Acquia is sponsoring me full-time to operate as the tech lead for Experience Builder — thanks!

Dries announced the formal start of the Experience Builder initiative at DrupalCon Portland 2024, on May 6. Shortly before DrupalCon, Drupal core product manager Lauri already shared the findings of the deep & wide research he conducted in prior months.

During the (entire!) month of March, Lauri walked some members of Acquia’s Drupal Acceleration Team (Ben “bnjmnm”, Ted “tedbow” Bowman, 
“hooroomoo”, Alex “effulgentsia” Bronstein, Tim Plunkett and I) as well as the lead front-end and lead back-end developer of Acquia’s Site Studio team (Felix Mazeikis and Jesse Baker) through the product requirements that were identified for Drupal to leapfrog its competitors on this front.
We spent that month understanding those requirements and do an initial pass at sizing them. To be able to refine the estimates, we started building proof-of-concepts for the riskiest areas. For example, I started one for dynamically loading a different “design version”, and a few days later another one for validating the data model proposed by Alex.

These proof-of-concepts have been shared with long-time Drupal core contributors while they were being worked on — for example, we asked feedback from Mateu “e0ipso” at Lullabot from the very start since Single Directory Components are his brain child. We asked feedback from Lee “larowlan” Rowlands at PreviousNext given his work on Decoupled Layout Builder. And so on.
They’re hacky as hell — the purpose was to explore connections between concepts and check viability.

At DrupalCon, Dries revealed that he’d love to see organizations using Drupal to contribute back significantly to both Starshot (the other announcement, which will include Experience Builder once it’s ready). So at DrupalCon, Lauri and I found many people asking us how to start contributing — an excellent new challenge to have!

We’re currently in an awkward phase to welcome contributors. Because  despite a clear product ambition/vision, we are in the very early stages of defining the concrete UX (Acquia’s UX team is working on wireframes and did user testing at DrupalCon). And during DrupalCon, there was no code base to point to!

So, during the week after DrupalCon, hooroomoo got a 0.x branch of Experience Builder going, cooking up a delightful hodgepodge of various PoC branches we’d worked on.
On Thursday May 16, Lauri and I met with 6 (!!!) people of the PreviousNext team, where they have not only serious Drupal core expertise, but also deep Layout Builder and JS knowledge — they offered to run the asynchronous meetings in the #experience-builder Drupal Slack channel. They’ve used this pattern before with great success, and it is the only viable way to truly involve the global Drupal community.
 

By the end of the week I got GitLab CI pipelines going (PHPStan L8!). Ready for more serious work in week 2 :)

• Drupal
• Acquia
• Experience Builder

Written by DrupalCon Portland Marketing Committee members Iwantha Lekamge, Luke McCormick, and Christina Lockhart.

DrupalCon Portland 2024 has come to an end, and what an exciting event it was. The City of Roses welcomed back Drupalists from around the world with open arms as we gathered at the Oregon Convention Center once more. It’s always great to get together with the rest of the Drupal community in person, and this particular DrupalCon was full of exciting news, from announcing a new version of Drupal to updated branding for the Drupal project. Four days full of networking and learning with the community through over 70+ sessions went by so quickly! 

Attendees gather at DrupalCon Portland 2024 for the group photo

Whether you could not attend the conference or want a reminder of how awesome it was, we’ve broken down each day of the event in our DrupalCon Portland 2024 recap. Read on to learn more about how each day went!

Day One

Day One of DrupalCon Portland kicked off with a morning of sessions, including Key to Collaboration—How to Build Psychological Safety with Individuals and Teams. This session, led by Britany Acre and Cori Neslund, was an impactful examination of the value of psychological safety. It explained how having it (or not) can affect teams, some best practices to build it within teams, and reviewed tools that can help teams based on their current state.

Another session highlight on Monday morning included Accessibility Audits -The many shapes and sizes, what’s the right fit for you with Kathy Beck and Julie Elman. During this session, the two speakers discussed why accessibility matters, the components of an audit, and steps that teams can take to ensure their work is accessible. 

Next up came the Welcoming Remarks prior to the Driesnote, where we witnessed Michael Anello win the Aaron Winborn award - congratulations on a well-deserved win, Michael! The excitement in the air continued when we found out where the next few DrupalCons will be held: Barcelona, Singapore, and Atlanta! Three vibrant, exciting cities that will be a perfect fit for the Drupal community. We can’t wait to attend! 

