The Out of the Box Initiative

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Matt and Mike the ins and outs of Out of the Box initiative, which endeavors to showcase Drupal's power "out of the box." They are joined by some of the developers from the Out of the Box initiative. 








Umami Theme Screenshot

Screenshot of the Umami Theme

Episode Guests

Mark Conroy

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Lead Frontend Developer at Annertech, and organizer of many Drupal events in Ireland.

Keith Jay

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Designer & Developer. Founder and managing director of Five Mile.

Gareth Goodwin

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Lead Drupal developer at Five Mile Media

Mentioned in this Episode

Transcript

Transcript

Matt Kleve:
For January 13, 2018, it's the Lullabot Podcast. (Music) Hey everybody. It's the Lullabot Podcast, Episode 221. I'm Matt Kleve, senior developer at Lullabot, with as always, senior front end developer, cohost of the show, Mike Herchel. Hey, Mike.
Mike Herchel:
Hey, Happy New Year.
Matt Kleve:
Happy New Year. We're ready to get going on the newest episode of the Lullabot Podcast in 2018. We're going to talk about something that we mentioned in passing a couple of times, haven't we?
Mike Herchel:
Yep.
Matt Kleve:
Yep, and I think it's actually going to be a good thing for Drupal as far as getting something useful when people install Drupal, and understand what's going on, right?
Mike Herchel:
It's been a long time coming.
Matt Kleve:
What are we talking about? We're being all weird.
Mike Herchel:
Well, this week we are getting in the box with the out of the box imitative. You like that?
Matt Kleve:
I like it, and we're going to talk to the people who are thinking outside the box with the... How do you say it? Ube?
Mike Herchel:
Uta-
Matt Kleve:
Out of the box initiative with Drupal, that's right.
Mike Herchel:
First up, we have Cristina Chumillas. She is a designer and front end developer at NBRA.
Mike Herchel:
She was a co-organizer of Drupal Summer Barcelona and is an active member of the Catlan Drupal Association, "ckrinas" on Twitter. From Barcelona, Spain, welcome Cristina.
Cristina C.:
Hi, there.
Matt Kleve:
We're just going to make you say those hard words like three more times.
Cristina C.:
Yeah, just wait, another time.
Mike Herchel:
Yeah, you got the easy one coming up here.
Matt Kleve:
Next up, we have the lead, front end developer at Inter Tech. He's an organizer of many Drupal events in Ireland, and a speaker at Drupal Con and Front End United. He's Mark Control on Drupal dot organization and Twitter and he's approaching his ten-year anniversary on Drupal dot organization from Galway, Ireland, we have Mark Conroy. Hey, Mark.
Mark Conroy:
Hi, guys.
Matt Kleve:
Hey, glad you're here.
Mark Conroy:
Thank you.
Mike Herchel:
Next up, we have a Director of Five Mile, K.J. on Drupal.org. Has been on Drupal.org for over ten years. From Hampshire in the UK, welcome Keith Jay.
Keith Jay:
Hi, there.
Mike Herchel:
Hey.
Matt Kleve:
Hey, Keith. Five Mile, that sounds like it's in Detroit, right?
Mike Herchel:
That's Eight mile.
Matt Kleve:
That's right.
Mike Herchel:
Also a lead developer at Five Mile Media, Smas on Drupal.org from Hampshire in the UK as well. We have Gareth Goodwin. I almost said Godwin. Would that have been wrong?
Gareth Goodwin:
That would have been... It's close enough.
Mike Herchel:
Gareth Goodwin, glad you're here.
Gareth Goodwin:
Hello, thank you for having me.
Mike Herchel:
All right, so let's go ahead and get started. What is the out of the box initiative?
Matt Kleve:
What are we actually talking about here?
Mike Herchel:
Give us the run down.
Matt Kleve:
Why have we been talking for three minutes? What are we talking about?
Male:
I guess it's an initiative that's come out of... There was two initiatives. There was, if we go back to Dublin, there was basically conversations going on around creating a new theme for Drupal Core. Talking about the fact that obviously that out of the box Drupal has still got the same theme that it's had for some years. There was a whole conversation going on around having a new theme for Drupal. Then alongside that, there was a bit of an onboarding conversation. How can we welcome new users to Drupal? How can we show off its capabilities and really shine a spotlight on what it's able to do? Again, something Drupal doesn't really do. If you install Drupal, you're familiar with that. You have no content message, which is super friendly and super helpful.
Matt Kleve:
Yeah, so you install Drupal. I haven't done this in a very long time, because I always end up working with the client side that already exists. So you install Drupal and you get, I remember this paragraph of text that says something that might be useful, but isn't really useful. Then it goes away once you make your first node, right?
Male:
Yeah, it's really bad. It's interesting the issue around this has actually been on Drupal.org for, I think, it's over ten years. I'm pretty sure it's over ten years.
Mike Herchel:
Sounds about right for Drupal.org.
Male:
I remember my first time installing Drupal, probably eight years ago now or something. I think it was Drupal 6 at the time. The first time I was going for it. I knew I was getting a job within Drupal, I downloaded it. Started playing with it. I just remember thinking, WTF is a node. You, kind of, still get that experience when you install Drupal 8, out of the box. It doesn't tell you what things are. Yeah, I still remember that experience from eight years ago now.
Matt Kleve:
Kind of cleaning up and making that experience a whole lot easier for a new user is kind of the goal here. That's what we're trying to do?
Male:
Yeah, the goal specifically is that we're doing a demo. That's the merge of these two initiatives is we're producing a new theme. We're producing sample content, and we're producing an installation profile that's going to give a demo of Drupal. That's really important. We're not trying to create a starter kit here. We're literally trying to say ... literally putting together a system that allows you to install Drupal and see exactly.
Mike Herchel:
Yeah, to show the power and versatility of Drupal. I started on Drupal Five dot whatever days. It's confusing when you have to, I don't know, maybe download various modules like you did in Drupal 7. I know in Drupal 8 it's a little bit easier where you have a log of the modules like views and under the relationship bundled or entity reference bundled. How do you know what to do? What exactly is an entity reference when you don't even know what the hell an entity is?
Mark:
