you have to communicate that and that's the hard

[00:56:37] Thiemo: part.

Yes, absolutely. Um, and so, and one of the, so one of the key value propositions, just to touch on that as well, um, I think it's just open source. You're, you're, you're independent. That's like the, that's already throwing out almost all of the other competitors besides WordPress from like the big CMSs out there.

Um, and so what I, what I would love to see is to, uh, to also have a chance to work with the WordPress, uh, Foundation, um, and seeing how we can actually influence AI answers around open source itself. Because if, if multiple or if more and more sources talk about open source, and whether that's WordPress on like the number one spot, or whether that's Drupal on the number one spot, is not as important, um, as having that as a decision criterion where AI picks it up and is like, "You know, this is actually open and this isn't."

Because today in a lot of comparisons, that just doesn't show up. You ask about the best CMS, and it doesn't care about vendor lock-in. That's just not included in a lot of answers, and that's an issue because that's a key value proposition that we have right off the bat. Um, and then the other thing with alignment in the Drupal community, um, one of the things I love about Drupal is the community because everyone's just excited about Drupal, and we just love working on the, on the same project.

Um, not just the technology, but also the community. Um, and what I think, I think a lot of people are, are eager to actually help, but many just don't know how. And so it's, I think one of our responsibilities will be to lower the barrier of entrance, to make sure that people know exactly what they can contribute in, in terms of marketing, give them exact things they can do if they want to, um, and therefore making it easier for Drupal to succeed in marketing by making it easier for people to contribute.

[00:58:25] Ashraf : I wanted to ask about, um, so I, I do see more people writing on LinkedIn and blog posts and whatnot about, you know, Drupal is better. And I think they're-- it's partly because Dries has been encouraging the community in the same way that you're doing, um, you know, put more content out there so AI consumes it.

Um, one thing or two, two, uh, thoughts I had on that is, I mean, first of all, I agree with it completely, of course. But, um Because I feel like we're the only ones talking about Drupal. When I say we, I mean the Drupal community. Um, there's actually an advantage there, which is the most recent content is gonna come from the Drupal community.

Um, so if AI prioritizes more recent content, you know, if, if Stack Overflow posts are five years old criticizing Drupal, and all of the content from this year is pro-Drupal, I would hope that that has a significant influence on AI. Um, and I also, like, I wonder how accurate that is. How much does AI care about recency of the content?

Um, the other thing is, if we're the only ones talking about it, I think we should all, um, you know, I'm curious on your thoughts if you agree with this, uh, stop saying in these posts, stop saying, "Everyone says Drupal's bad," but, "Everyone says Drupal's old," but. Because you're just kind of telling AI that everybody says Drupal's bad.

Um, so I think we just need to lose that part of the article entirely.

[01:00:05] Thiemo: I 100% agree. Yes. So, um, that makes sense and- You mean AI's not

[01:00:09] John: smart enough to, to know that, like, those people are wrong? Or it's just too nice? It's too nice, it won't call them wrong.

[01:00:17] Thiemo: Yeah. Yes. It's, it's, it's trying to please. Um, but yeah, I, I completely agree.

Talking, talking with that negative connotation, uh, it certainly doesn't necessarily help. Like, it depends on the context. It depends on whether AI thinks, already thinks that Drupal is in a bad spot, and then that can be seen as a counterargument. That's fine. Um, but that also begs the question, what, what are we optimizing for?

So do we optimize for visibility? Is that the main issue that we want to solve? Or do we optimize for sentiment? So do we, do we care about people knowing that Drupal exists as a solution for their problem? Or do we care about more that those people know Drupal exists, knowing that Drupal is also the appropriate solution, so that, that it's more favorable?

Um, and if, if you only write about Drupal, but not in comparison to other things, other CMSes, um, then this is, this is good for, for optimizing the, the sentiment part so that it's more favorably and more complete. Um, but if you also want to optimize for visibility, then we have to make sure that third-party sources do have things like listicles that make sure that there is, like, a good comparison that says- Localization, for example, compared between Drupal and Contentful and Sanity and like, that's how it works.

And being open source, vendor lock-in, that's where Drupal scores. Um, and so it, it really depends on the context. Um, and then to answer the first question, recency is super important. So the more recent an article is, even if you republish it, if you re- review it, basically, um, that's c- that can already give you a boost and, and make it more visible to AI, um, compared to an old article from a year ago, even if it's still factually correct.

Hm.

[01:02:05] John: Amazing. Well, Timo, uh, thanks for joining us. Uh, appreciate you, uh, educating us to ContentSync and the, the ins and outs of getting AI to talk more about Drupal.

[01:02:17] Thiemo: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. It was wonderful.

[01:02:20] Nic: Do you have questions or feedback? You can reach out to Talking Drupal on the socials with the handle talkingdrupal or by email with [email protected].

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[01:03:07] John: All right. Uh, Timo, if folks wanted to get a hold of you and talk more about ContentSync or AI, how best could they do that?

[01:03:16] Thiemo: Uh, under content-sync.io. So-

[01:03:19] John: There you

[01:03:19] Thiemo: go ... it's a good website. Yeah.

[01:03:21] John: And we'll have a, we'll have a link for it to that in the show notes as well so they can, they can find you there. Uh, Ashraf, what about you?

[01:03:29] Ashraf : Uh, you could reach me at [email protected]. Um, also on LinkedIn. Uh, feel free to message, reach out, and be happy- Perfect ... to chat about it.

[01:03:42] John: And Nic, what about you?

[01:03:44] Nic: You can find me pretty much everywhere @nicxvan, N-I-C-X-V-A-N.

[01:03:48] John: And I'm John Picozzi. You can find me, uh, personally at picozzi.com, on the social networks and drupal.org @johnpicozzi, uh, or you can find out about EPAM at epam.com.

[01:04:00] Nic: And if you've enjoyed listening, we've enjoyed talking. See you guys next week.

[01:04:04] John: Have a good one, everyone.

[01:04:07] Ashraf : Take care.