This year’s Driesnote, one of the most anticipated parts of DrupalCon, introduced a new version of Drupal – Drupal Starshot. Speaker and Drupal founder Dries Buytaert explained how Drupal Starshot will bring a new wave of users to the Drupal Community. Drupal Starshot, which aims to build the new default download of Drupal, will be a package built on Drupal core. It will include refined common features from the contributed project ecosystem to create a great user experience out of the box. You can learn more about Drupal Starshot and make your Drupal Starshot Pledge!

Driesnote

Photo of the attendees at the Welcoming Reception

At the end of the day, the Expo Hall Welcome Party celebrated the start of an exciting week. Along with a food truck and libations, the crowd enjoyed a robot DJ, giant Lite Brite, and a 360–degree photo booth. See all of the images from the booth on the DrupalCon Portland Flick.r group!

Day Two 

Day Two of the conference held the highly relevant keynote, Open Source AI Now: Why Open Must Win the AI War, with Alex Salkever. During his keynote, Alex walked the audience through the significant changes that AI will bring to every industry. 

 Day 2 Keynote by Alex Salkever

Other highlights from Tuesday included Gábor Hojtsy’s deep dive into what to expect from Drupal 11, the Women in Drupal Luncheon, and many other informative sessions – some of which you can watch now on the DrupalCon Portland 2024 YouTube playlist. The Women in Drupal Luncheon, in particular, celebrated the women of Drupal, with four panelists from Four Kitchens discussing being either the only woman in a particular role or one of the few. 

Day Two continued with a few Drupal Association sessions, including the Drupal Association Public Board Meeting and Innovation and Contributions Challenges with Alex Moreno and Irina Zaks. Alex and Irina shared their research on innovation and contribution friction analysis, which led to an open discussion on what resources are needed to propel Drupal to the next level.

Day Three

The third day of DrupalCon Portland 2024 was a dynamic conclusion to the conference, filled with insightful sessions, collaborative workshops, and networking opportunities. The day began with the highly anticipated Drupal Initiative Leads Keynote, where initiative leads for nine projects shared updates on current and future endeavors within the Drupal community. Among these updates were the results of the six Pitchburg projects, showcasing innovative developments such as the Drupal API client, Decoupled Layout Builder, Policy-based access, Mentor the Mentor project, JSON Document Storage, and Drupal Gutenberg Editor.

Initiative Updates:

• Amber Himes Matz – Issue Queue changes, designed to increase the "throughput" of the issue queue.  Since almost all improvements in Drupal's code come through the issue queue, improving this system ripples down helpfully throughout the entire Drupal ecosystem.
• Janez Urevc - Introducing Gander, the new core performance-testing framework that has been added to core.  This change will make it dramatically easier to monitor and improve performance in the code that runs a huge proportion of the Internet.
• Fran-Garcia Linares – Gitlab CI, replacing Drupal CI. Compared to Drupal CI, Gitlab CI is easier to use, offers many useful features, and is much easier to maintain.
• Ted Bowman - Automatic Updates is almost ready for release. It has been in use in over 300 sites for a year. They’ve begun expanded testing and hope to get this into core soon.
• Jürgen Haas – ECA and BPMN, Automation API.  Powerful toolkit that enables automation of Drupal tasks, similar in some ways to a low-code/no-code approach to Drupal's "Actions" facility.
• Mateu Aguiló Bosch - Single Directory Components. This project gives site builders and themers a lot of power to control the presentation of Drupal sites.  It integrates with UI Suite, Storybook, Experience Builder, and other exciting developments.
• Christina Chumalas – New Navigation.  A new vertical/collapsible menu system is available now as an experimental module in Drupal core.  It incorporates many exciting features, including easier customization of menus, a "drawer" feature, a new design system, and much more.

For more information about any of these initiatives (including information about how to get involved with any of them), be sure to watch the action-packed video: Drupal Initiatives Keynote.

Drupal Project Initiatives Keynote

Following the keynote, attendees could participate in various sessions tailored to different interests and skill levels. The Drupal Branding Panel provided a comprehensive overview of efforts to modernize and enhance the Drupal brand, while the First-Time Contributor Workshop welcomed newcomers to learn about contributing to Drupal, fostering a welcoming environment for fresh talent. Simultaneously, the Mentored Contribution session offered hands-on guidance for participants to navigate the contribution process with the help of experienced mentors.

In the Marketing Contribution room, marketing professionals explored strategies to effectively promote Drupal, emphasizing the crucial role of marketing in expanding and sustaining the Drupal community. This not only provided valuable insights but also encouraged active participation and collaboration among attendees.