I think we're trying to solve a problem such as the evaluation of Drupal is very difficult out of the box because you install Drupal and [inaudible 00:06:11], and they're not going to decide to go with Drupal based on a [inaudible 00:06:14] and a message that says, you've created no front page content yet. You look at a designer, and they install Drupal and think, "Oh, God. That's what we get? That looks like 2001, because that's when that was designed." You look at the fund raising department or whatever in charity or you look at the content editor as in what we're trying to do with Food Magazine, and out of the box Drupal just doesn't sell itself well. One of the main problems they're trying to solve is to say that out of the box Drupal can be quite an impressive content management system. From there, then you can start building more things. You start using all the features that Drupal core gives you, because we don't use all of the core features. Or you start using [inaudible 00:06:55] and modules and things like that as well.
For me, we're trying to solve an evaluation issue that's it.
Matt:
No, that's exactly right. It's about first impressions, and it's something Roy Scholten has spoken about a fair bit before. What's that first impression that anyone install Drupal gets? Roy described it, I think it was back in San Francisco, he described it as being that we're effectively delivering an experience that implies that Drupal doesn't have a lot to offer. When, in reality it's especially with Drupal 8, the exact opposite case.
Matt Kleve:
So, what we're trying to do is we're targeting evaluators of Drupal. Is that true? All of us here on the podcast today are not really the target. Is that difficult to try and develop something for somebody who isn't us?
Cristina C.:
Exactly, that's the main issue. That's one of the main challenge we had some time ago, because we had to figure out which were the main features we wanted to show. Keith, I don't know if you remember them, but it was like okay, let's put all the staff together, and let's decide what's the most important things. It was kind of...
Mike Herchel:
What are the personas that you've identified that you're trying to market this to?
Male:
The personas that we originally discussed were, as you just mentioned, the evaluators, really important, content authors, site builders as well, because we want this to be about learning as well as just getting that first impression. If this is the... If you're coming along to Drupal as someone who's a bit of site builder, or even a developer, you might be coming from another platform. And you want to know exactly what's going Drupal. You're going to have a very different perspective on what you might expect to see. So, we want to guide users through what is a typical set of features that you might find on a Drupal site, site builders, content authors, those types of roles, as well as evaluating the ones that we laid out.
Mike Herchel:
What features are being showcased by Drupal that speak to those various different personas.
Male:
I suppose the best thing Drupal does is content modeling. So, the idea that we can get content types much quicker than you can get in something like WordPress or other CMS's, that we've got three content types. You've got a basic page, and we've got our typical content type. They come default with either the standard installation profile, but then we created a new one called recipes. Then we can give those feels and we can be very sure of what's going to happen with the data in those fields when it gets stored in the database. So that the content modeling aspect and then the idea, I think, one feature we've shown quite well is the idea of our content relationship stand that you can get lists of that content quite quickly and related content to the present content that you're working with through views and views of the contextual... What's the contextual arguments, contextual relationships in views? Can someone else continue please?
Male:
Yeah, filters and grouping and things like that, so taxonomy terms using them to group recipes by maybe food type or something like that. So, you create a recipe, and you'll see the recipe page grows. I think we've got it all grouped by ingredients, things like that. So, you can see how people can filter this data or you just write the article or the recipe once. It's going to show up on the home page. It's going to show up on the recipes page. It's going to show up in search. You don't have to and add it everywhere throughout the site. Relationships handle part of this. Yeah, there's been about relationships.
Matt Kleve:
You started talking about articles and recipes and that kind of thing. What kind of website are we actually building for our demo? What is it?
Mike Herchel:
It's a recipe site.
Male:
It's actually for a food magazine, so obviously a fictional scenario. The brief back story on this was there was a farmer's market tutorial. We all started looking at doing sample content for the farmer's market tutorial. That was something that was going to be rolled out in some format. It was that, that fed into this now, which is [umami 00:11:24] which is this fictional food magazine. So, the idea being that we want to present this whole idea of a publishing type website which is a good use case example for, obviously, a Drupal installation. The idea is just to bring along the different content types, how you might use those. Also thinking ahead about features in the future that we might want to show. So making sure to choose a scenario that's going to be able to scale to the type of things that we want to demo that Drupal packs in, into core.
As far as what we've got so far, it's been kept really MVP, if you like, for the first version. So that's currently, we've got articles, and we've got recipes, and we've got pages. But actually, all of the features that are in those few types, it's really rich. Obviously, we're showing entities. Those entities are fieldable. We've got users that feed into that. We are going to be able to show that users are fieldable. Obviously views, how we display all of that content from the actual sample content. We've got image styles. It's a whole wealth of core stuff that I guess we, as Drupal site goes, can easily just take for granted. It's right there in core. I think it's really important that we get that message across that core is incredibly powerful, but also incredibly well structured. It's not going to tie you down to working necessarily in one way. It's designed to actually be way more flexible than that.
Mike Herchel:
Are you making use of any of the new layout APIs or anything like that?
Male:
At the moment, no. We've made a decision not to use experimental items that are in Drupal core. So, layouts and content staging or content moderation, those kind of things are not being used by us at the moment, because give that it's called out of the box, we want to show what you can do with Drupal out of the box in terms of stable Drupal. If we start using experimental modules and one of those experimental modules does not get as far as being stable, and gets removed, then we're going to break what we've been building. So, it's out of the box stable Drupal core and is filled with what you can do and there's much more you can do even without experimental modules. There's lots more you can do than what we've done. We're focusing on the MVP part of that, so in a later phase we might have or we will have more features. We don't think we'll be building on using experimental code to do so.
Male:
Another part of that is to do with the fact that we're obviously trying to demo to effectively new users of Drupal. We're trying to draw in new users for the whole Drupal community. If we, we're basically trying to work with features that are... where pans exist on how you work with it. If we're working entirely on the bleeding edge of things, then we also have to work at how we want to demo that. We want to make sure that we're setting out best practices effectively. So, we're providing a demo that follows. This is a recommended way to work perhaps. Is that how you'd describe it, perhaps, Mark?
Matt Kleve:
Yeah, I think that's fair.
Male:
The other thing is this is kind of a first step towards this sort of thing. So Drupal doesn't currently have a demo or more than just in core at least, a standard or minimal profile. There's no way to install any additional profiles that buried away on Drupal.org. We're taking this a step towards opening that conversation, and finding out what other people might want to do with them. Like you said, there's nothing to say we couldn't have another profile of some description that does include all these experimental features, and goes hey, this really is bleeding edge. We don't want to break people's demos that they just installed when they next go and do update Drupal. Then go, hang on, nothing works all of a sudden, because something we've relied on has been removed. It was experimental. It didn't work.
Or I've had API breaking changes. I think content moderation is an example of this recently. Where between Drupal version, they needed to change the API. That's caused a few problems. So, trying to avoid anything like that. This is as stable as we can for now and it's getting this movement going, and into core and seeing how it develops.
Matt Kleve:
I like how you're thinking about different types of evaluators whether it be the site builder or the developer. Looking and seeing how you built your demonstration site, and the best practices therein. I heard you mention, making sure the designer looks at Drupal and doesn't run away screaming. Tell me about the design. How is that being built? What's it look like? What are you doing to make that right?
Male:
The design has been something that's been really enjoyable to be involved in this actually. Obviously we're coming out with a fictional brand. So, that's the first part. That's been really enjoyable. We've got this Umami name to play around with. The entire design process came from meetings that initially was just myself, and Cristina and Larry, Larry [Scella 00:16:41]. Where we were just really throwing around ideas about how this could work and what we might call this. We had a long list of names, and just went through the whole thing of what would this look like as a scenario that would be convincing? If we have a strong brand, and we know exactly what it is we're trying to deliver through the designs for that brand, then hopefully, everything will just fall into place.
I think that's exactly what's happened. We've got this, we've effectively got the orange Umami-type face. We've set out an entire color scheme around that. The actual design behind the content is very lean. That was one of the other things we decided to do quite early on, is to say well, we've got this sample content coming in. So, let's let the content do all the work from a design perspective. So, we've gone down the route of saying we can use grids, and images, and texts and just a couple bits of type face work between headings and, obviously, body. And use those sorts of really generic features, if you like, those general features to give a feel for the theme. But also it means that it's hopefully a bit more adaptable for the future. You might be able to do more with this as time goes by. We might better adapt into other demos, or anything like that. Yeah, it's got flexibility. So, the actual design is really just focused around the content which is a lot of images as well.
The recipes is a good example. Obviously, you got different types of fields there, so you've got ingredients. You've got the actual method. Then we've done some work with custom icons just to support the metadata for a recipe like how long it's going to take to cook, and how difficult it is to do. Just laying all of those ingredients out on the page, just really gives it its fill. At the same time, hopefully, we'll have anybody using the demo, just give them the incentive to just be prodding around. Saying, I wonder how this is pieced together. I wonder what's delivering this piece of content or how does that path or theme hang together? That's what we're looking for, is just allowing the design to, hopefully, drive that interest in what's going on in Drupal.
Cristina C.:
There was that discussion sometime ago where we were trying to decide if we wanted [inaudible 00:19:16] being very open. You needed design with, that goes at the beginning. It goes this farm market idea, content before that we were going to use. We said that we were going to put all the strong design on the images and content, it was same because otherwise we couldn't use the thing wasn't going to be used for any other stuff otherwise. Okay, I just, could you cut this thing? I was just going to say that we wanted the design that it wasn't really a thing you needed because we wanted the people to try the demos with this design and be able to demo any other stuff. For example, something related to food. So that's why we don't have this farmer market design, because it was going to have a lot of good, a lot of vegetables around, icons related with that. That's why we switched that. That's one change on the back that we did at some point.
Matt Kleve:
So in building this new shiny theme, I'm assuming, we're using all sorts of the latest front end best practices to give a good sense to a front end developer that might be evaluating it, things like responsive and other front end best ways of doing things currently.
Male:
