Welcome to Community & Code,
the podcast where we talk to the humans
behind the commits.
I'm here today with Mike Herschel,
who is a co-founder of something called
DripYard and a longtime member and
developer in the Drupal community.
Welcome to the show, Mike.
Hey, thanks for having me.
So I think we can start by asking,
what is a DripYard?
That's a good question.
Oh, there's a whole bunch of background.
So like the TLDR of Dripyard is we
sell premium Drupal themes that don't
suck.
So Drupal in the past,
like it really never had a robust theme
ecosystem like WordPress or Webflow or any
of the other competitors have.
And part of that reason is just because...
Within, within, within Drupal,
the theme is so separated from like the
rest of the system,
it would never have any idea what the
markup is.
So like a Drupal developer would go in
and create, you know, their views,
which are kind of like smart lists,
like the loop type stuff.
And,
but the theme could never predict what,
you know,
what the DOM structure was and what the
CSS classes is.
So, so it could never,
you can never theme against that.
And that recently all changed.
Drupal now has a concept of components.
We have like a thing called single
directory components where you have a
theme can ship a whole library of
components as you know, the markup,
the scheme of what type of data has
and, you know, JavaScript and CSS.
So our company is now shipping themes that
have a whole library of components.
You can wire your data directly in there
through the UI or through code.
But yeah, that's basically the gist of it.
So I'm a WordPress dude,
and I think a lot of this is
going to be, we do this in WordPress,
and how does this work in Drupal?
And it's funny because I was at Badcamp
last month.
It was my first Badcamp,
which is Bay Area Drupal camp.
And I was doing that thing.
I was being that person, the voice of,
why does WordPress do this for the Drupal
folks there?
So I will definitely empathize putting you
in this position,
having just been in that position from the
other side.
But so talk a little bit more about,
like,
You mentioned that there's specifically
technical limitations of the way that
themes sort of existed in Drupal in the
past that sort of prevented the existence
or, I guess,
feasibility of something like a
marketplace.
Yeah.
Can I guess from, from,
from a dev perspective,
somebody like I have a history of like
building WordPress themes and actually had
a site for a while where I was
attempting to sell WordPress themes.
Why, what, what is the sticking point?
What are the sticking points that
prevented that from being really, uh,
doable in, in Drupal from like, like,
like, uh, in the weeds kind of, uh,
direction.
yeah yeah so if you want to get
down into the weeds um like drupal of
course has been around for a very long
time and like so within drupal you go
into your admin form or your admin side
and you create what's called content types
which are the same thing as post types
you know and and they're all fieldable
they're all kind of
And then we have another like a module
that's integrated into Drupal called
views.
And you create like basic, like a,
like a listing of items.
You can create filters and smarts.
It's really powerful.
You can do a heck of a lot
of stuff with that.
But as you do that,
as you create these content types,
as you create these fields within the
content types, as you create these views,
Drupal will add markup, you know,
it'll add like a thing, like it'll,
like with Drupal,
a piece of content is called the node.
And so it'll add like a C a
default CSS class on there called like no
dash dash, you know, episode or something.
If you're doing a podcast website,
but when you're trying to sell a theme,
you know,
you're trying to sell a theme that can
work with a whole bunch of things.
And the theme doesn't have this
functionality.
Themes cannot,
cannot contain content types.
They can't contain views.
So,
you can ship a theme,
but you don't know that that CSS class
is going to be no dash dash episode.
And you also don't know, you know,
what the HTML structure is underneath,
you know?
And, and, and so that made things,
that made things pretty, pretty, pretty,
you know,
almost impossible for a robust theme
ecosystem.
And there's companies out there that do
sell Drupal themes.
You'll see my theme forest and stuff like
that.
um these the the themes that are sold
like they kind of get around that by
by shipping a custom module with themes
and so the custom module might install
some content types you know might have
some views and stuff like that but as
soon as you go away from where that
custom or where that custom module points
you to everything falls apart because the
theme can't handle that right and uh
So that's the difference, you know?
And yeah, yeah, that's basically it.
Yeah, so like fundamentally,
I guess sort of quasi-equivalent,
although I think you could still probably
build a theme that was open enough in
WordPress to support this too.
But like the idea of like I'm doing,
like we were talking before we hit record,
is like this website has a custom post
type called episodes.
And if...
like WordPress didn't understand and
didn't like already like have some like
base classes and whatever that just the
themes expect to use or you know that
are general enough then the idea is that
because the theme doesn't necessarily know
about the existence of the episode post
type it would and because Drupal
specifically is kind of architected from
the perspective of like we're letting you
tell us
what types of content you're using on your
site, uh, then it's like,
the theme is like, well, like,
I don't know what you're doing.
