Talking Drupal #563 - Drupito: More Than a Marketplace

[00:00:00] Nic: This is Talking Drupal, a weekly chat about web design and development from a group of people with one thing in common: we love Drupal. This is episode 563, "Drupalito: More Than a Marketplace." On today's show, we are talking about Drupalito, its business model, and marketplaces with our guest, Ashraf Abed.

We'll also cover Generate Social Media Image as our module of the week. Welcome to Talking Drupal. Our guest today is Ashraf. He is the founder of Drupalito, a platform that's making Drupal easier to adopt, deploy, and manage. A longtime member of the Drupal community, he has spent years providing quality Drupal training, consulting, and open source contributions.

Today, he is focused on making Drupal competitive in the age of Replit. Welcome back to the show, and thank you for joining us again

I'm Nic Laflin, founder at nLightened Development. Today my co-hosts are Avi Schwab, joining us for the whole show again this week, technical product consultant at ImageX.

[00:01:05] Avi: Hey, Nic. Thanks

[00:01:06] John: for having me.

[00:01:08] Nic: And as usual, John Picozzi, solution architect at EPAM.

[00:01:13] John: Howdy, internet friends.

[00:01:17] Nic: And now to talk about our module of the week, let's turn over to Avi Schwab, a technical product consultant at Imageax and maintainer of a number of Drupal modules of his own.

Avi, what do you have for us this week?

[00:01:28] Avi: Okay, Nic. So have you ever wanted Drupal to generate dynamic social media images using tokenized node data, similar to how you have share images for, like, GitHub repos with the number of stars and the, the name, or, like, Reddit threads with the name of the thread and some comments?

There's a module for that. Uh, the module is Generate Social Media Image, or GSMI. Uh, it is, it was created by TFranz of Germany in April of 2022. It has a 1.x version and a 2.0 beta 2 version that was published just a few weeks ago by our own Martin Anderson-Clutz. Uh, now the module is, um, relatively minimally maintained, although Martin is working on remedying that.

Uh, there's no security coverage yet. Again, Martin Anderson's probably on it. Uh, it does have passing GitHub, GitLab CI tests, uh, and it has a pretty well fleshed out readme for documentation. Um, there are eight open issues, zero of which are bugs against the current branch. Uh, but again, there are lots of feature requests for the old branch and, uh, the current branch, uh, is relatively new.

Uh, interesting usage stats. There is only one site reporting using this module, uh, but I think it's really cool and we're hoping to bring it into a number of the, um, event platform sites coming hopefully later this year maybe. Um, so how does, how does this, this whole thing work? So, um, GSMI requires an image style that uses a text overlay effect.

Um, you, if you listened last week, uh, you heard me talk about the Image Effects module. Um, so there's a number of kind of image, uh, there's a number of dependencies that this module has, uh, that you can, you can listen about last week. Um, the text overlay, uh, image style, uh, lets you burn tokenized or static text onto an image, uh, using Drupal's whole image styles, um, system.

Uh, but normally when Drupal generates the image style derivative, there's no entity in that scope. It's just a regular file with some text. And so GSMI takes a token like node title, uh, and resolves it to the actual, like, content of an entity. Uh, so when you're building a, an image derivative, uh, for a specific node, uh, you get that node specific text, like, overlaid on top of the image.

Um, and so it, it provides any number of entity-aware tokens that work inside Image Effects That's a lot. Um, but let me, let me kind of try and, try and simplify it a little more. Um, once you have an image style, you, you kind of like put a background image with a couple like text kind of spots. Uh, GSMI's setting form lets you pick a source image, so you can say like use an image field as the source, uh, or a media reference.

Uh, and you can also have a fallback image. Um, and then you can also, um Uh, that chooses, uh, sorry, like how it generates the image style. Or sorry, you choose the image, and then you also choose the image style where you define like the, the tokens that you're gonna generate from. Um, finally, once you have the whole kind of image set up, um, GSMI exposes its own token, which is node generate style, and that has a number of other images kind of deeper in it.

Um, you can take that token and drop it into any, um, OG image fields that you have, uh, for like, uh, session node, for instance. That was what I experimented with on the MidCamp site. And then after all that, uh, you can get dynamically generated images for your share sheets. So like we could have the MidCamp logo with like MidCamp 2026 and then like obvious cool session, uh, you know, in the middle of the image.

So it's a pretty cool idea. Um, I think there's a lot of power here. Um, and, uh, I'm really excited to see this module come, uh, further along as, as we keep developing it. Um, there are a couple bugs. Um, some of these, uh, the text overlay, um, module has some like weird kind of UX quirks where you gotta kind of fill everything out exactly right, otherwise the, the underlying image libraries fail.

Um, there's also this weird bug, um, where it doesn't-- the GSMI, uh, image styles don't respect like file extensions, and there's some weird conflicts there. Um, this brought up another discussion that I have every couple years, which is like, is it okay to use WebP images in share sheets? And the answer is still no.

Um, LinkedIn still doesn't support WebP images for its share cards. So, uh, you still can't use WebP images for all of your, your meta, your OG meta share images. Uh, we'll put the link to the LinkedIn documentation in the show notes so people can argue about why we're still not supporting WebP images in 2026.

[00:07:00] Nic: That-

[00:07:01] Avi: Anyway.

[00:07:02] Nic: Yeah, that is kind of mind-blowing. I, I will say though, this module, um, it, it's funny because this module seems super useful, especially for the use case that you're talking about, like having a, the ability to show some sort of slide about, uh, it, it's something that we've continually struggled with at Nic Camp.

Being able to say like, "Hey, this session is this date and time," and have that automatically show up when people share it. E- or even if it doesn't, you're not using it for social media Um, as kind of like the automatic image, but something that we can provide to the speakers to be like, "Hey, if you wanna promote your talk, here's a, here's a pre-generated image."

Fantastic use case. The funny thing is, is I feel like the name is, all of the modules are almost a misnomer now because generate is now an AI term, right? And that's not what this is doing. Oh, no. That is not what this is doing whatsoever. Uh, it's the-

[00:07:57] John: I, I literally was like, "Oh, this module actually might solve a problem I have," 'cause it uses AI to generate an image, you know, i- to take the base image, use AI to put text over it, and then, and then save it into Drupal.

I was like- Yeah, that- ... perfect.

[00:08:12] Nic: That

[00:08:12] John: sounds pretty great. But then I looked at it and I was like, "Eh, well."

[00:08:14] Avi: Here's the thing. We can, we can programmatically generate things without AI.

[00:08:20] Nic: Yeah. A- and, and- Uh ... with- without the risk of, you know, the disaster of trying to put text on top of an image, I, I imagine that will never be great.

It's

[00:08:29] Avi: true. Yeah. But I will say, so, so I've, I've tried playing with this a couple times. Martin and I talked about it, um, at one of the, uh, like DrupalCon community summits a couple years ago, uh, and we've been wanting to get it in. Um, I've tried to install it a few times and had trouble, and last night I was experimenting with it to like get ready for the show, and I was just like, "Claude, like install this and get it set up, and like I don't know what's going on but like figure it out."

Uh, and it did. Like, and me, like I, I like have spun my wheels for like a couple hours in the past trying to get this working and, you know, 10 minutes of Clauding it was like, "Here's the thing." And it didn't look great, but it like demonstrated every like potential use case in like a, you know, mediocre but still working way.

So I think that was kind of cool. It was a, it was an interesting kind of test of just being like, here's a module with like a site that like, you know, it's like a local copy of the MidCamp site that like, you know, do whatever you want, uh, and make it work.

[00:09:38] John: But, but, but Avi, Avi, Avi's highlighting a, um, a great, a great point here and, and where pe- many people are like, "Ooh, AI?

Scary." Um, Avi, do you understand how the module installed it to get it to work?

[00:09:56] Avi: I, I do. I told it to, to tell me afterwards.

[00:09:59] John: Ah, okay. All right. And, and what did it do? Avi's smarter, Avi's smarter than the average AI user. Okay, got it. Um, so what, what, just out of curiosity, what was the difference?

[00:10:09] Nic: Yeah.

[00:10:11] Avi: Uh, it, it was just that like there were enough like wonky bugs, like in all of the UX pieces because all of these are like slightly like n- not- Yeah.