We are using responsive. We've got, I think, it's three break points; small, medium, large. We're using a bend structure for naming class and things like that. What we don't do, what we would love to have done, and we tried for the first while and we abandoned was using a style guide. We tried to use KSS node. Due to limitations in Drupal core specifically, I think we need something like the component's module in core which I have proposed, except it goes into core. If anyone wants to endorse that, please do. In terms of best practices, we're going to best practices as much as possible. They are many ways to from best practices. We're doing our best and we don't have a style guide to go along with it. That was a big thing for us. We really wanted that, and spent a lot of time in Vienna. Actually, I think I went to one talk in Vienna. That was the very lost talk, just so I can say I went to a talk. The rest of the week in Vienna I spent working on trying to get a style guide implementation going. That was a pity. In general yeah, we'd like to think it's fairly correct in the approach we've taken.
Matt Kleve:
Right on. Is there any concerns that we're going to build a profile so great that people are just going to spin up their own recipe site and just use it?
Cristina C.:
That's a question.
Matt Kleve:
I don't know. I figured if I were actually building a recipe site, that might be a place for me to start.
Male:
It's a big concern. We actually have done a fair amount on that. Cristina, I'd like you to speak on it more than me, because you've done a lot of work on the design of the new installation page.
Cristina C.:
Yeah, sure it's just more like are we going to build just a demo or something where people is going to use as a starting point? That's a big discussion. We don't want that people build their website inside that, because it will make that we have to give everybody an update pass, and we have to be really sure about, for example, not changing anything on the content type for example. If you want to include, for example, the new layouts or anything, we can change the templates that we are already using and some kind of this stuff. That question is more about what can we do? So far, we think we don't want that. What we are doing is trying to place some warning messages, both on the installation screen, when you are going to select the profile. We're trying to place also on a warning when you have your site installed and that appears. We don't know when, but probably every day after a week has passed, reminding you that that's not the production for the website or a production for the installation profile. I don't know, Mark, do you want to take that from here?
Mark Conroy:
Yeah, we've got concerns then, as well. We want to be very strict that people don't use this as a base website. That was something that happened a lot with something like say a commerce Kickstart. The guys from Kickstart, the e-commerce guys have been telling us you got to be very careful this doesn't happen again, because we got calls from people saying you broke my website. We're trying to show the best features of Drupal. So, as soon as something becomes stable, we'd like to be able to put that into the next versions. As an example, we have images, let's say, just standard image field like the image from Drupal 7 in our current setup. But in 8.5, the media module will be stable, we think, and available. So, for 8.6, let's say, we'll probably convert all our images into some sort of media management system. We might have an asset bank built in this part of the Umami brand. That's going to break your website.
We want to make sure that you install this. You evaluate it. You look at how we've created, say, content types and added fields and maybe views and views attachments and things like that. Then you wipe your database and you start again. We think this will be quite a backwards compatibility breaking engine simply because it's just a demonstration of one version of what can be done with Drupal. So, we really want to make sure that people get the message. This is a demonstration website. This is not a production website.
Mike Herchel:
Is the same thing for the theme? If someone decides for whatever reason to do their own content model and use a theme, I'm guessing that theme is not going to be backwards compatible and have breaking changes and stuff.
Matt Kleve:
There are a lot of websites that run Garland.
Male:
Garland and [Bartic 00:26:26 and those kind of themes are a bit different to ours. Our team is built specifically for the Umami profile. So, we've got hardcoded where you've got a recipe, and then you've got a difficulty level. This is a one to ten, it's an eight, level eight difficulty recipe. We've hardcoded that. That field gets printed directly above the image, let's say, or where it goes on the recipe content type. So, if you want to use the Umami team, you're going to end up with either empty divs or else at least a twig variables printed that aren't available in your own setup. You could use a team, but we wouldn't give any guarantees towards it. It's specifically built for this out of the box experience initiative. It's not a general Drupal team. I think there's still an argument that there would a new team for Drupal core eventually. This won't be it, but I would like to see that initiative taken off, and replacing Garland or replacing Bartik with something else. It won't the Umami team, I don't think.
Mike Herchel:
Is the Umami theme selectable under appearance or where you select your theme? If I install the standard profile, can I then change my theme to Umami?
Male:
At the moment, yes, after this podcast probably no.
Matt Kleve:
We're talking about the out of the box initiative. Working to put Drupal's best foot forward to CMS evaluators. More from that team coming up right after this. (Music)
Your local Drupal community is the place to get involved and hone your chops. Coming up in February the community has the US covered coast to coast. February 3rd and 4th, you have your choice between Drupal camp New jersey and Princeton or the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit in Portland, Oregon. President's Day weekend, February 16, 17, and 18, slide on down to Florida Drupal camp in Orlando. There's plenty more on the horizon across the globe. So head on over to Drupalcal.com. Find your nearest event or meet up. Or if you're ready to level up, but can't make the trip, point your browser to druplize.me. Stuff your brain full of carefully videos and tutorials. (Music)
Mike Herchel:
Welcome back to the Lullabot podcast. We're talking about the out of the box initiative with part of the team from that out of the box initiative.
Matt Kleve:
Yeah, they were telling us about the profile that they're going to create or they have been creating. They're branding the recipe site Umami. Are you familiar with Umami, Mike?