Uh,
so it can't really fill in those gaps
as, as easily as what I'm hearing.
Yeah, exactly.
So, you know,
and the thing can maybe do like some
default styling, you know, you know,
put some spacing around stuff, but,
You know, and, and like me, like,
like I,
the default theme in Drupal is called
Olivero.
Like when you installed it,
when you installed Drupal,
that's what you get.
And I was the primary dev on that.
And so we had to basically try to
accommodate everything without the ability
to accommodate everything.
Sure.
You know, but,
but with the introduction of components,
you know, so, so,
so now like as a theme developer,
I can, I can ship a library,
you know, a fifty,
sixty components or more.
and let's say i want to create an
episode you know content type or post type
or whatever at that point you know i
can i can kind of drag in you
know the a title component you know map
that to the you know my title field
i can drag in you know same thing
with a body field or you know a
video field and you know potentially you
know mp three like an audio player and
stuff like that right
And so now it comes a lot more
flexible, which is pretty neat.
And I have been watching what's been going
on in Drupal land.
This is sort of a,
one might suggest a fortuitous time for
the existence or emergence of a theme
development shop,
given that Dries Boitart,
the founder of Drupal,
has been talking a lot about marketplaces
and selling Drupal stuff.
Talk about that relationship.
and what your thoughts are about sort of
a commercial ecosystem for Drupal.
Yeah.
So like for the longest time,
when I say for the longest time,
maybe like for the past ten years,
Drupal really concentrated on like the
enterprise.
You know, we were like, all right,
let's just put our time and effort into
tracking down these Fortune five hundred
companies and try to get these million
dollar contracts.
And, you know,
that would work for the larger companies.
But at the same time,
the unintended consequence of that is that
Drupal's market share started to decline.
And when the market share declines,
that means that there are less Drupal
developers.
There are less people, you know,
in that mid-market kind of learning
Drupal, knowing what Drupal is.
And that has hurt Drupal, you know?
And so eventually the, you know,
the powers that be,
the leadership within Drupal said like,
all right, well,
we need to recapture this mid-market.
And so they put together this huge
strategy, and this is up on Dries'.
He has a blog somewhere called Starshot
Product Strategy.
Starshot was the code name for Drupal CMS
before it was called Drupal CMS.
And so basically the goal is for Drupal
to become feasible of being a CMS chosen
for a website
you know,
that has like maybe a budget of like
ten to thirty thousand dollars or
something like that, which right now,
unless you're a Drupal developer,
you probably don't want to do that
because, you know,
Drupal can be a little expensive.
So as part of that, they decided,
all right, well,
we're going to create this kind of like,
I call it like an easy button for
Drupal, you know, called Drupal CMS.
And it has like all the modules that
you have to download pre-configure.
You know,
because there's like some modules that
should totally be part of Drupal core
things like, you know, like the, uh,
friendly paths, you know?
So if you create a piece of content,
it's not node slash one, it's like,
you know,
whatever it automatically gets that node
title in there and stuff for SEO.
Um,
so it has all this stuff pre-configured
and it's pretty nice.
but there's still a couple of missing
pieces in there.
One of the missing pieces is like a
decent page builder.
Like Drupal has this whole ecosystem of
page builders because no one has
specifically like taken over.
And honestly,
this is something that's like kind of hurt
Drupal.
You know,
you can kind of do anything in Drupal,
but it shouldn't be this much effort.
You know, WordPress has Gutenberg,
Webflow has whatever the hell Webflow has,
et cetera, you know?
And so, so there's a,
they're Acquia,
which is kind of like the largest Drupal
company.
And the one that Drew's founded, uh,
is creating a next generation page builder
called Drupal canvas and Drupal canvas
does everything that you should pretty
much, you know,
you would assume it would do, you know,
and, and does a few extra things too,
which is pretty cool.
So you can like copy and paste components,
group components,
create what's called like patterns,
you know, edit them, you know,
you can map your data to it.
It's, it's pretty cool.
Um,
And then, um, so, so, uh,
so at that point we have, you know,
once Drupal canvas comes out,
which will probably be next month.
And then, you know,
we have then Drupal CMS two dot O
will be released.
So at that point we have like a
pretty good starting point,
but we still need to like,
kind of put everything together to compete
with WordPress, to compete with Webflow,
Wix, Squarespace, you know, and.
all contentful and all those headless
CMSs.
So at that point, you know,
the Drupal association of powers that be
said, like, like we need this ecosystem.