The day concluded with the "Unofficial Official DrupalCon24 Party" at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI), where attendees had the opportunity to unwind, network, and celebrate the successful conclusion of DrupalCon Portland 2024.

Overall, day three was a testament to the vibrant and collaborative spirit of the Drupal community, highlighting innovative developments, strategic goals, and the importance of community involvement. The event set a positive tone for future DrupalCons, showcasing the dedication and enthusiasm of Drupal enthusiasts worldwide.

Day Four

Finally, the conference’s fourth and final day was jam-packed with a day full of trainings and summits. From the insightful Nonprofit Summit to the community-driven Community Summit, attendees of the summits enjoyed guest panels and learned from each other during roundtable discussions. You can watch sessions from some of the summits and trainings on the Drupal Association YouTube channel.

The Nonprofit Summit at DrupalCon Portland

We’ll see you next time!

After four days of collaborating and learning with the community, DrupalCon Portland 2024 came to an end. From the sessions to the social events each day after the conference, we enjoyed every bit of it! Don’t forget that you can watch session recordings now on the Drupal Association YouTube channel.

As always, it was an incredible event, and we cannot wait to get together at the next DrupalCon – DrupalCon Barcelona, which will be held in Barcelona, Spain, from 24-27 September 2024. Don’t forget to also mark your calendars for DrupalCon Singapore (9-11 December 2024) and DrupalCon Atlanta (24-27 March 2025)! By visiting each conference’s official website, you can sign up to stay up to date with the latest news and updates from the conference.

Here's what I've been working on for my LocalGov Drupal contributions this week. Thanks to Big Blue Door for sponsoring the time to work on these.

a second official version of Drupal

- Dries Buytaert, in his blog post announcing Drupal Starshot

If you're a Drupal developer of any caliber and pay any attention to the goings-on in the Drupal community, then you no doubt have heard about Starshot, recently announced by Dries Buytaert at DrupalCon Portland 2024.

In this post, I'll do my best to not repeat everything that was announced, but rather to summarize, ask a question or two and offer an opinion or two…

The basics

Starshot will be a new download available on drupal.org that includes contributed modules and configuration to provide a superior out-of-the-box solution that is more usable/approachable/friendlier than Drupal core.

In my opinion, Starshot can be thought of (generally speaking of course) as two-ish large tasks. First, full integration with Automatic Updates, Project Browser and Recipes (including full Recipe support in Project Browser.) Second; Experience Builder, which is planned to be (roughly speaking) some combination of Layout Builder (or a replacement,) Paragraphs, Single Directory Components, an in-browser styling tool and other modules/configuration to provide a best-of-breed page-building solution.

The -ish in two-ish from above is all the additional functionality that having full Recipes support will bring. IMHO, this is the star in Starshot.

Note: Experience Builder is not new - it is an evolution of Next generation page builder initiative that started in 2023. 

Why?

In his keynote, Dries spoke about the need for Starshot over the course of a few minutes, enumerating various reasons why he and others in the community feel this is a necessary task, including the fact that Drupal's UI is difficult to use for new users.

I think Mike Herchel summed the Why up nicely in his blog post: 

It’s an acknowledgement of the perception that Drupal is archaic and/or legacy software, and that this perception needs to change.

Starshot is the Drupal community's effort to win back small- and medium-sized sites that don't currently even consider using Drupal.

Furthermore, one of the main goals of Drupal Starshot is to allow for faster innovation cycles, allowing Starshot to add functionality at a faster pace than Drupal core.

Timeline

There's a countdown clock to liftoff on drupal.org/starshot that is currently at a bit over 200 days. Based on this, Starshot will be ready by January 1, 2025. Dries mentioned in his keynote that the goal was to have an initial release by the end of 2024.

There's actually a very early prototype of a subset of the functionality available from phenaproxima (Adam G-H.) 

I'm a bit dubious about all of the mentioned functionality of Starshot being ready by the end of the year. More of my opinion on this in a bit…

Relationship to Drupal core

It's not a fork - that much is clear. It will include Drupal core, but have its own release schedule. I can only imagine that any time Drupal core has a security update, there will be a new Starshot release (as well as any time any of the contrib modules used in Starshot have a security release as well, I assume)

What's up with the "Launch" button?

One of my biggest questions after Dries' keynote was based on a mockup of a drupal.org page that he presented.