Mike Herchel:
No, what is Umami?
Matt Kleve:
Seriously, you're not? It's a big time foody word these days.
Mike Herchel:
I don't know what that is.
Matt Kleve:
Well, it's the fifth sense of taste.
Mike Herchel:
Okay.
Matt Kleve:
Right? There's the sweet, the sour, the salt, the what is the one I'm missing?
Mike Herchel:
Umami?
Matt Kleve:
Anyway, Umami is the other one, right?
Mike Herchel:
Yeah.
Matt Kleve:
It's like the savory mushroom, kind of, yeah, Umami.
Mike Herchel:
All right.
Matt Kleve:
Did you know that.
Mike Herchel:
No. I'm learning something.
Matt Kleve:
Yeah, it's the fifth taste. Do you know why that's interesting?
Mike Herchel:
Why?
Matt Kleve:
This is the fifth initiative that we've talked about on the podcast.
Mike Herchel:
Bam.
Matt Kleve:
Is it really?
Mike Herchel:
I don't know.
Matt Kleve:
I don't either.
Mike Herchel:
That was pretty bad.
Matt Kleve:
But we have four folks from that initiative talking to us right now. The thing is that it takes way more than four people to get something like this done and get into Drupal core. So, who all is involved with getting this work done, guys?
Cristina C.:
I would say, Larry, for example, he was one of the main responsible that it's happening, because he's been there from the beginning. Of course, Thomas, Mario, [inaudible 00:30:18], she has been there also giving her feedback. I don't know. Guys do you want to keep going?
Male:
We've actually had a lot of help as well from Joy [Deep 00:30:29], and Matt [Neat 00:30:31] who've been helping on the backend work. That's been really helpful, and of course,[inaudible 00:30:35] has come in recently and helped out a lot as well.
Male:
Yeah, and Tom [Fippin's 00:30:40] been helping me with front end stuff, and Andrew [Mcferson 00:30:42] who also works with me at Innertech. He's taking the lead on accessibility, gateways. He's got to make sure we pass all those. Roy Schulton has been popping in and out of our meetings for user experience, and canning our ambitions down a bit.
Male:
The other thing is the team seems to be growing a bit recently. Now we've started getting small patches an everything like that going on at Drupal.org. More and more people chirping up with comments from wanting to contribute and things like that. So, that's who we've got at the moment. I'm sure there's more that we've forgotten about. I apologize to them, but yeah, more and more joining. So, expect that list to grow.
Matt Kleve:
It takes a bunch of people to get something like this done, right? The process to get this rolled into core is not an easy one.
Male:
No.
Cristina C.:
Not at all.
Male:
At the start it was... This idea had been around for ten years so far. So, yeah, it's definitely not a simple process.
Mike Herchel:
What was the impetus of picking this up after so long? I think someone mentioned Drupal Con New Orleans at one point?
Cristina C.:
Yeah, that was the first time I heard about it. [inaudible 00:31:59] moving it. After that, there was some time it goes like just to the air, just moving stuff on the back. There wasn't anybody working. It was more they are moving. Then we arrived to Dublin where everything happened there. Right, Keith? When we started with the two initiatives together.
Keith Jay:
Yeah, certainly from my perspective. I was really interesting in the onboarding side. Just getting new folks involved in Drupal. It was pretty much just getting to use Drupal 8 where myself and Gareth and the team at Five Mile really jumped on Drupal 8 very early. That wasn't always so easy. That really was a real eye opener for us, because we're a small team. We just love working with Drupal, so we just jumped in and thought well there's a number of sites that fit that model for Drupal 8 that we can build and get learning along the way. It was early. It was really early, and it make things tough. One of the things that came across to me is just the whole oh wow, there's not that wealth of Lullabot blog posts around that I can refer to, to work out how to shift something around or whatever.
So, it's just that whole onboarding and thinking about how we communicate these brilliant features that are there. How they work and just making that part of the story, really. Making that part of the narrative. That's certainly something we got to look at with the out of the box profile. Is how can we actually also lay a layer where that information is delivered? It's not just a case of oh, here's a good looking theme with some content and I'm going to have to do all the digging myself. It's actually what layers can we add so that users of the demo can actually learn a little bit as well and get pointers for next steps?
Mike Herchel:
This is not something that's yet in core, so I understand it's a couple of patches. Where can somebody go take a look at it, and see what you've done?
Cristina C.:
No, it was more like a process about getting the idea approved at the beginning when we had these designs and we had these, a list. We had the content more or less defined. Then there was this new idea [inaudible 00:34:37] where we posted it. We actually helped trying this idea [inaudible 00:34?43]. We finally get it approved. I don't remember when. That's when actually the work started. From there, we jumped to Umami and then Mark is our responsible to move the work from [inaudible 00:35:04] to the Drupal tutorial.
Male:
Yeah, at the moment I think we've got every release we make of it, I'm going to say every release. We started releasing it just yesterday. Not too many releases. Each time we make release of it, we're creating two versions of each patch. So, one version of a patch is if for the team has no images. That's just for people to do code review on the actual code itself. The other version, the patch has all the images that you need. So, if you install it, you'll actually get to see what the team looks like. The same the same then with the profile. We've got two versions of that patch as well. One has everything in it that you need if want to install it. One patch has none of the config directory, because there's no point in people doing a code review of the config that Drupal gives out of the box when you do your export.
If you want to play with this or if you want to review it or you want to install it, you need two patches. So does one patch on a node on Drupal.org that is the title of the node is implement the out of the box designs as a core team. Then there's a second patch which is, one second, sorry. I should have had this open, I guess. We can't cut this out, can't we?
Mike Herchel:
No.
Matt Kleve:
We can make...
Male:
Okay.
Matt Kleve:
One thing we can do is make it really clear for listeners that they can go to Lullabot.com and go to podcasts, and go this podcast. And go to this podcast node. There will be a link at the bottom that'll be handy.
Male:
We've got two nodes on Drupal.org. One called implement out of the box designs as a core team, and one called create an experimental installation profile. So, we've got two separate patches. You can install the team patch on its own if you just want to see what the team looks like with your own website for whatever reason. But if you want to install the installation profile, you must install the team patch as well. The installation profile is going to look terrible without the actual team that was built for it. So that's basically how you play with it at the moment and review it, and give us suggestions or get involved. It's a two-patch process.
Male:
There is currently... We're working mainly over on Umami at the moment because there's been lots of works going on from lots of people. Trying to do this and patches would have been a nightmare, so over in Umami we've got the demo underscore Umami which is the profile. Umami is just the theme. I'm sure you'll provide links to your listeners. So those if they want to go and look around or download them, at the Drupal site. I do also have a composer project that you can download, composer install. Then, you can actually go through the installations steps in your browser to install the Umami profile. You'll get the theme and everything. So, yeah, that's another way. You have got patches on Drupal.org you can try. Or if you actually just want to click around and give this a go, you have composer. I do have a full build, and that is also what we're using to do a demo over on platform.H instance that's being hosted. So, there is also a link where you can go and go browse let's work and see up to the minute pretty much where we're at.
Matt Kleve:
Cool, I hear the Umami design is being implemented by the Contenta folks as well. Is there some cross help going on between those teams?
Cristina C.:
Yeah, actually there was. They were just there at the beginning, helping us with defining the content instructor. Also, they actually helped a lot with the profile, right Gareth?
Gareth Goodwin:
Yeah, so I was pointed in the Contenta direction when I started working on the profile, and the basis for that. So yeah, I was [inaudible 00:39:09] how to lace up their content types. How they'd done their migrations and things like that. Unfortunately, they use quite a bit of [inaudible 00:39:18] modules which we're unable to do in this case. So, I wasn't able to take full advantage of all the media browser and things like that which is a shame. But yeah, the Contenta team definitely helped get going on this.
Matt Kleve:
If you're unfamiliar Contenta CMS is a Drupal distribution that is tuned for APIs out of the box, so with Jason API, your content can then feed into wherever you want it to do. A lot of really great work coming from Mateo and many others on the Contenta side. Being tied to just core and CSS must have been a challenge as far as building this out of this out of the box stuff, right?
Cristina C.:
No. It's the first time that I've been stemming with only CSS in a while. That's exactly what we have, only CSS. No KSS, no SAS, no [inaudible 00:40:17], no any other thing and it's getting a little bit of painful because we had to forget about life living style guide. We had to forget about some stuff. It's been one of the trickiest part of the process.
Male:
I think the biggest thing we missed actually with just writing CSS around SAS was that we don't have variables. We couldn't define variables for maxed widths and our colors and things like that. That gets tricky trying to either create a class for everything and drop the classes where you want them. Or else find and replace things.
Mike Herchel:
Yeah, find and replace, let's do it like it's 2005.
Male:
If we didn't have to support IE-11, I think, we could have used variables. That's native on CSS now, that would have been great. Writing CSS was a pain the CSS.
Mike Herchel:
Did you have to write to support the right to left languages?
Cristina C.:
Not for now, for the [inaudible 00:41;23]. The idea is having all these things figured out at some point, not now.
Male:
At the moment, we're going for a this is how we're working. This is been getting approval from the core team and going yes. Going in the right direction. That's fine. So we'd haven't been able to throw everything into it just yet. Because we can put a hell of a lot of effort into it, and then they'll go and review the patch, and go, no. We don't like how you've done content types. Go away and come back next year. So, it's things like right to left and more features in core. Those things we've not even got around to. That's something that will come along. We've still got time during or talk about when it's going later, but we've still got time to actually make use of some of that. I would say, never say never. I'm not doing the CSS, so maybe I shouldn't say that.
Mark Conroy:
No, what you need to do is just commit to it. Say, yeah, we'll have it done next week.
Male:
Yeah, it will support IE 8 as well, right?
Male:
IE 6.
Male:
There's some other changes, have been with this going into core. We've had to think about, we've love to have loads of rich images. But that's going to make the file size for them huge and things like that. So, we've got to think about limitations around that. We had licensing limitations as well. I think Keith might know a little bit more about that, but with fonts and images and things like that.
Matt Kleve:
Which makes sense if it has to go into the repo with Drupal.org like you have to think about that.
Male:
Yeah, so I think they are being a little bit more flexible with it. They've, there's a changeup coming to that. But still not quite enough for every single asset we wanted, I think. The other thing has been actually getting the content into core during install. We did want to use migrate, but migrate's still a bit experimental. We wanted to use CS fees which isn't supported, so we'd have to write without using a concept module. We would have had to include the CSV path and all sorts of things like that. So, we've had to redo how we were importing the content. So I think, yeah, quite a few changes there as well.
Cristina C.:
I think the lessons imparted really tricky because it made talk about that on Vienna.
Male:
That's right, yeah. When we were at Vienna, we were in the situation where we couldn't have fonts that we wanted to use in this. Effectively there is tight licensing restrictions around what we can have in and what type of licenses are effectively compatible. So the great news is that was reviewed. We got that conversation going again. That was reviewed, and in the last month or so, it's pretty much been agreed and I think... I don't know if they've already drafted up the new licensing or whether that's just coming along now. Yeah, it's a big change for Drupal. Effectively we can have these licenses that are compatible with the GPL license that Drupal's using. They can actually be used.