We want to do something called site
templates and site templates are basically
like, it's a, it's a theme,
it's a Drupal theme,
but also like pre-configured with those
content types, you know,
which are similar to post types, you know,
has,
it can come pre-configured with modules.
And it can also come pre-configured with
default content, you know?
So an example of this is like,
let's say I'm a church and I want
to, you know,
I want a church churchy website, you know,
and I built a couple of those.
Yeah.
You know, I, I,
I would hypothetically be able to browse
this marketplace,
look for a site template that like,
you know,
it would have maybe have a list of
the content types, you know,
you may have like sermons.
you know, events and blog, all that,
all that good stuff.
And at that point, pull it down,
install it.
And at that point, you would, number one,
have all,
you would have content so you can just
edit content.
And then you would have a beautiful theme,
hopefully, and everything pre-configured.
So it's, but at that point,
like what's really cool is you have that
flexibility of Drupal now.
Like Drupal is hyper-flexible.
Drupal can build like so many things if
you have,
you know,
if you kind of know your way around
it, like, like Drupal is fricking amazing.
So, so that's,
that's kind of where we're going with
that.
And, and to get started, we're,
we're like the, the marketplace is,
is set to kick off like right around
DrupalCon Chicago,
which is going to be in March.
And, um,
it's going to be kind of like almost
like a beta, you know,
like we're going to be there.
We're going to have a couple of site
templates.
There's going to be fifteen or sixteen
other companies that have some type site
templates.
we don't know what we're going to build
yet,
or at least I don't know what we're
going to build,
but all our stuff is going to work.
It's going to be awesome.
It's going to be super accessible and,
and hopefully people will buy it,
you know, and if they buy it, well,
that's good.
Like, like I, I can tell you, like,
I've been to a number of WordCamps.
I've been to like WordCamp Miami and
Jacksonville, probably one or two others.
And the amount of money into WordPress
ecosystem is like significantly more than
in the Drupal ecosystem.
And the reason is, is because of the,
like the robust commercial ecosystem
around WordPress.
You know, you have, you know,
however many theme vendors,
you got all these plugin vendors,
you know, and stuff like that.
And they're all advertising.
And the thing about that is like,
That's why, you know,
WordCamp US can cost like fifty dollars or
something like that, because, you know,
they get is a fifty dollars or just
a couple hundred.
Yeah, it's yeah, it's I think.
I want to say this last year,
it was fifty dollars a day.
I have honestly paid less attention to
WordCamp prices because my company pays
for them,
so I never even look at the ticket
price.
But yeah,
I think it was fifty dollars a day,
so if you're going to WordCamp US,
it would be a hundred dollars, I think.
Yeah, so that's ridiculously cheap.
But that's super cheap as compared to
DrupalCon, which is like one K, basically.
Yeah.
And, and,
and DrupalCon is lowering their prices.
FYI, like DrupalCon Chicago,
like prices are going to start like at
five hundred just because we're kind of
realizing we're pricing people out,
you know,
especially like a lot of the smaller
companies like, like Dripyard, you know,
like to drop a couple grand going there,
you know, that's,
that's a little more significant than if
you're like Pantheon or Acquia or,
you know,
Automatic or something like that,
you know?
You're hitting on all of my key touch
points about things in the WordPress
ecosystem.
There's just so many crossovers.
So one of the things, okay,
so a foundational, I'll start here.
A foundational part of this podcast
specifically came out of a sticker that I
got from DrupalCon, which is right here,
because I was at DrupalCon last year.
Come for the code, stay for the community.
And that was...
That resonated with me because that's the
reason why I was in the WordPress
community.
Ultimately,
that became one of the foundations for how
I wanted to do this show.
One of the things that I learned when
I was in Atlanta that is distinct about
the Drupal community from the WordPress
developer ecosystem is that in Drupal,
more frequently,
if we both have tools or modules or
whatever that serve a similar purpose that
we're probably more likely to be like hey
let's join forces and make the best thing
so like if i have an seo plugin
and you have an seo plugin then we
might work together and be like well let's
make one of these things the de facto
seo plugin and make it the best plugin
or module
Whereas in the WordPress ecosystem,
if I have an SEO plugin and you
have an SEO plugin,
I'm probably not going to talk to you
because that's my IP and I might turn
around and sell it.
So I had a lot of conversations at
DrupalCon about this,
but also about the idea of a marketplace
because that was sort of when Dries
started floating the idea.
And my reaction as someone in the
WordPress ecosystem is I really like that
model of being collaborative and sharing
and like, you know,
joining these two things instead of like
really going head to head and competing.
What is your take on sort of like,
because in WordPress,
we're more likely to be competitors and
not sharing those ideas and being sort of
siloing yourselves off.