Like there were, there were enough weird bugs that like Claude was able to like w- work through all the bugs by just like editing, you know, schemas and config files and whatever. Uh, and didn't get... You know, I think it actually did get stuck in a few of those, uh, and like flagged them to me.

[00:10:44] John: Um- Did you then have Claude make issues on drupal.org for all those bugs?

[00:10:48] Nic: Oh, please don't do that. I,

[00:10:49] John: I did- So that when, so that when the, the maintainer's back from gallivanting on his vacation- Please ... um, he can- Please use-

[00:10:57] Nic: He can

[00:10:57] John: address Please use... As a maintainer

[00:11:00] Nic: of several modules- Address ... please use brainpower to create those. Please do. I, the, the amount of-

[00:11:03] John: I'm not saying you should just have them automatically submit them, but I mean, like-

[00:11:07] Avi: So,

[00:11:08] John: so there is already an issue- And also, I wanna go on the record before I start getting messages, I think all maintainers should take vacations and put the code and laptops down and go have fun.

So I ho- I, I know that Martin is having fun. I've seen his pictures on social media. The stuff he's eating looks delicious, so I'm sure he's having a good time. Uh, anyway, what were you gonna say, Avi?

[00:11:30] Avi: Um, I did review the issue queue. There are a number of existing issues. Ah. I did not auto-generate new issues, but I'm gonna work with Martin on getting some of these things fixed in the right ways.

Awesome.

[00:11:45] John: So I-

[00:11:45] Avi: Yes ...

[00:11:45] John: I might have missed this, and this has got probably key functionality here, but can you like have an overlay on underneath that text? So like if you have an image, you can kinda like overlay the text onto a solid background- Mm-hmm ... so it doesn't like- Mm-hmm ... look unreadable and gross on your image?

[00:12:01] Avi: Yeah. Yeah. So the, the text overlay image style, um, allows you to configure a lot of that. So you can, um, use any kind of fonts that you have in your code base. You can change the, you know, size. Nice. You can change the color, you can change the background. Um, yeah, so the, the, the text overlay image style takes care of all that.

And so, you know, w- mine was set up with like a, you know, white text on a, you know, s- 70% opaque black background or something- Yeah, yeah ... that would then overlay on whatever the, the kind of back end choice.

[00:12:36] John: All right. I might have to- Do you run into any- ... I might have to give that a go.

[00:12:40] Nic: Do you run into any weird issues like you do with, uh, email templating where it depends on what theme you're making the request from?

Like, does it have to be made- No, no. Because they're like- The theme has to have fonts available?

[00:12:52] Avi: No. I mean, the, the, the font files, they're like all of this work with which like the, the, all of the, the, um, the module, the image style stuff that I was talking about last week, as well as, uh, the text overlay and GSMI.

Yeah. Like they're calling either GD or ImageMagick, like directly basically. So they're taking like f- full file paths for the, the, the, uh- Oh, okay ... the fonts and they're like m- mostly not bootstrapping Drupal for any of that stuff. Okay. So like it has to have a static path in the file system, um, but once you put that in there, um, it's good.

And again, like yeah, there's, there's other like weird oddities, like if you're image- using ImageMagick versus GD, you've gotta kind of tweak things. So I, I think, I think there, there are just enough kind of hurdles in, in something like this that make it a little bit too complicated for like the kind of general use case.

Um, but, but like I said, I think, I think for the situation where we're trying to kinda bring it into, um, a site template, yes. Uh, w- and, and deploy it for a bunch of folks, um, in a kind of standardized way, I think it can be really powerful.

[00:14:09] Nic: So

[00:14:10] Avi: I think that's a great segue too, but-

[00:14:12] Nic: Yeah. Yeah. I was gonna say, so, uh, Avi, thank you.

It's always a pleasure to have you to fill in for Martin. Uh, if folks wanted to suggest or chat about the sponsor of the week, what's the best way for them to do that?

[00:14:22] Avi: Sure, yeah. There's the, um, talking Drupal channel on Drupal Slack. Uh, I'm in there. Uh, you can reach out to me, uh, as froboy or Avi Schwab on Drupal Slack or LinkedIn or all the other places.

[00:14:38] Nic: Awesome. And we have Matthew here to share some information about Drupal GovCon, which is coming up soon.

[00:14:47] Matthew: The Drupal community st- does some of its best work when we get together, share what we've learned, and talk honestly about the problems we're trying to solve. That's what Drupal GovCon is all about.

From August 11th through the 13th, more than 600 members of the Drupal and government technology communities will gather at the University of Maryland in College Park. Whether you're a developer, a designer, content strategist, project manager, agency professional, or government digital leader, you'll find people who understand your work and sessions you can put to use when you get home.

Come for the keynotes, trainings, technical sessions, and birds-of-a-feather discussions. Stay for conversations and connections that happen between them. Drupal GovCon is free to attend. Register today and make your travel plans at Drupalgovcon.org. We'll see you in College Park

[00:15:45] Nic: Thanks, Matthew All right, Ashraf, uh, let's get to our ma- uh, main topic of the week. So for our listeners who have not yet heard of Jupito, uh, what, what problem are you trying to solve? What, what does Jupito do?

[00:16:01] Ashraf: Well, first of all, I wanna ... L- let me know if you can hear me okay. Is the audio coming through?

[00:16:05] Nic: We can.

We, we, we do hear some horns in the background, but, uh-

[00:16:08] Ashraf: Yeah ...

[00:16:09] Nic: I, I don't think there's much you can do about that.

[00:16:11] Ashraf: Yeah. Not only am I not at my usual desk, I'm not at my usual country. Um, partly why I missed my intro earlier. Um, I'm usually in the US, right now I'm in Egypt, um, taking the family for the first time.

My wife is, uh, partly from here and, um, yeah, it's pretty, pretty wonderful experience. Um, but I found myself a co-working space, and, uh, everything seems to be in order technically now. So to answer your question, um, what problem am I trying to solve? Um, so I think we're all familiar with the marketplace concept in Drupal lately.

Um, I would say that- that's a subset of what we're trying to solve. You know, demos for Drupal sites in seconds. You can launch a site, you can host a site. Um, you take it a bit further, your sites are auto-updated, the sites are low cost to host. Um, but, um, the real, I'd say, greater problem that we're trying to solve is making a monetization engine for people who build with open source.

And we'll dive into that throughout the call, but that is sort of the North, North Star. Making open source and open source businesses sustainable.

[00:17:29] John: So how does Dropedo use Drupal? I mean, obviously Drupal is, like, the thing that you're, you're, you're using to edit the sites, create the sites a- a- and, and, and your various things.

But is, is it using it, um, under the hood to, like, kind of provision each instance for people? And then second question or, or, or other question there would be, you know, is it gonna be Drupal only? Like, is it- is the model gonna be able to be applied to other, other s- open source softwares?

[00:18:06] Ashraf: Yeah. So actually the...

Dropedo is a consumer of the base software that we're building or that we've built. Um, Drupal is not the only consumer in the long run. Drupal, Drupal is just the first. Um, and so the name Dropedo is reserved for the Drupal community, but we're gonna have other brands geared towards WordPress and others.

Um, so-

[00:18:31] John: Wordpedo coming soon.

[00:18:33] Ashraf: Yeah, exactly. Um, so we've got... And we'll brainstorm with our AI and our community and all these Yeah, that's

[00:18:41] John: not a good name. I, y- I got it.

[00:18:44] Ashraf: Um, but in, you know, Dropedo itself, it's, it's, um, you could... There, there's a few layers to it. I like to think of it as a layered cake rather than layers of an onion because, you know, we really just enjoy cutting into it.

Um, but, uh, the Dropedo has a lot of payment infrastructure, hosting infrastructure, um, in the base layer there. Um, we've also got some packages, composer-based packages you can add onto your website to integrate with the hosting platform and the CDN and make things fast and smooth. Um, and we also have a, a management UI.

So if you purchase a site on Dropedo or if you're selling sites on Dropedo or if you're managing a code base on Dropedo, you can manage that through the UI. Um, so someone who doesn't know, uh, or doesn't want to SSH or use the command line or anything like that, they can still access certain Drush commands.