Matt Kleve:
Whose recipes ended up in the content?
Male:
That's a good question. So at the moment we're having to... There were so many unkownns around the licensing, we're actually producing the content from scratch. Thankfully, there's a real limited amount of content going into MVP.
Matt Kleve:
That's a metaphor that's really good for a recipe site, by the way. Producing the content from scratch.
Male:
I would also like to give a shout out to Keith's wife who's had many a cold dinner while he's been taking photos, and everything like that.
Mike Herchel:
That's amazing.
Male:
Yeah, when will dinner be ready after I've taken another [inaudible 00:45:40] shots.
Mike Herchel:
I'm doing Drupal development.
Male:
It's a lot of work, but we just got to make sure that what we're using is obviously good to use. There's no problems with that.
Mike Herchel:
That definitely makes a lot of sense. So when is this going to be in Drupal core?
Matt Kleve:
Yeah, what's your timeline? How are we doing?
Mike Herchel:
We need the cricket soundboard.
Cristina C.:
Yeah, we need to have this MVP for, I think, the 15th of January. Do you remember the date?
Male:
Yeah, 15th, I think, is still good, 11 more days.
Male:
We're aiming for sort of an MVP, the most we can get done or the least we need in order for it to be suitable. We're aiming for the 8.5 alpha release candidate and so on, but we've got a few deadlines in there. It's got to be considered feature complete or API complete by the 15th and have the sign off from the core team to actually be considered for the 8.5 alpha. Then, throughout the alpha phase, we've got chances to improve it. Address accessibility issues, things like that. Then, I think, when we get to the beta stage, or the release candidate stage, one of the two. A decision will be made as soon as this is good enough. If it's gone far enough, if they're happy with it as to whether we'll be able to get 8.5. Or we can then have to focus on 8.6 instead. Yeah, the first deadline we've got is about a week, just over a week's time. So, after this call, I think we'll all be back opening our texters and carrying on.
Mike Herchel:
So, what blockers do you have right now to meet that deadline?
Male:
Reviewers, I think, right now at the moment. You've already seen the [inaudible 00:47:47] sorry, the last few days on Twitter, striking for people to help the reviews. We can get all the work done ourselves, and it's perfect for not even alpha. It's stable for core as far as we're concerned, because we don't see all the mistakes we've made. We need to get the patches on Drupal.org which we've been doing. Then, we need people to review them and let us see what mistakes we've made and what improvements we need, and let us know that this isn't even really for alpha yet alone stable in Drupal core. So that would be great if people would start with reviewing the patches, rating them, making suggestions or chipping in code themselves if they want as well. For me, anyway, that's the big blocker. I'm not sure if others have other blockers.
Mike Herchel:
Cool, so what is next? Assuming the MVP goes into core, what's next for out of the box? I know at one point we mentioned layout or medio or something like that. What's coming up for 8.6?
Male:
I think rest is next, and I don't mean rest API. I mean if this gets into 8.5, I'm taking a week off from contributing to Drupal core, if you don't mind.
Mike Herchel:
Yeah, I think that's well deserved.
Male:
This is the initial version, so we'd love to get feedback from people, what they think. List what they'd like to see. What else they thing should be included. So that we can expand on this. We can't think. We just want to go this is demo Drupal. That's it. This is what we think the Drupal demo should be. Lump it or leave it. So feedback from people is great, but there's as features become stable. Better media handling and so on, as you mentioned layout. Whether we could do things with quick edit or anything like that, I'm not sure.
Male:
It works find [inaudible 00:49:46] at the moment.
Male:
Maybe we'll have a look at that one. I won't promise that one though. I promise the IE I support but not quick edit. Just continually evolving it. Making use of the latest and greatest. Just more features that you might find on this kind of site.
Male:
I think media is the thing we would tackle next, because we can do that without any breaking changes to the team. It's still just going to output image files eventually for us, let's say. I think what I would like would likely tackle media next once that's stable, and then layout API and layout of discovery module and that kind of stuff. Once that's stable and probably 8.5 as well, because that would mean then we could abstract some of the hardcoded things we have on our team to give us left and right panels or left and right regions, whatever we want to call them in a template file. We could do that then in a layout file instead. If we get in the layout file, then the team that we've created can become the general team that could be used by other websites if they wanted. At the moment, the don't want the things we've hardcoded like this is a difficult recipe hardcoded in their forum post or something like that.
Cristina C.:
Yeah, that's why the thing is going to be internal. That's why Mark was saying right now you can find it, but probably later on, you won't be able to find it on the appearance page because it's super focused on what we have in super hardcode right now because we don't have any other size.
Mike Herchel:
Does the out of the box experience just encompass this installation profile? Or can this initiative maybe make some changes to the installer? Maybe throw some terminology around or maybe have a little video of what Drupal can do while that little progress bar is marching across the screen? Or has this not been talked about?
Male:
You missed the part where we said minimal viable product.
Matt Kleve:
That's fair.
Mike Herchel:
I'm talking in the future. Maybe, obviously, this is nothing that's going to happen any time soon.
Male:
I think that does tie in with this whole thing I was mentioning about telling the story. If a video is a great thing... Only the other day someone, I'm sorry, I can't remember who, but someone posted a comment on Drupal.org mentioning how we need to think like marketeers. We've got Drupal 8. We've got this brilliant product. It's fantastic. Now, we've got to convince, explain why it is. So, I think any ideas could go in the pot that will just keep reinforcing the idea that this is a demo to show off Drupal.