So what is your take on that sort
of dynamic in terms of like,
do you do you see that as something
that could be a risk to like the
Drupal developer ecosystem as things get a
little bit more competitive?
Yeah, things are always a risk, right?
Like as soon as you make big changes
like this and these are these are some
of the biggest changes in the Drupal
ecosystem ever, you know,
there's always a risk.
So, like, to expand on your point, like,
I saw a blog post at one point
that, like, WordPress had, like,
I don't know,
a hundred and something form builders,
you know, that you can buy.
And they won't play nice with each other.
And then, like, furthermore, like,
if you have WordPress and you install,
like, you know, fourteen, fifteen plugins,
you're kind of, your site's, like,
a little funkier.
You're probably fighting.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You can be fighting some bugs and stuff
like that.
Like one of the cool things is with
Drupal is like all the modules play well
together.
Like Drupal has a very robust set of
API APIs, you know, and,
and that's something that,
that we do better than WordPress.
WordPress does a lot of better, a lot,
a lot of things better than Drupal.
But one thing we have is like a
robust APIs that allow things to work
together.
So if you have like six to seven
D modules,
installed on a Drupal site, that's normal.
If you have a couple hundred,
that's fine too.
And so going into Drupal has probably
three or four page builders,
but there's one big one.
It's called Webform.
It's easy.
And built around Webform,
there's ecosystems that build on top of
that.
So you'll have Webform Commerce,
Webform this, Webform that,
that allow you to do like
you know, little things.
And it's just really nice.
You don't have to evaluate.
You don't know, you don't got to pay,
you know, twenty dollars,
forty dollars or whatever for something
like that.
You just try it,
you get it to work and and everything
goes.
So like that's that's one of the
advantages that that Drupal has.
And that's something that I think,
you know, the leadership recognizes.
You know,
Dries had stated modules will always be
GPL forever free, you know.
and it's it's the themes that you know
that that that could be commercial code so
back when i was like back when i
was like researching like like doing a
little bit of due diligence like can i
do drip yard you know so i started
looking into gpl and like everything
because gpl for those who don't know has
a very sticky license you know where like
if if
If you write PHP that builds on top
of Drupal or WordPress and then distribute
it, it's technically GPL,
which means it's free.
And, um,
but that doesn't necessarily apply to
things that it's a little bit of legalese,
but like things that are not directly
interfacing with that.
So things that can run in the browser.
things like CSS and JavaScript will not
necessarily be GPL.
And I did a little bit of digging
and there's a Drupal licensing working
group, you know,
and there was some talk about that.
And the conclusion that I saw within this
issue is yeah,
like CSS and JavaScript is not necessarily
GPL.
So at that point I was like,
all right, well, we can do this.
We can just kind of, you know,
have our CSS and everything closed source.
The TLDR of all of this is that,
like, it's kind of like a fine line,
you know?
Like, you can't...
like it's not necessarily a good idea for
everything to cost money and,
and then people don't collaborate,
you know?
But at the same time you need money
because people need to get paid.
Right.
Like I am doing this because to tell
you the truth, like I want to,
I want to be able to make six
figures and work twenty hours a week.
That is my dream, you know?
And, and yeah,
so it's going to be a fine line.
I have a feeling that like as we,
As, as,
as Drupal continues to like continue down
this path, there are going to be,
you know,
changes and people are going to figure
things out.
People like,
like Drupal is going to make mistakes and
they're going to say like, all right,
well, let's back this up a little bit,
or maybe we should go forward a little
bit more, you know,
maybe we're not doing this enough.
Yeah.
So I think it's going to be trial
and error.
Yeah.
Yeah,
that's interesting about modules being
different and the marketplace not being
handled or not covering modules
necessarily versus themes and themes being
the thing that we're talking about first.
I think that makes a lot of sense,
both from sort of Drupal's history,
but also like creating,
like not shutting off that sort of
collaborations,
which I do recognize I think happens a
lot more in modules because like you said,
like you can have dependency modules and
whatever,
like this module calls these other three
modules and whatever,
and you do need to sort of like
keep that ecosystem.
In WordPress,
there is kind of sort of an equivalent.
There are like plugins that are like
add-ons or additional features
functionality to an existing plugin and
maybe that existing plugin is a premium
plugin or maybe it's like a free plugin
and the extension is is a premium thing
or whatever like there's all sorts of like
weird things like that but
but yeah i think that that's interesting
do you see a future where there might
be also a module marketplace both like you
know besides drupal.org and getting your
stuff like normally that way but like
having like a like the equivalent of like
an envato sort of thing where you could
like purchase and and integrate like
premium uh modules for drupal i would be
really really surprised there are like
some modules that like kind of do the
whole gpl loophole and put some processing
processing on the server, you know,
that's kind of how they,
how they do it.