They can access, you know, Drush ULI, which allows you to log in as administrator. Um, they can do various other things. Um, so Dropedo's really like a provisioner of websites for now, um, Dru- which tend to be Drupal based. Um, and we've been building Dropedo for over two years and talking about it for over two years on and off.

You, some of you probably have noticed I go through spurts of, before DrupalCon I'm like, "All right, guys, it's coming. Here we go." And then DrupalCon comes, and I'm there, and I'm, you know, I'm happy to talk about it and whatnot. But the reality is the vision is so big and I- I build for, for big clients. I, I know Drupal.

I've been in Drupal for so long, and I know when it is and is not appealing to different use cases, right? And, um, at both of the past two DrupalCons, it's been appealing to certain segments. Uh, but I think we're finally reaching a point where, uh, it has enough novel pieces to it that are actually, um, significant in ways that, you know, move the needle, and I promise I'll stop speaking in buzzwords very, very soon.

Right.

[00:21:07] John: So I wanna, I wanna actually dig into something that you said, um, and just make sure I understand it before we keep going. Um, you said that Drupedo is building software to- Mm-hmm ... kinda run the platform, right? And, and obviously Drupal is just kind of one of the, one of the open source code bases that you have the ability to kinda install and manage.

So that underlying software is not Drupal. It's some other, you know, language or something, right? It's, it's- Yeah. That's right ... basically proprietary Drupedo software that helps facilitate all this stuff.

[00:21:44] Ashraf: Exactly. Exactly.

[00:21:45] John: Okay.

[00:21:46] Ashraf: Yep. The underlying software isn't Drupal-based. It's, uh, yeah, it's custom. Um, uses multiple languages.

You know, it's very thoroughly architectur- architect- architected for performance and- Yeah ... you know, to support many, many sites and all that. Um, sort of like Gatsby JS came out of people from the Drupal community who were looking to do something big. Um-

[00:22:08] John: RIP. RIP Gatsby.

[00:22:10] Ashraf: Yes, I know, I know. Not that

[00:22:14] Nic: side of it.

Well, I, I, I'm curious because you said, um, you said one of the goals is, you know, kind of I, I think hitting that more niche market, right? Um, do you have an idea of like, you know, if I have a, a small website that I'm looking to host that's for like a, a little association or like a- Mm ... a family site or something, what's the hosting cost look like for that?

And maybe a marketplace target price?

[00:22:41] Ashraf: Yeah, I mean, at the moment it's, uh, it's as little as something like $13 a month. Um, we're looking to really be competitive with Wix and Squarespace and those. Um, you know, I actually saw something on LinkedIn, I think today. Um, even wrote it down, 'cause when I saw it, I was like, "This is what I'm pushing against."

Um, I took a picture of it actually. And, uh, basically, it said, "You don't use Drupal for..." Here. "Is this the right... Is Drupal the right call for your cousin's wedding photography site? Obviously not." And with Dropedo, obviously yes. Like, you can absolutely use it for that. And, um, yeah, we're bringing the price point down.

Yeah. And we're also bringing the maintenance, we're taking the maintenance requirement away.

[00:23:37] Nic: I- So- ... would be very interested in hearing more about that once you, once you, you fully launch, because yeah, I mean, that's a great marketplace for, that's a great market for growing new Drupal people too. So yeah.

[00:23:49] Avi: Yeah. I mean, I think, I think this is the like, this is like, we have these quest- these conversations all the time about whatever new technology that we're bringing into Drupal, or we're trying to do some cool thing. Like, the, the million dollar question is always like, can this bring new people into Drupal?

Like- Mm-hmm ... can we get more sites, more people into the ecosystem with Dropedo?

[00:24:14] Ashraf: Yeah, 110%. I'm already seeing it. Um, in fact, I have a couple customers that I, um, I'm very grateful for, but I'm not, like, seeking yet. You know? One of the reasons I don't advertise so much is because I'm like, "It's getting so much better.

Maybe you should wait." Um, and you know, but I actually have a few real examples. So, um, there's one person who makes sites on Squarespace, um, today. He sells them for a bit over $1,000. And- He, um, obviously I'm like reluctant to mention what it is because I don't want people to go compete with his business, but it's like such, such a niche.

We would never imagine approaching anything like this at all. Um, like imagine it's like come hang out with my grandpa, you know, like that type of website, like where it's just something so random

[00:25:07] John: and so small scale I actually thought of, I actually thought of a scenario like that the other day with like little league websites.

Like everybody's got a little league, right? And all the websites are meh.

[00:25:18] Ashraf: Yeah,

[00:25:18] John: exactly. But some of them are really good. But like, I was like- Exactly ... oh, it would be cool if there was a, and this is now a, a public free idea that somebody could take and, and develop apparently. But like-

[00:25:28] Ashraf: There ...

[00:25:28] John: like develop a, you know, on Dropito a little league like-

[00:25:33] Ashraf: Absolutely

service,

[00:25:34] John: right?

[00:25:35] Ashraf: That's, and that, that idea is so much- Just register

[00:25:37] Avi: littleleaguetodo.com

[00:25:40] Ashraf: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And that idea is like so much bigger scale than the one, than the real example that I'm talking about here. The one I'm talking about, this guy sells sites for 1,000 to 1,500 a month. I mean, not a month, one time.

Um, he builds them on Squarespace, and then that's it. But with Dropito, he's, he was so excited because he's like, "Oh, I can build it and I can sell it for $200 a month? Like, and you can keep giving me that monthly revenue? I would rather have $200 a month than $1,000 one time because o- over all this time I would've been able to just, you know, quit my job and l- live off that revenue."

Right.

[00:26:14] Avi: And then the- And

[00:26:14] Ashraf: this guy, this

[00:26:15] Avi: guy ... the owner is, the site owner is like paying, you know, 50 bucks a month to Squarespace or something, and that money's just going away forever.

[00:26:22] Ashraf: Exactly. Exactly. So he's like very excited about that. And he, you know, he builds on Squarespace, like that's the extent of his, you know, technical knowledge so far.

And, and just

[00:26:31] Avi: to

[00:26:31] John: clarify, he's building on Drupal now?

[00:26:33] Ashraf: No, he's never used Drupal before. Oh, okay. And when he's, yeah, when, when Dropito's like ready for him-

[00:26:42] John: Ah, I got

[00:26:42] Ashraf: you ... he's ready to use it. He's like, "Here's my numbers." He's a potential client. "Help me. I will build this there." Yeah. And, uh, there's also, um- Let's see, two more.

There's someone who's had a Drupal 7 site for so long and has not, you know, pulled the trigger on upgrading. Um, but now that he, that now that Drupal is at the end of the tunnel for him, he's going to finally upgrade his Drupal 7 site to Drupal 11 because he wants to list it on the marketplace as well.

So now it's not just a cost to do the upgrade. He's like, "Okay, it's a cost, I'll pay it. But if one person pays for the site or if 10 people pay for the site as well, awesome. Like, I'll go to, I'll go shop my site to my competitors." Like, we're all in the same non-technical industry. You know, it's like martial arts.

Uh, they sell martial arts videos. And he's like, "I, I know other people who do this stuff too, and there's stuff that's unique about my site, but now it's worth the investment because it's an investment, it's not just a cost."

[00:27:45] John: Yeah.

[00:27:45] Ashraf: Um, so that's a, that's one who's actually signed the contract and building towards being on the marketplace.

Um,

[00:27:53] John: yeah, and then there's one-

[00:27:54] Ashraf: And,

[00:27:54] John: and, and does that person- Yeah, sure ... know that they're using Drupal? Like, are they like, "Oh, I'm using Drupal for my website"? 'Cause like, I guess one of the things that I'm wondering about with obvious question here, like, is it gonna help to attract new people to the Drupal ecosystem?

Is that like, if they're coming to Drupal and they're like, "Drupal lets me do all of this cool stuff"- Mm-hmm ... they don't necessarily know that the underlying technology they're using is Drupal, right?

[00:28:20] Ashraf: No, they do. So for this one- Okay ... um, you can export your code base, you can host it elsewhere. Mm. You're not, there's no vendor lock in.

That's awesome. And when someone tries to buy a site, um, this might even be on app.drupal.com right now. Um, but if someone goes to try to buy a site, every site has a label that says, "Built with", and then the name of the code base.