Matt Kleve:
A lot of people get involved with contributing to open source or to Drupal because of they're scratching the itch. At least that's the phrase that's used. They're working on a problem that's bothered them. Or they're wanting to build something that's going to be useful to them. This is a project that you won't use every day. Is it tough staying motivated to work on something that isn't something that you will touch in your future of Drupal?
Gareth Goodwin:
That's a good question actually. I don't know.
Matt Kleve:
I hope I haven't made you all depressed and want to give up now, because this is really important.
Gareth Goodwin:
I don't think I'd ever installed it.
Matt Kleve:
I can't remember the last time I've installed Drupal. So, at least to a blank slate anyway.
Gareth Goodwin:
It's been something that's always been of interest to us whether we stick with this fully or whether we do start branching out into where can improvement be made elsewhere. You mentioned the installer. I was looking at the installer earlier when I'd been thinking about do we potentially need to add warnings there? This is experimental. Don't touch it. Are there things we can improve there? It would be great if on the installation screen, you can actually search the distribution repository, and actually find more demos, more examples, more things to actually base your site on rather than at the moment. Before Umami, you got standard or minimal. It doesn't tell you what they mean or why there's a difference there or what the implications of making your choice are. There's not a lot there. Yeah, there's definitely more things related to what we're doing that I think we'd be interested in getting involved in.
Male:
I think, sorry Gareth. I think that's going to be something that's interesting as well to see how. This all comes out of the whole usability, user experience thing that obviously, I know Roy's been an important part of getting going. It's going to be really interesting to see how potentially, I guess, Umami could really help focusing on some of those key things that we need to resolve in terms of core Drupal's usability and user experience. If this is one place where you can go and there is a kind of typical content management website experience there. We can say, what is it like to use? We're trying to describe it here. If we find ourselves not able to describe it, then we know there's obviously an issue. I think it feeds that whole improve Drupal's usability.
Matt Kleve:
Right on. Hey, let's go around the horn. Time to get wrapped up and close up the podcast for the day. So if we could just go around and maybe everybody can talk about something they're excited about or something that they need help with and want to call out. Maybe a listener can jump in and help out with something. So Mark, is there anything that you're excited about or anything you want help with?
Mark Conroy:
Yeah, just review please. That's the big thing for me at the moment that we've got so much code, and we just can't review it ourselves because we don't have independent eyes on it.
Mike Herchel:
You want eyes in the get hub repos specifically, right?
Mark Conroy:
Well I suppose on the patches that would be in Drupal.org might make more sense. People, I guess, are more used to looking at it there. I appreciate this podcast Mike wrote after our deadline. This might be in, but we've got about two months between the January 15th deadline and Drupal 8.5 being released. We need to make a lot of improvements to this. So just because we get the MVP into an alpha release, doesn't mean we don't need people helping out. That's really it. Help out where you can if you can.
Matt Kleve:
Great, Keith?
Keith Jay:
Yeah, I think obviously, my time at the moment is going into the sample content. So, it's getting eyes on that. Just review. Helping out. Getting opinion on as we start to drop in the sample content over the next few weeks, not just for the 15th deadline, but we've obviously going to be adding content in afterwards. Just making sure that side of it is really good and delivers just something that feels like it's a realistic scenario. So it's the same things as Mark already said. Just review about the actual scenario and the design. Just making sure that people like the design and that it's working for them.
Matt Kleve:
Gareth?
Gareth Goodwin:
Yeah, I'm very excited to see this is the first step in going towards something like this is Drupal. So, if people can, maybe not everyone thinks a demo that we come up with is the best idea or that it's going to solve all use cases. But people can see the potential in where this can lead to and get involved and think about how it could be used and process forward. In terms of something that helped me out. I think I posted about using migrate CSV source module, bringing that into core. That would be awesome because that means we could then start using migrate and bringing in even more functionality from core. But we need that [inaudible 00:57:39] migration plugin.
Matt Kleve:
Cool, all right. That would be handy. Cristina?
Cristina C.:
The thing that I'm enjoying the most is learning so much about the accessibility reviews that we are getting from Andrew. I think it will be great if we could have more people reviewing the theme ones we finally get it in core, I hope. It will be great if people reviewing also if the components are properly done and this kind of stuff from the theme itself.
Matt Kleve:
Yeah.
Cristina C.:
That's all for me.
Matt Kleve:
Cool, hey Mike, this is really cool.
Mike Herchel:
Yeah, I'm really excited. And I just want to express my gratitude to you four in addition to everyone else that's helped out with this. This is a really big deal. In the history of Drupal, it's always really been an ugly out of the box experience despite the power that is Drupal. It's so exciting to see this theme changed.
Matt Kleve:
I remember when Angie, Byron, and Joe [Schlinder 00:58.41] went on the web chick tour, and they were demonstrating the awesomeness that was Drupal 7. The fact that there was a standard and a minimal install profile was a big deal. We've got all this stuff installed. You can see the power of Drupal. This is a really nice reminder that there's a whole lot more that could be done to introduce people to Drupal and put our best foot forward.
Mike Herchel:
Yeah, absolutely.
Matt Kleve:
Thanks.
Mike Herchel:
Thank you, everybody.
Male:
Thanks you very much.
Cristina C.:
Thank you all.
Male:
Thanks for having us.
Mike Herchel:
Thank you.
Cristina C.:
Yeah, exactly. (Music)

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