So there's, there's things like that.
I can't see any,
any Envato type marketplace for, for,
for modules.
I think if that happened,
people would kind of get pissed and then
just like download it and throw it up
on Drupal.org or GitHub or something like
that, which has happened in the past,
you know?
It happens in WordPress too.
Yeah.
And it's interesting,
like it's an interesting topic, right?
So if I sell a site template,
let's say I sell this for like a
thousand dollars and I have my theme and
also like has, you know,
a composer file that references a bunch of
modules.
These modules are key components to this
site template.
Well, I'm making all the profit of that.
These module maintainers aren't making
shit, you know?
I don't know if I can say that
word, but I just did.
I'll flag the explicit tag.
It's not a problem.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, and that goes,
but that also goes all the way down,
you know, like, well, at that point,
the core maintainers and the core
developers are not getting paid, you know,
the Apache developers or NGINX.
And also, like,
the argument would be that, well,
these module maintainers and developers
have been doing kind of unpaid work.
unpaid labor for years and years while
other people are making money,
you have agencies, you know,
like agencies,
I used to work for a company called
Lullabot and they would put together these
great websites for these large companies
were for multimillion dollar contracts.
And, and, you know,
does that money go toward those module
developers?
No, I mean, to be fair,
there are some, there's a,
there's a number that would work at that
company, but still, you know, so,
It's a really interesting ecosystem.
Open source is really interesting and how
that works and how that can work.
Yeah.
I'm interested...
So one of the things that happens a
lot in the WordPress commercial ecosystem
is that even though technically,
because Matt Mullenweg has explicitly
stated a number of times that he believes
that all code in plugins and themes should
be GPL licensed or GPL compatible,
even when it doesn't have to be,
because that's the spirit of the GPL,
not necessarily the letter, you know?
So he doesn't like things like Envato
where they have mixed licenses or
whatever.
He's much more like everything should be
GPL.
And if everything is GPL,
then that means anybody can take your code
and then republish it and put it somewhere
else.
And now it's their code because that's
what the GPL allows you to do is
basically redistribute it as is.
So the thing that most...
premium WordPress plugins and themes sort
of do is, okay,
what you're paying for is access to
updates.
So they have a different update mechanism
that so it's not going to be on
like WordPress at all and get automatic
updates that way.
uh it's going to be through their own
sort of homebrew update mechanism and two
they're also selling support for a
contracted period of time um is that sort
of the model that you are thinking of
uh for drip yard as well are you
thinking that uh primarily you are selling
the proprietary like javascript and css i
mean you know like
that is that is the thing that is
that is being sold even if it's like
you're selling it with a bunch of other
stuff that is yeah technically gpl
compatible so like we're definitely like
selling support add-ons you know
reoccurring and that's like a hundred
dollars a year so that's not a heck
of a lot of money um updates you
know will people just will download the
zip file from our you know
when they log in, you know,
get their theme and stuff like that.
And then they can, you know,
download their updates that way.
And, you know,
hopefully their changes will be in a sub
theme so they don't get clobbered.
But like, it's like, I can't really,
I can't,
it's going to be interesting to see how
things go.
I, I can't really tell you,
I can tell you what we're doing,
but I can't tell you what everything,
everyone else is doing.
Like, and yeah,
I don't know if that really answers your
question.
I was, I mean, I was wondering from,
from the perspective of,
of drip yard specifically.
Yeah.
So it sounds like that you would like,
Kind of,
and that's one of the things too,
like if you're gating access to the files,
uh,
because you have to be a logged in
user and you have to pay to get
the login in the first place, then,
then that's, that's an easy way of,
of making sure that people are,
are paying for your stuff.
Yeah.
We're doing that.
And, and there's, there's like,
to tell you the truth,
there's like nothing stopping people,
you know,
from redistributing our stuff after,
after they purchase it, you know, like,
like we could sue them, but you know,
we still have themes for a hundred
dollars, you know?
more than likely I'll end up spilling
something on my DrupalCon or something.
But at the same time,
our thought process is, well,
if you're starting a project with Drupal,
you're probably spending significantly
more than ten thousand dollars to spend
like five hundred dollars on a theme.
Add in some support seems pretty
reasonable.
And honestly,
these themes that we developed,
over ten months and I'm like probably
thousands of hours, you know,
and they're really good.
You know, they're awesome.
And it's going to save people tens of
thousands of dollars, you know,
by using these.
So what I,
we've talked a lot about Drupal and we've
talked a lot about WordPress.