[00:28:43] John: Ah,

[00:28:44] Ashraf: okay. Okay. So if you click on that code base, it actually educates the customer, like what is a code base?

So- Hmm. Most of them right now- Oh, cool ... say, "Built with Drupal CMS 2.0," and that says- Got it ... "About this code base, Drupal CMS is so-and-so." And then, you know, we'll work on the wording, but maintained by so-and-so, what is a code base, ownership and portability. So, you know, if someone wants to We are, we're gonna give the code base maintainers control.

Like, they, if they don't want people to be able to export their code base-

[00:29:17] John: Hmm ...

[00:29:17] Ashraf: we're gonna give them the option of not letting them. But we're gonna warn customers, "Hey, you're buying a site that is not exportable." Yeah. Uh, other sites on our marketplace are exportable if you-

[00:29:27] John: Yeah, yeah, just a d- a set of tags, right?

Like, it's built with Drupal. Yeah. It is exportable. It's for, you know, whatever, da da da da. Yeah, that makes sense.

[00:29:35] Ashraf: Exactly.

[00:29:35] John: Okay.

[00:29:35] Ashraf: Like, if, if you're fine living within their constraints forever, buy one that's not exportable. That's okay. If you want to, the freedom to grow out of it in case-

[00:29:44] John: Yeah ...

[00:29:45] Ashraf: they, I don't know, uh, you can buy something that is exportable.

[00:29:49] John: Uh, not to go down this very windy rabbit hole with exportable versus non-exportable, but like, so if I create, you know, a, a Drupal site on, on Drupal and it's in Drupal, it's not exportable because, like, I don't know, I'm doing some special magic, right? Like, what part of it isn't e- exportable? Because, like, uh, to me, like, I'd like to be able to export my content.

Like, I'd, I'd like, if I- Mm-hmm ... if I outgrow it or need a new Drupal, like-

[00:30:22] Ashraf: Mm-hmm ...

[00:30:23] John: site built, I don't wanna have to pay somebody to kinda, like, build a new site and then pay them to migrate the content, right? I'd like to be able to export it- Mm-hmm ... and kinda like take it somewhere to... So I'm just wondering, like, have you thought about that or is it kinda like, oh, that'll come later?

[00:30:40] Ashraf: Yeah, no, I've thought about it. So there, at, so at the moment, everything is exportable fully. There's nothing on Drupedo that's not exportable at all.

[00:30:49] John: Yeah.

[00:30:49] Ashraf: Um, you can export code base, files, and database, and you also get the site template for anyone- Hmm ... who's familiar with what a site template is in Drupal.

Um, it's a little different than the code base, but um, you can also get the site template if there is a site template for that code base. Um, and you can just download. You'll get a zip file with all of them. Um- Hmm ... we're also building Composer integration so that if you buy something, you can get updates for a period of time via Composer.

And, you know, when your subscription ends, you no longer get Composer-based updates. Um, but you can come back, pay for more, and keep updating your site through Composer. And that only really matters if you decide to take your site elsewhere.

[00:31:33] John: Mm-hmm.

[00:31:33] Ashraf: Yeah, but um, this stuff is all built because, you know, not every community is Drupal.

Like, Drupal may say, "Hey, we want nothing, w- we want everything to be exportable all the time." And if that's the case, we may just go that way with Drupedo and say, "Hey, everything on Drupedo is always exportable." But even today, someone could build Sass on Drupal and- They are unlikely, if it's a SaaS product, they're unlikely to say, "By the way, if you want to export your data, you know, or your-"

[00:32:03] Avi: Yeah.

Well- "...

[00:32:03] Ashraf: our code base, here you go."

[00:32:06] Avi: And I think that, I- John, you said something that I, I think ties into this. Like, i- are we, are we really bringing people into the Drupal ecosystem if they don't know they're using Drupal? I think that's actually, like, a really powerful thing. Like, if we could, if we get people using Drupal and they don't even know they're using Drupal, like, I think that's, that's great, too, right?

That means that, like, somebody's building that site. Yeah. That's money that people are using. And like, you know, the, I, I, I think a lot of people aren't going to build a website and being like, "Hey, there's all this cool free PHP code. I can take it. I can, like, spin up DDEV." Like, that's awesome. Like, they just want a website, and if like-

[00:32:47] John: Yeah

[00:32:47] Avi: a couple years after getting a website, they're like, "Oh, hey, I'm kinda interested in how this works," like, then there's a pathway. But I think there, there, there's so many more people that come to this just as, like- Well- ... I wanna build a thing. I don't care about- Yeah,

[00:33:01] John: but- ... what's going on

[00:33:02] Avi: underneath ...

[00:33:02] John: yeah, no, I think, I, I think the education aspect is important, right?

So, like, I- But,

[00:33:06] Avi: but, like, eventually.

[00:33:07] John: I agree with, I agree with your- Yeah ... your, your statement, like, hey, if they just use it, fab. Like, wonderful. Go ahead. But I also ag- like, love the fact that, you know, Ashraf's saying, like, "Hey, you're gonna see the Drupal tag there, and if you hover over it, it's gonna say, 'Hey, this is open source software.'

Like, here, go learn more about it if you want to. If you don't want to-" Yeah "... you just like what it looks like and it's gonna work the way you want it to, like, go ahead. Go hog wild." But- But, like, I, I feel like that education piece is important.

[00:33:35] Nic: I, I think the entry point's actually different than that. It's more like the way that I got started in Drupal was by building these smaller websites for these smaller businesses.

And if somebody can... Wait, if somebody builds a site on Drupal not knowing that it was Drupal, and, uh, then later, uh, Ashraf, if you could mute. Well, yeah. Uh, if, if somebody, um- Later wants to add some features to it, Dropito can support that customization it sounds like, but they need to hire somebody to do that.

And one of the things that Drupal as an ecosystem is facing right now is a lot of those use cases that Ashraf was talking about are, are more complex, right? Like univer- a university project isn't going to, uh, go to a freelancer probably out of the gate. But they're also not going... I- it's v- a lot of agencies are somewhat looking to hire brand-new, fresh developers that have no Drupal experience at all.

But if you have 50, 100, 1,000, 2,000, you know, small business websites on, uh, Dropito, and a certain percentage of them start growing and they need additional features, they start hiring somebody, they start with somebody who has less experience. Yeah. Um, they learn Drupal. Now you're growing that next generation of developers as well.

Um, so it's not even just that the, the people using it, they don't... I mean, they need to know is Drupal when they go to hire somebody to work on it maybe. But-

[00:35:04] John: Y- y- yeah. I, I mean, I, I agree with that, and like I feel like that's a, that's a great longer, longer term objective and way to get developers into the mix.

But like, I think like first step is like Ashraf's example of like, uh, you know, his, his, his, you know, soon-to-be client or current client that's using Squarespace, right?

[00:35:29] Avi: Yeah.

[00:35:29] John: Like, "Hey, now we've got a person that was using Squarespace using Drupal for their, for their same, same business model," right? Like-

[00:35:37] Avi: Yeah

[00:35:38] John: that's a win. If we can do that, you know, 1,000 times or even 100 times, l- like that's, that's a huge, that's a huge win, and then helps to fuel what you're talking about, Nic, for sure. Yeah. But like, to, to be clear, like I don't know, like I think you're probably looking more at the, the marketing small business folks than you are like the development folks that are like, "How do I need to build something?"

Yeah. But like, I, I love-

[00:36:04] Nic: It's not 40. It's, it's a virtuous cycle. Rather, rather-

[00:36:06] Ashraf: Overall. Yeah. I wanna actually address-

[00:36:08] John: Love it ...

[00:36:09] Ashraf: a bit of that. So with, uh, I gave that example, right? And that example is likely someone who's gonna use a code base on Dropito that is maintained by someone else. All right? We're gonna talk more about that.

But he'll basically, kind of, you know, he, because this is a real person, uh, he's, he'll basically, you know, create his, we call it a derivative site for his customer, sell it, earn his recurring revenue. But we have another customer who, um, it's not a signed contract customer, but somebody who is like, "Just tell us when we can start building."