What happens when someone clicks "Launch?" I've been a proponent of the Drupal Association engaging/partnering with low-cost hosting providers to provide a way to easily provide hosting for a Drupal site that supports relies on Automatic Updates and Project Browser. The community has invested a lot of time in both of these initiatives, and I feel that neither really has a hosting "home." What would be a better way to officially launch these projects than hosting partners that fully support both, as well as a meaningful site backup plan, all included in a low monthly hosting price. IMHO, this type of thing should definitely be one of the options behind the mysterious "Launch" button. Maybe the DA gets a small referral fee from the hosting providers as well?

Gábor Hojtsy writes in his blog post about Starshot, "Discussions around making simple hosting available for simpler sites was reignited and a WebAssembly-based browser-executed demo solution's feasibility is also explored again." He also mentioned the potential for a WebAssembly-based option in his DrupalCon Portland 2024 session about Drupal 11, as well as options for ephemeral (temporary) hosting solutions (think SimplyTest.me.) 

Will the plan and/or timeline change?

Absolutely. Dries and other folks already involved in Starshot admit that there's a lot of things to still figure out, decisions to be made and a lot of work to do to make all this a reality. Nothing is set in stone. 

If I had a magic wand 🪄

As exciting as Experience Builder sounds, I'm worried that this is going to take a long time. In addition, as we've seen with the plethora of Layout Builder related contrib modules, there is often no one-size-fits-all solution for page creation.

From my perspective, I think that Drupal Starshot (or Drupal CMS, or whatever we end up calling it) phase 1 should be Automatic Updates, Project Browser, Recipes, and a set of curated recipes available geared towards page building. Experience Builder should be phase 2.

Being able to install recipes from Project Browser (leveraging Package Manager from Automatic Updates) will be a game-changer.

The way I look at it is with full Recipes support, we don't have to have just one Experience Builder, we can have many. We can have simpler ones (sooner) and more intricate ones (later.) We can have recipes that leverage Layout Builder and any number of the currently existing supporting contrib modules or recipes that focus on Paragraphs. The cream will rise to the top as the various Experience Builder modules are written, tested, and released.

Simon Hobbs agrees that Recipes is the "secret sauce" to Starshot in his optimistic blog post. 

Community reaction

In the two-ish weeks since Dries announced Starshot, Drupal agencies from around the world have weighed in with their support, including PreviousNext from Australia (blog post by Kim Pepper,) 1xINTERNET from Europe (announcement,) Specbee (blog post by Malabya Tewari,) and (obviously) Acquia (United States.) 

In my conversations with folks while at DrupalCon Portland 2024, reactions were mostly positive, but some folks had some concerns; with the leading issue being that (paraphrasing) the announcement feels like there were some internal (non-public) discussions about doing Starshot following by a "we are doing this" announcement by Dries. While I don't completely agree with this sentiment, I do understand it. The main pieces of Starshot have been open to discussion in the community, while the idea of putting them all together into a new "product" is something that (as far as I could tell) wasn't necessarily widely open for community input. 

Additional resources

• If you're only going to read one (more) "reaction" blog post about Starshot, I recommend Mike Herchel's, despite the fact that we disagree about the most important part of Starshot (he says Experience Builder, I say Recipes: stay tuned for a future cage match.) Regardless of his incorrect opinion 😜, his blog post is quite comprehensive. 
• Blog post from Taylor Paine at Five Jars about Starshot.
• Matt Glaman's reaction to the Starshot announcement (focuses on Recipes.) 
• Blog post from Nadiia Nykolaichuk from ImageX 
• Press release about Starshot from the Drupal Association 
• Paul Johnson't blog post about Starshot 
• Electric Citizen blog post by Dan Moriarty 

About 7 years ago, Washington State University, Vancouver set up their 11 websites on Aegir using a single Drupal 8 codebase. Thanks to Aegir, our client and friend Aaron Thorne was able to maintain all 11 websites by himself, despite not being a Drupal developer. Eventually, though, it was time for something new.

Last year, they contacted me to upgrade their sites and the hosting platform, but keep it inside their own private server infrastructure.

We took our time to figure out how we could design a new model for a multisite codebase, hosting, testing.

How can we implement reliable quality controls and automated delivery across all 11 sites? How can we make it as easy as possible for developers and system administrators to maintain? How can we leave WSU Vancouver with a system that they can use long term, so that they can update their codebase... forever?

The answer? A new self-contained system using DDEV, GitHub Actions, and clever usage of settings.php and Drush aliases.

I gotta be honest: as a developer, working this way has been a dream.

Yesterday, your CTO mandated that all new CMS builds would be on Drupal and that all existing CMS platforms would be consolidated to Drupal within the next three years. Great! Time to start prioritizing sites, hiring teams, and planning development and launch schedules.