What I often like to do, uh,
is to really talk about, um,
sort of what your journey to tech or
web development was sort of like in the
first place.
Like, how did you get to be, uh,
how did you get to be Mike Herschel
co-founder of Dripyard?
Like what, what led to, uh,
to you just getting involved in this stuff
in the first place?
so i was born at a very young
age i got i got into uh computers
back in like i used to do technical
support for dell and gateway computers
before they like shipped off all that
stuff over to india you know so i
would talk to your grandmother trying to
troubleshoot windows i moved up to up to
gainesville and i got this job doing
technical support over the phone technical
support uh just because like i had done
that before
And it was this enterprise software
company called Bar Systems that would
interface between mainframes and regular
networks and stuff.
And it was so slow that we would
just sit there and twiddle our thumbs.
And the guy in the office next to
me, he was doing these websites.
And he was using Macromedia Fireworks and
showed me how to do that.
And I had to use Photoshop.
This would have been like, like,
And I would literally do all my designs
and fireworks.
We both would.
And then we would slice it up.
And we would just export it.
And it was literally a table full of
images.
That would be your website.
I remember those.
That was awful.
I hate those.
I found some of those on my old
hard drive.
And I have some of those up on
my GitHub.
If you have some links or something,
like show notes or something,
I'll shoot you some links.
You can see Spacer GIFs and stuff in
there.
Yeah.
So I got into websites and I started
doing like my brother's band's website.
I did it at my brother's friend's man's
websites.
And I started like, you know,
doing websites as a side hustle and stuff
like that.
I remember I would,
I would put these ads on Craigslist for
barter to do websites for like to have
people do stuff for our house.
And I ended up getting this guy who
was starting a lawn care company.
And, uh,
We became friends, you know,
you put in a sprinkler system and,
and he,
he said he had this website called, uh,
or he had a domain name called gator
tailgating.com, you know,
and I'm a big Florida Gator football fan,
you know, and I was like,
I like tailgating.
I'm like, let's do this, you know?
So I, um, I started looking for CMSs.
This has been.
And I don't know why I didn't look
at WordPress, but I,
I looked at Joomla and I looked at
Drupal and I chose Drupal to be honest,
because it had an integrated forum,
which is like such a funny thing to
select.
But then I kind of got into it
and around,
and I started doing like a little bit
of freelance and Drupal, you know,
I would just literally like do everything
the wrong way, you know,
like edit the files and core,
which you're not supposed to do,
et cetera, et cetera.
And, um,
I eventually made my way, like,
I remember I Googled, you know,
Gainesville Drupal just to see if there
was what would happen, you know,
and I found,
I found this thing on groups.drupal.org
that led me to Florida Drupal camp.
And I went down there in early,
and I was kind of hooked on the,
I was like, holy shit.
I didn't know that there was actual
community.
I thought it was just like a bunch
of nerds developing this, you know,
and they taught me how to do stuff
that I didn't know how to do.
I went home and I was like,
so enthusiastic, you know,
I ended up going the next few years
and started volunteering and stuff.
And I started looking for Drupal jobs at
that point.
I was working for the Florida High School
Athletic Association at the time,
just doing like all their computer stuff.
And I migrated their like fairly large
website to Drupal six at the time.
And then I,
I ended up, uh, you know,
kind of getting more involved with Florida
Drupal camp.
I ended up, uh, you know,
getting my job at Lullabot back in, uh,
uh, and, uh, kind of just,
kind of just went head on into Drupal
at that point, you know,
if I wasn't already there and I ended
up, uh,
getting involved in Drupal core
development at Lullabot where, you know,
uh, I, uh,
I kind of got roped into leading a
team to do a new theme for Drupal,
where the previous theme for Drupal just
had been around for so long.
At the time,
it was probably like ten years old,
which is like a million in internet years.
And so I went through that,
and everybody was really happy.
And I ended up doing a bunch of
other cool stuff.
And then I ended up quitting Lullabot for
more money, you know,
and then quitting that job for more money
and I'm getting laid off.
And that, you know,
and then I was like, you know,
that led me to here.
And I was like,
cause I had been mulling this company for
a while.
And I was even talking to other developers
while I was still like, you know,
in various different jobs about
potentially starting this with them.
And then I was like,
this is going to be it.
I'm going to, I'm,
I just got laid off.
This is going to be my kick in
the ass.
I'm going to,
I'm going to start this up.
And, you know, so I, I, uh,
I reached out to my current business
partners, guy named Andy Giles,
who lives in Asheville, North Carolina.
And he's a amazing backend dev.
He's, he's, he's a horrible front end dev.