They already started building this alumni platform on, um- some other technology, maybe Laravel. Um, and they started building it already, and they've got a team, and they've got universities they're taking to, taking it to, et cetera. Um, but when I told him about Drupedo, how it works, et cetera, he's like, "Oh, we'll rebuild it in Drupedo.

It's worth that." He's, doesn't know Drupal, doesn't, never used Drupal before. Mm. He's like, "We'll rebuild it." And based on, like, his ambition, um, he's going to go the custom code base route. So he's gonna have to learn Drupal for real. Um, or he can start with a code base maintained by somebody else, but it has to be an exportable one.

There's no way he'll build on a, you know, one that he can't export. Um, but anyway, he's gonna actually get in the weeds there, and you know, learn Drupal all the way. Um, and so I think that, that, that's gonna be beneficial to have new people, you know, getting in the weeds. Also the, the Squarespace, uh, folks who come over, the money that they earn, uh, some of it goes to the person maintaining the code base who is likely closer to the Drupal community.

Um- Yeah ... so it all kind of funnels back to Drupal. And one more relevant point, we actually got the Drupal Association signed up on Drupedo, like, uh, six months ago. Uh, m- maybe in April or March, um, so that we can actually send them money when people buy sites, um, or rent sites. Now, we haven't worked out the details of it, but at the moment, for many of the sites, um, see if I can find a specific one.

But for many of the sites when you go, yeah, the Byte, you know the B-Y-T-E, um, site template-

[00:38:35] Nic: Yeah.

[00:38:35] Ashraf: Mm-hmm ... that comes with Drupal CMS? That's on Drupedo. So if you wanted a customer to use that, you could send them to Drupedo, tell them, "Pick the Byte one." And if they choose a hosting plan, whatever, this donation section pops up, and it says, "Donate to the Drupal Association."

And you could do a one-time donation or a recurring donation, and we don't take any percentage of that, and that just goes directly to their account. Um, and we're looking at, you know, maybe we don't make that a donation. Maybe we make that, like, a percentage that's required, and all sites on Drupedo are required already, not from a technical enforcement but, like, a policy standpoint.

We want them all to be built on Drupal CMS, so there's some baseline level of consistency for sites. Um, and becau- if they're all built on Drupal CMS, and then I think that justifies the Drupal Association receiving a share of revenue for all the sites. Um, and so, like, this is gonna benefit Drupal and the Drupal Association- However it, you know, for the customers who know they're doing Drupal and for the customers who don't.

Um, but the customers are seeing the word Drupal, they're being educated step by step. On the checkout page it's like, "Donate to the Drupal Association. Oh, why?" You know, and then you learn that they, you know, support the underlying technology and that type of thing. Yeah.

[00:39:59] Nic: Yeah, it sound, it sounds similar to the Acquia Fair Trade initiative that we talked about last week, where they're, they're, for a percentage of their customers, they're donating, I think, what was it?

2%, um, I think it was- Yeah ... of, of the, of the revenue. So if, if we can get more automated funding, automatic funding, I think, for the DA, it helps everybody all around.

[00:40:22] John: And, and, and educating the, the, the world about Drupal too, I think is, um, is an important benefit, uh, to, to highlight. Um, so speaking of, speaking of, uh, educating folks to the word of Drupal and, and the, the global reach, um, Martin, Martin's coming in from, from Bath.

He's gallivanting there. So hi Martin, uh- Hi Martin ... glad you're, glad you're watching. We also have somebody, Lev's watching from Egypt. From nearby. I'm not gonna lie, real, real nearby right there. Um-

[00:40:57] Ashraf: Yeah. Put it, God, that sounds so better.

[00:40:58] John: And then, and then Roger just chimed in that he's in Nicaragua, so, like, everybody's everywhere.

Um-

[00:41:04] Ashraf: Yeah ...

[00:41:04] John: I feel, I feel like, you know, so small here in the smallest state in the United States. But hey, you know what? I'm glad everybody's listening in and, uh, thanks for participating in the, in the chat there.

[00:41:17] Nic: Yeah, and I think, I think it's worth, um... 'Cause we t- we talked about the hosting. Uh, Steven was curious about, uh, migrating from other hosts.

Like, is this only for new sites, or is it something that you can migrate an existing kind of new site to Drupeto?

[00:41:34] Ashraf: You will be able to migrate an existing site. We haven't built that yet. We're prioritizing new sites, um, for probably the next couple months. Um, and but yeah, absolutely. This is, this, uh, every- We're building everything in a way where, um, you can deploy code bases, you can make sites from it, and you can import databases and files and all that.

So you can absolutely move sites to Drupeto

[00:42:02] Nic: So, uh, moving back to the... You, you've mentioned the Marketplace a few times, you've mentioned the Drupal Marketplace. I- uh, can you talk a little bit about the difference in the vision of, like, the Drupal.org Marketplace versus you- the Marketplace you're building?

[00:42:17] Ashraf: Yeah. Um, one thing I wanna point out is this wasn't, like, inspired by the Drupal Association's Marketplace. It wasn't like, "Oh, that's a cool idea. Let's do a different one." Um, this was... This started a little over two years ago. Um, it was... I- at the time, I had, like, a pinched nerve. I, I was struggling to teach my classes.

I was struggling to type, and I was like, "Okay, I can't do this type of work anymore. What can I do that's more of a product?" So that's actually what started the ball rolling. Um, thankfully, I've since gotten a surgery, replaced some discs. Uh, TMI, but, you know, I, I'm feeling better now. But now I'm just really excited about this, so I'm continuing.

Um, so anyway, this roadmap was formed mostly by talking to people who are, like, mo- for most of the time, not in the Drupal community. Um, I also... I ran, I run Debug Academy, a training company, and I pretty much put that on hold for the past two years. But, um, something different about Debug Academy is, I'd say my network, especially for the first, like, half of the, you know, first five years of it, did not really consist of the Drupal community.

It was people outside. So I have so much, you know, history teaching people who have never heard of Drupal to use Drupal, and we used, you know, well-known Drupal hosting platforms for our classes. So this was built with them in mind. You know, what are the little things that none of us ever talk about that actually trip students up when they're starting with Drupal?

And I won't mention them here because it's like, it'll sound like I'm taking shots at specific hosting companies and whatnot, but basically, there's lots of little things that, like, are not even part of the conversation. Um, so, you know, the first thing is removing friction completely from starting. Like, you need to be able to look at all the sites running, working sites, without even, like...

Not, not just a free demo, just, like, it's already running. It's super fast. You just click the link. You can open 10 sites at once and look at all 10, and you know, you're not doing a CAPTCHA to do that. Um, and then, you know, in... Beyond that, like, where is it different? Um, I'd say the... We really focus on incentives.

Incentives for customers, right? The customers, it's not enough to give them a Drupal site and make it easy to get a Drupal site. They need to be able to maintain the site Right? That's, that's huge. Like, if I, in good faith, I cannot recommend Drupal to friends and family who have zero budget, right? Like, that example that was given on LinkedIn of, you know, someone's wedding photography site.

If they plan on keeping it for more than six months, I can't recommend Drupal to them because it's gonna become expensive or difficult to maintain. Mm-hmm. So where is this vision different? Um, we try to incentivize people to maintain the sites, the code bases I should say. We try to make it so customers don't have to be aware of the maintenance, and they don't have to pay the full price because that maintenance is being spread across many customers.

Um, we, let's see. Yeah, keep people on Drupal long term. Um, also, we ... You know, I've talked to agency leaders about the Drupal marketplace, and a lot of them are like, "Yeah, I don't know. We would s- create a site template and list it for free because a one-time sale doesn't really matter to us. You know, even if it's $1,000, um, it doesn't move the needle much.

Um, we just wanna meet customers." Um, so we're focused on, like, a long-term ongoing relationship. So if they publish a code base, they know who's maintaining the code base, so they can eventually turn it into a bigger engagement.

[00:46:16] John: So I, I, the more you're, the more you're talking about this, the more I love this idea.

Um, because, you know, to your, to your point about the, you know, the cousin's wedding photo website, right? Like, I would 100% send them to Squarespace and be like, "Yo, build a site over there." And like, you know, that'll be, that'll, that'll help you out. That'll do your thing, right? Um, having a kind of Drupal alternative to that is, is, is fabulous.

I wonder, though, like ... So I see, I see the, the model that you're building, and I love the fact that you're, like, you're basing the whole plat- well, not the whole platform. But you're, a large part of your business model here is returning revenue to the people that are building these things and, and making it more accessible to the users who need the, need the websites, right?

Um, but I'm wondering, like, how much of Like how much is Dropito like validating that code maintenance, that update, right? Because like for me it looks like, hey, I'm a developer, I build this great site template on Dropito, I sell it to 100 people, and then, you know, my life circumstances change, I have to stop supporting it or I'm like halfway in and halfway out of this thing.

Um, I push a, I push an update and the update's like not good for everybody that's using it. Like what does that process look like? Is Dropito doing some sort of validation to say like, "Yes, this update was good. Like it's not gonna break all these sites. Like let's push it." Or is it truly like, um, that point in time like, hey, you get it when you, when this thing is, is out and that's it.

Like how are you kinda handling that?

[00:48:07] Ashraf: Yeah, so part of making sites easy to maintain is giving people the, you know, freedom to update sites themselves without being experts. So like for example, if I'm a developer doing an update for a client, um, I might take a backup of prod first. I might deploy to stage, do my testing there, push the code to prod.

This is the normal workflow. Drupedo, we, we've taken a different approach here. Um, we have sort of more of like a blue-green deployment situation, if you're familiar, if anyone's familiar with that. So it's sort of like you have two production environments. And so you can have your, your site on prod, and then the latest, the next update, goes to the, it's actually called the green one, is the next one.

And then, um, you can pretty much flip a switch and okay, now that's the live site and that's the old site. And if an update is, you know, not what you want it to be, you can just switch back. Um, now there's a lot more to it, and it's kinda hard to summarize it concisely, but we've given a lot of tools to the code base maintainers so they can have, you know, Git tags and branches and-

[00:49:20] John: Mm-hmm

[00:49:20] Ashraf: different versions of PHP and all that stuff. And, um, they're not just gonna push to prod for everybody. Um, we are still working out some details. You know, there's a lot going on, but we're still working out some details. In the longer run, we want to give them the ability to set a content freeze on all of their customers' sites, and then take this blue-green deployment approach, and then do some sort of visual regression automated testing.

Um, we, we have this concept of what- Yeah ... we call a representative page. So they can say, "For this site we sell, the following is a representative page. This should not change visually." Um, over time, likely we'll have programmatic- Yeah ... automated tests and such, but, you know, there's, there's, there's code plus server- Yeah.

[00:50:09] John: So- ...

[00:50:10] Ashraf: plus database ... so

[00:50:11] John: the onus is on the site, the, the, uh, site builder basically, or the site owner to say like, "Hey, I'm gonna update my site 'cause the, the, the code creator has released a new update. Let me blue-green test it. Yeah, it looks good. It looks great. Push it." Right? Okay,

[00:50:25] Ashraf: that makes- Yeah, unless they set up...

Unless they like check a box that says, "I don't care. Automated updates are good."

[00:50:31] John: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. "

[00:50:32] Ashraf: If something goes wrong, I'll come back later."

[00:50:33] John: Right. Yeah. That's- So- ... that's fair. That makes sense. Okay.

[00:50:36] Avi: I, I have had the experience of updating WordPress sites and, and, and that's mostly, uh, you hit update and then Uh, you hope that nothing breaks, and then if something breaks, then- No, this isn't Wor-

[00:50:47] John: this isn't Worpedo.

This is Drupedo. It's, it, we don't have that problem here. Yeah,

[00:50:51] Avi: nothing. Exactly.

[00:50:52] John: No,

[00:50:52] Avi: that sounds amazing.

[00:50:54] Nic: Well, I, I will say, I just wanna plug a, a book that I've slowly been reading the last couple months, uh- Not

[00:50:59] John: as slow as me, but go ahead.

[00:51:02] Nic: It's called Code That Ships. Um, and it, it's something that, Ashraf, you might wanna recommend to people going in the marketplace, because one, one of the things that it's really highlighted for me and has made, um, my approach to core, uh, as a maintainer a little bit different too, is there's a, there's a concept in the book about whether you're, um, writing a framework, a library, or a custom code, right?

So when you're You know, one of the reasons why core development sometimes seems slow from the outside is all the test coverage. Like, you can't just fix a bug. I mean, there's, there is some allowance for, like, a super simple bug that's really hard to test, but the idea is your, you know, Drupal core is going out to thousands or millions of sites.

You don't wanna break them. It's extremely disruptive to break sites with a core update. So the update path is tested thorough- like, and, and sometimes things slip through, but that's also why we have, you know, such a strong deprecation and backwards compatibility layer from version to version. Um, if you're building...

A- a- and it's different than, like, a custom... Like, for a customer site, if there's a bug, you fix it, you push it up, you do a hotfix. Fine. Eh, you can do that for core too, but in general you just do a hotfix. You, you do write tests, but you really, like, the, the onus is on just like, "Hey, if I need to rewrite this whole class or this whole subsystem to make it work for a client site," you do it.

It's not a big deal. Doing something like that for core would be extremely disruptive. Um, so if people are building, um, templates or, or packages or whatever you wanna call them, that are going out to hundreds or thousands of sites on Drupal, they very much wanna consider themselves as, as that type of framework.

They wanna have that mindset, um- Absolutely ... yeah, be- because you're affecting so many sites at once. You can't, you can't test those individually. Um, you need- Yeah ... you need to have those built in.

[00:52:57] John: I'm not, I'm not sure that I recommend, like, requiring a book to be read for, as a business model, but, um, I do tend to agree that, you know, Nic is right in his, in his thinking.

Like, you know, people wanna be careful with, with that, that sort of, uh, development process. Um, so I love the comment here from, from Steven. Um, "I love the idea of Drupal CMS, but the hosting and maintenance side has been mostly ignored. Um, I love this direction." Uh, it kind of, uh, corresponds to my next question, which is, um, Nic asked earlier about the Drupal marketplace that's being, being produced, and I'm wondering, like, do you see Drupal as competing with that official Drupal m- Drupal, Drupal marketplace, excuse me, or is it, like, complementing it?

Because, like, you guys are kind of the full package of, you know, maintenance and hosting and, and Drupal.

[00:53:57] Ashraf: Right. So when they announced the marketplace initiative, the first thing I did was I ran over to them and I said, "Hey, we're already building this. Um, can we talk? You know, can we, can you use this? Can we collaborate?

What can we do?" And, um- They were pretty overwhelmed and it, it seemed that I wasn't the only person who'd told them that. Like, a bunch of people approached them who were like, "We're building a better marketplace. Let's, you know, use our thing too." So, you know, I completely understood and, um, I was like, "Okay, do your thing.

When you're ready, let's talk." And, um, I followed up with them numerous times, and they were responsive. Um, and so like, uh, I mean, the reality is they've got so much on their plate and, you know, changes-

[00:54:51] Avi: Yeah, I think- ...

[00:54:51] Ashraf: are abound and all that. Anyway, um, they are aware of what we are doing. They are also aware of what others in the community are doing.

Mm-hmm. And, um, conversations are open, you know, and ongoing, and we don't know if they'll decide to leverage us or, you know, just learn from each other or-

[00:55:13] John: Mm-hmm ...

[00:55:14] Ashraf: what the situation will be.

[00:55:15] John: Yeah.

[00:55:16] Ashraf: Um, but I-

[00:55:17] John: I kind of, I kind of see it, I kind of see it as like a complimentary service in a way, or a complimentary, um, existence.

Because like, I imagine the Drupal Marketplace, the official Drupal Marketplace, will be, um, more of a place to see all of the site templates, maybe try a demo if they exist, and for people to kind of have that one-off experience of like, "I need a site template to do this thing. I'm willing to pay for it.

Here, let me buy it once and then I'm gonna manage it myself and host it where I want to host and like I have the, the know-how to be able to, to, to do that," right? Um- Yeah ... as where, you know, for you guys, I think a lot of the, the people coming in are gonna be, um, maybe they're going to be selling it on the Drupal Marketplace, but they're also going to have it included in Dropedo because there are gonna be people out there that are like nonprofits that, I feel bad always picking on nonprofits, but like the, you know, they, they're gonna be, they're gonna be a nonprofit or a small business owner or somebody who's like, "I just need a website that does the thing that I need to do for my business.