And,
but he's also like really good at things
like DevOps and e-commerce.
And he's a nice guy, you know, and,
uh, we ended up, uh,
I ended up talking to him,
talking to him and I said,
we're going to get rich, you know,
all this type of stuff.
And, uh,
You know, I, I, you know,
like money wise,
we had to invest in some designers,
you know,
so we ended up at this point,
we both probably threw in about like five
grand into the business to pay for some
designs, you know,
and just a heck of a lot of
work ended up taking the equity line of
credit against my house.
So I have something to live off of
and ended up just
I thought we were going to have this
first theme out in like three months.
It took like ten months.
Because it's funny how much work goes into
making sure your themes can support almost
anything that the kitchen sink.
But now we have this whole design system.
We have a system behind everything.
So it's really easy to kind of turn
around new themes.
at this point, but what we're, um,
I guess the answer to your question,
but I guess where I'm going with this
is like,
currently we're kind of working on, uh,
making sure we have full support for
Drupal canvas,
which is that next gen page builder.
That's going to come out in about a
month.
Yeah, tell me about,
so I've been sort of watching the
evolution of Drupal CMS since, well,
I guess since January this year,
pretty much.
And I went back before I went to
DrupalCon in Atlanta,
I went back and I watched Dries' last
two keynotes before that.
And I watched the one from Vienna this
last couple weeks.
And I remember when I was in Atlanta
and he was showing what was then referred
to as Experience Builder,
which is now Drupal Canvas.
I was like... I tweeted... Actually,
it's not tweeting if you do it on
Blue Sky.
It's like bloot.
I don't know.
I posted on Blue Sky that...
this looks like the thing that Gutenberg
should have been all along.
I was so incredibly impressed by what
looked to be way more intuitive,
way easier to use.
And I've played with and installed Drupal
CMS, and I fully believe... In fact,
I wrote a blog post on the Pantheon
blog about this.
I fully believe that that is...
a thousand times better experience,
first-time user experience for installing
a CMS than WordPress.
And part of that has to do with
like, it's more of like a guided install.
It's asking you questions,
but also it's asking you like,
what type of site you want to create.
And most,
like every other CMS I've ever installed
just gives you a bunch of form fields.
And it doesn't ask you the question,
what are you trying to build?
And so because of that,
uh you never ask the question of yourself
what type of website are you trying to
build you just kind of like oh well
i'm just going to click a couple buttons
and then i have a website and then
i'm just going to do stuff right like
but you never actually have to
intentionally like come up with like no
what am i actually trying to create and
i thought that that was a really uh
a really good like just like just slow
down and like make this the process a
little bit more more user friendly and
then also when it when it installs like
i feel like
Like the user interface,
which in the past for me as somebody
who is more familiar with WordPress,
the user interface and the Drupal admin is
very complex and hard for me to navigate
and know where all the stuff is.
And it feels better.
And maybe it's just because it looks more
like the WordPress admin.
I don't know.
But it feels better for me to like
in the Drupal CMS admin.
I don't know,
maybe just because stuff is on the left,
I guess.
But like,
it feels like it's easier for me to
navigate.
So I guess my question is like,
somewhere in here is the question,
I think, which is like,
Where do you see, like,
do you believe that capturing the sort of
mid-market or that first time user
experience will be like the changing point
for driving more Drupal adoption?
I mean, I would say definitely, you know,
like there's a lot more mid-market stuff.
than uh enterprise market you know and and
and honestly to tell you the truth like
the enterprise people want the same crap
as the mid-market people for for the most
part you know they want to be able
to assemble pages without having to like
you know have a post-doctorate or
something like that you know um like you
know like i don't know if you're familiar
with like um
Adobe enterprise, uh, yeah.
Yeah.
Like they have like nice drag and drop
stuff, but they don't do what Drupal does,
you know?
And, but, but they ended up,
they ended up selling,
selling their product based on like
showing that drag and drop stuff to the
marketers and the marketers, you know,
get super excited about that because it's
pretty sexy, you know?
And, and, and if, if,
if we can match that and surpass it,
which I believe we will, like,
that's going to be a big deal,
you know?
And,
and the same thing with like Gutenberg,
like, like, like Canvas is built by,
by looking at the lessons from everything,
you know,
from things like Gutenberg and AM and,
and almost every other page builder out
there, they were all evaluated as,
as these technical requirements started
coming in for Drupal Canvas, you know?
And like, like,
One thing that I really like,
I've done a little bit of Gutenberg
development under Drupal because there is
a Gutenberg module for Drupal.
But one thing that I really disliked about
Gutenberg is you have to have almost two
versions of your markup.