Oh, if I go to Dropedo, I can press this button and it, it spins it up, and I can create my content and be off and running," right? Mm-hmm. So I kind of see them, you know, I, I kind of see you guys maybe working together or just being two different resources for that, that creator who's creating that, that site template.

[00:56:43] Ashraf: Yeah. I will say for us, like whatever happens, we plan to contribute to the Drupal Association financially, 'cause I think it's, uh, just kind of fundamentally wrong to be like, "Oh, Drupal CMS is polished. Let's get paid for hosting it now. You guys don't get paid." You know, like so we, uh, you know, that, that's why we, like I said, in April- Already got them plugged into our system so we can send them funds and whatnot.

Um, we'll keep the conversation going. I mean, I would hope at a minimum on their marketplace they have a link that's like, "Try this here, try this there." Um, but I do think there's value in taking it a bit further. And, um, we actually re-architected our system to make it more appealing to them so that, like, we don't need to be the owners of the code bases.

They don't need to be hosted on our servers. You know, Drupal Association can host them if they want to. We can pull from them. Um, you know, that's where the Composer piece came into play originally, is because I heard their concerns and I was like, "Well, here, we can re-architect a few things, shuffle a few chairs around, and, um, make things appealing."

Um, but with that said It's not an easy decision from their point of view. They, like, they're a nonprofit. They want to be neutral. They want to do certain things in, uh, you know, a way that feels right. Um, but yeah, we-we'll see what happens, and at the end of the day, we do think this will be beneficial for the Drupal Association no matter what.

Yeah.

[00:58:14] Avi: And I, I feel like, I think I remember having this conversation with you, Ashraf, like two years ago when the marketplaces were announced. You know, one of the, like, we walked by each other at DrupalCon, and it was like, "What are you doing?" Uh, but I, I think the idea from the Drupal Association and from the, the, the initiative, the marketplace initiative was for the DA marketplace to, to, you know, encourage other marketplaces to exist, and that's where it, it, it seems like, you know, the, the, the DA is kind of kickstarting development or these ideas similar to how Drupal CMS is kind of pushing contrib modules like, you know, into core, um, or like, you know, encouraging contrib development.

Um, so I'm hopeful that that's, you know, y-y-your marketplace can help everyone else, and they can help, you know, help you, and it, it becomes this virtual cycle. I also, I, I realized I hadn't checked in on the Drupal marketplace for a while, and it's been two years, and there's only one paid site on there. Uh, and it's just a, it's just a theme.

Um, it's not like a hosted situation, so I think that's a, um, you know, you're providing- Yeah ... a different service than just like, "Here's a one-time fee for, for a theme." Like John was saying, "Go, go use it wherever you want." Um.

[00:59:33] Ashraf: Yeah, I think one of the tricky parts is just this really requires a lot of time and attention and whatnot.

Like, when I've had calls with, uh, folks from the, the DA, and these, again, to be clear for anyone listening, these are not calls they requested. This is me putting something on their Calendly and saying, "Hey, can we talk?" Um, but when I had calls with them, um, I would say, "Hey, we are figuring out code. We're handling code-based maintenance this way.

We're handling split payments that way, and we're handling derivative sites that way." And a lot of times they're like, "Wow, that's like one of the biggest issues we were struggling with. You've solved it in an elegant way. Awesome." Um, so like, and there's sort of things they said that also influenced my architecture and whatnot.

Um, but I think it really just comes down to the fact that this is, uh, Drupal's being worked on by more than one person full-time. You know, we've got like, um, multiple people, people working on infrastructure, et cetera, et cetera. The one area we're not working on much is Drupal code bases itself because at some point we realized this can be a real revenue driver for agencies and freelancers and this, and so on.

And I don't want to be put in a position where I have more information than they do, and now I'm competing with them. So we have a policy that- Drupal doesn't publish code bases. Uh, like, unless it's, like, for demonstration purposes, we don't want to be- Right ... in the business of competing on the marketplace with everyone else.

[01:01:03] Avi: Yeah. So I, I, I think that, that, that's a, that's a good tie-in to, to the next question. So hypothetical, I work at an agency. Our agency has a, a, a code base that we, uh, that we work with regularly. Um, y- y- you know, our current model is, um, you know, a client pays a hosting provider to host that code base. They pay us to do updates.

They pay us to do custom development. Um, they may pay somebody else to help them with content or marketing. Um, is there a possible space for Drupal to help, um, agencies build a new business model, uh, and, and create more value for their clients as well as, you know, help, help f- find a new way of kind of working in the, the, the world as it is today?

[01:01:57] Ashraf: Yeah, for sure. And there's, it also enables, like, agencies to do partnerships without needing to talk to each other. Um, so, like, let me explain a little. Um, so let's say you have, uh, let me use an example. There's, um ... I don't wanna use the wrong name here when I mention them, but there's a groups initiative.

Where is it? They're very on top of the-

[01:02:26] Avi: Oh, the, the groups.drupal.org thing? No.

[01:02:30] Ashraf: No, no. There's, um ... God, they have weekly meetings every Wednesday. Member Platform, that's what it is, not groups. Yes.

[01:02:37] Avi: Member

[01:02:38] Ashraf: Platform. Yeah. Okay. Yes. Um, so the Member Platform Initiative is building a code base, right? Or might be a site template with recipes and whatnot.

Um, and they're just building it out in the open. Great membership code base for everyone. Um, now- It's not restricted to one person because it's open source, right? So an agency that's maintaining this member platform, uh, code base, or one of the freelancers who's like a core contributor to it, whoever can publish this on Rapido and they can basically say, "Hey, um, we're charging $0 for this."

Okay? So bear with me. "We're charging $0 for this." Um, but if they charge $0, they get a percentage of hosting revenue. All right? But also the, the interesting part is they can list it and then someone else can use it to make different marketplace sites, and we'll talk about this more soon. But, um, you know, membership platform is very high level.

People can use that code base to make more specific sites and circle back and list those on the marketplace too. And if those are sold, if that person who made the derivative site makes a sale, the code base maintainer also receives a percentage of that sale. So, you know, I, I know we're gonna talk about this, you know, derivative site soon, but that's what really enables, um, some interesting, uh, forms of, you know, uh, or in- interesting business models here.

But just at the agency level, what you were asking about directly, um, agencies receive the money from their site being sold. They also receive a percentage of hosting revenue, and they receive a percentage of any downstream derivative sites, niche derivative sites we call them And, and also- That sounds like-

business models. Um, the, when someone buys a site, they're gonna be prompted, "Hey, you're buying this, you know, uh, member platform site. Do you want it customized?" And they'll see, you know, okay, yeah, the, the maintainer of the code base who published this, they charge the following one-time fee for customization.

They charge the following for, I don't know- Yeah ... ongoing SEO or whatever, whatever they wanna list there, and the customer can choose, "I want these services," and, you know, change it from just the template purchase to also, you know, services being sold.

[01:05:10] Avi: Yeah. So- And I feel like I've seen these models, yeah, like so many times.

Like X agency has open X, you know, distribution or site template or whatever, where they're trying to sell this thing and develop it, and they made it for somebody, and they're trying to sell it to other people and, like, it's pretty complicated kind of sales process. Yeah. This sounds like it could streamline that a lot

[01:05:36] Nic: So- Yeah ... uh So Technora also kind of s- is piling onto this, said she loves the idea of going niche and sees a lot of different, uh, small businesses, like a local dog groomer, a candle maker, somebody who needs a site kind of just as a brochure almost. Can you, can you go in a little bit more on the concept of niche derivative site and why, you know, why you think that's so important here?

How-

[01:06:00] Ashraf: Yeah, and I will also

[01:06:01] Nic: comment on her- What do you envision that looking like?

[01:06:03] Ashraf: Yeah, and I'll, I'll comment on her dog groomer example. That's the closest example to the, the one that I mentioned earlier where someone makes sites for a niche and sells them for $1,500 a pop. And I was very surprised. I was like, "People would pay that much for a dog grooming website?"

That's very surprising to me. Um, but yeah, he's done that many times. Uh, bear with me with the honking horns in the background. Um, but, uh, yeah, in terms of the niche derivative site, uh, Drupal, as you all know, is, um, so flexible from the configuration layer, from the, you know, information architecture, content types, entities, et cetera, and you can do all of that without writing any code.

And now we have Canvas on top of it, and you can really, like, use JavaScript and et cetera in the UI to change how the front end looks as well. So you can do so much without editing the back end now that you couldn't do before. And so, um, basically when someone publishes a code base, people can then create what we call a niche derivative site of that, and basically they can create a site from that code base.

Um, and they can change all the settings. They can use Drupal Canvas as much as they like. They can use whatever modules the code base maintainer gave them to make a site for a specific niche. Um, so in that, you know, member platform example from earlier, maybe they publish a member platform code base. Um, but then maybe somebody says, "Okay, well, let me create a niche derivative site of this for gyms," right?

Every gym needs membership, and they need, you know, to track their members, whatever. Um, and so they publish a niche derivative site for, uh, for that use case. Now, in, in this example, we'll say that the member platform code base maintainer set a price of $50 a month. The niche derivative site maker, when they tailor it for gyms, they set a price of $100 a month.

Okay? So we refer to that as the incremental price, because it gets added onto the price of the code base. Now, when they go make a sale, they're selling it for 150, the combined price, 150 a month. And they can go door to door. We're hoping that there's some people who have more energy than we do, you know, younger people who say, "Oh, member platform, and I don't know backend development."

Let me, you know, spin this up for whatever people I know personally and create a derivative, set my price, and I'll go sell it to them. And they go make the sale. They get their $100. The code base maintainer gets their $50. The code base maintainer also gets a percentage of whatever price was set at the niche derivative layer, you know, the incremental- Okay

price. Because what if they, they set it for free? You know, you wanna make sure that they get, th- they're earning in the upside if there's, like, a big discrepancy.

[01:09:10] John: Um- Not gonna lie, you, you may be a genius. I'm, I'm, like, uh, I'm like- ... oh my God. Well- Silo- siloing the, the, the people and how they... Well, you know, what they're good at, and then it...

Dumping money into their silos a- at, like, like... Yeah, no, it's- Why have we not thought of this before? Like, I worked with... I, I talked with JD

[01:09:29] Avi: about this.

[01:09:30] John: JD's

[01:09:34] Avi: one of the maintainers of the member platform, and, like, I think he- Yeah ... he was saying he worked on, like, HOAs, like, f- he, he was working on, you know, homeowners associations. Exactly. Yeah. It's like, not quite door to door, but, but, uh, association to association. No, it's more-

[01:09:48] Ashraf: Yeah. Like- Yeah, like- You know

people like him who maybe- Everybody

[01:09:49] Avi: needs one of these things ...

[01:09:51] Ashraf: Exactly. Like, one thing I think we, like, I... that hit me is there's some people who are great at coding, and they don't have big networks. There's some people who are, who have big networks and may or may not be great at coding, right? In this example, let's say someone made the, the member platform code base.

Let's say JD maintains it. Um, somebody else tailors it for HOAs, right? And you could even have a third person say, "That's an HOA site. They're only selling it for 150 bucks a month. My HOA pays 1,000 a month. Let me make a derivative of their derivative," right? They can actually do that already. They're gonna fork it.

They can add $600 a month. They can use their copywriting marketing skills to make it much more appealing, and they can go sell that for $800, and everybody gets their slice. And, you know- So- ... you want people

[01:10:42] John: who

[01:10:42] Ashraf: have, who can sell to be able to create-

[01:10:46] John: So, okay Or

[01:10:46] Avi: expanding the pie

[01:10:48] John: Love, love this idea.

Question on kind of the slicing, right? Is, is Dropedo defining that? Like, or is the code creator saying, "I need to get... Every time somebody uses this code, I need to get at least $50 for my, for my thing." And then, like, Dropedo's just saying, "Okay. Well, you've used this derivative of a derivative. Like, you have to pr- you have to build in these prices into whatever you're selling it for."

Like, how does that work?

[01:11:20] Ashraf: Yeah. So at the moment, Dropedo defines the percentage, but you can... Uh, and the percentage is separate from the fixed amount. You can set your own fixed amount. Right. So if someone lists the member platform, they can say, "I need at least $100 a month per customer for this maintenance work to be worth it."

Yep. So they can set $100 a month. Now, when someone makes a niche derivative site, they don't need to do math necessarily. We will show them a summary, but they can... They will just set their incremental price. So they can set $50. I think I flipped the numbers from when I gave the example earlier. But they can set their $50, and the customer-facing price becomes 150.

[01:12:01] John: Got

[01:12:01] Ashraf: it. Now, there's issues, you know. Uh, people... When- every time I mention this to people and they say, "Oh, you can make a derivative of a derivative of a derivative?" And I say, "Yes." They say, "Well, then the price will get too high." And I say, "Okay. Yeah. The, then the market will work the way the market should work."

Wow. People won't make a fork of a derivative that's already $800. You know, they'll go look for a cheaper one, and they'll start from there. And they might have to do more work, and that's okay

[01:12:30] Nic: So before we close out, I have two very rapid-fire questions 'cause we're running out of time. Question number one, yes or no, do you handle the domain registration process for these people too?

[01:12:43] Ashraf: Registration, not yet. But tying the domain, applying the domain to the site, yes. Okay. That's trivially easy. It's on the dashboard.

[01:12:51] Nic: Okay. Second question is when are you going live? And I need a firm date, exact date. No, I'm just kidding. When are you, when, when do you plan on going live for the general public?

Very

[01:13:00] John: soon. Remember,

[01:13:01] Ashraf: this is live

[01:13:01] John: on the internet right now.

[01:13:04] Ashraf: It's permanent. Um, so people can register sites today. Um, you can email me if you're ready to publish a code base, but what I would say is, you know, functionally complete to where you can maintain code bases properly, um, before Rotterdam is our target.

And we do want people who are interested in maintaining code bases, um, to reach out. Um, one thing I think I didn't really mention in terms of the vetting, uh, the sites that we're gonna list on the marketplace, we are preferring, um, people who have, like, a, a history of significant contributions to drupal.org, as well as companies who are Drupal certified partners.

Um, that's sort of like, okay, if you have the ability to publish a module with security updates on drupal.org, you can publish a template on our marketplace. If not, you can still sell one, but it won't be on the marketplace. Um, I think that's one point worth noting. This functionality is going to be available to people who want to sell privately on their own domain.

It'll just use the same engine underneath. Yeah.

[01:14:09] Nic: Well, Ashraf, thank you for joining us for the last few weeks. It's been a pleasure having you on as a guest host, and I've really enjoyed learning more about Drupal today.

[01:14:16] Ashraf: Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Yeah, absolutely. This has been great.

[01:14:20] John: Thank you. Do you have questions or feedback?

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[01:15:12] Nic: All right. If our listeners wanted to get in touch with you, Ashraf, what's the best way for them to do that?

[01:15:18] Ashraf: I'll give them the email that's easiest to spell.

[email protected]

[01:15:25] Nic: Awesome. And how about you, Avi?

[01:15:28] Avi: Yep. I'm, uh, FroBoy on Drupal Slack, uh, Avi Schwab, uh, uh, everywhere else. Uh, and folks can reach out to imagex, uh, at imagex.co

[01:15:38] Nic: And John, how about you?

[01:15:40] John: Uh, you can find me personally at picozzi.com. You can find me on social media and drupal.org @johnpicozzi, and you can find out about EPAM at epam.com

[01:15:50] Nic: And you can find me pretty much everywhere @nicxvan, N-I-C-X-V-A-N And we forgot to tell you, but since this is your final show, Ashraf, uh, it's up to you to do the tagline at the bottom of the show notes.

[01:16:06] Ashraf: Okay, let me look

[01:16:07] Nic: at- No, no, it's our, it's our fault. We forget and you're the guest host, so

[01:16:12] Ashraf: Put the tagline at the bottom of the show notes. There we go. Thank you. If you've enjoyed listening, we've enjoyed talking.

[01:16:22] Nic: Awesome.

[01:16:23] Ashraf: Thank you so much. Thank you.

[01:16:24] Nic: Have a good one. It's been a pleasure