You have to have the one that appears
in the editor and the one that appears
on the home page and stuff.
And that's something that I
with Drupal Canvas,
like right now I'm in the process of,
you know,
making sure all of our components work
well.
And there's some funky things I'm having
to kind of work through, but you know,
it's, all this is kind of normal,
but like,
I add like an additional setting,
like a prop or, you know,
a slot and it just shows, it just,
it's just like nice.
And,
and it's like to develop your experiences
getting right up there.
And then like coming back,
from previous drupal page builders which
was honestly a lot of them are like
really kind of rough unless you did a
lot of manual work like you can make
these page builders awesome but that
requires you know a person who knows what
they're doing to install a bunch of
modules configure them just so you know um
but just like right out of the box
it's just like nice you start dragging
stuff you start copying and pasting stuff
everything it updates on the fly
There's a nice preview button.
There's all these things that just feel
very intuitive.
So it's nice.
And there's still a little rough edges.
I go in there and I'm filing bugs.
I find stuff and I'm filing bugs because
it's not stable yet.
But it's like head and shoulders above.
you know,
anything else that Drupal's done before.
And, like, as far as, like,
I like it better than Gutenberg, too,
although Gutenberg, to tell you the truth,
like,
it's going to be interesting to see how
that works out, you know?
Yeah, I...
So I've been in the last year or
so been playing a lot more.
So as Gutenberg has developed in the
WordPress ecosystem,
it's extended to be more than just like
the block editor in content stuff.
expanded to do more site editing things.
The site that this podcast is,
is the website,
the Community & Code website is just a
twenty twenty five like default theme and
a bunch of customizations in the full site
editor to change the different layouts for
the different pages and the episodes and
whatever.
Like so like I can do a lot
of stuff
just using the tools that are core without
having to build a theme at all or
think about that anymore,
which is pretty impressive.
It didn't used to be like that.
But it took a long time to get
to that point.
And for a long time, it was like,
there's a lot of limitations that I was
running up against and like, oh,
I don't know how to do this thing,
or I just need to change a line
of CSS to fix this other problem,
whatever.
And it took a lot to get to
the point where it is now.
But it does seem like... I mean,
demos aren't live.
And so the proof is in the pudding
when you actually start to use it.
But what I've seen of Drupal Canvas,
it feels like it's a better...
It's further along that timeline to a
usable thing than...
a lot of the stuff that has been
in WordPress core for the last couple
years and then iterate it on to get
to the point where it is now.
Yeah, I can't really speak to like...
I don't know WordPress nearly as well as
you, and I haven't used it recently,
so I can't really speak to how it
feels compared to modern Gutenberg.
Most of my Gutenberg experience comes
within
the context of drupal which is not not
the correct specific flavor yeah yeah yeah
yeah and i i can tell you that
like there are some some things in drupal
canvas that like you know need to be
worked on and sure and i've been filing
bugs and pinging the appropriate people in
slack which i'm pretty sure they're
probably you know oh oh crap here's
herschel again you know but um
But at the same time,
a number of the bugs I found have
become release blockers and things like
that.
And that helps.
So it's going to take iteration.
I think the success or failure on Canvas
is going to be how it feels.
How intuitive is it?
How it feels?
How many paper cuts are there?
We can deal with a couple paper cuts,
but if there's too many paper cuts,
it starts to get really, really annoying.
And on top of that,
how well developers can extend it.
If I want to inject XYZ or something
in there into the editorial interface,
How easy can I do that?
Yeah,
that's actually a really good point and
something that I want to talk about too.
And I know we're getting close to time,
but I want to still throw this in
because one of the things about that when
Gutenberg development started forced
WordPress developers to learn was the fact
that
Gutenberg,
the decision was made very early on to
make it a React interface.
And so that meant that not only did
WordPress developers need to learn
JavaScript,
but they also needed to specifically learn
React.
And the learning curve, like...
Having played with React a little bit...
I mean, not before Gutenberg, obviously.
Why would I?
But having played with it since,
I do like using React coming from a
PHP background because it makes a little
bit more sense to my brain.
But there's definitely a learning curve
there.
Talk about the developer experience for
building things for Canvas,
because as I understand it,
it's not that same sort of like you
need to learn a fundamentally different
language anymore.
Yeah, yeah.
So if I want to create a component
that works in and outside of Canvas,
it's the same as creating a component
outside of Canvas.
You know,
so I mentioned that Drupal has this
concept of direct components,
which are called single directory
components.
And basically, like within your theme,
you have a component directory.
And within that component directory,
you have a directory for every single
component.
uh and there's two mandatory files for
your component there's a twig file which
is which is like the markup language that
drupal uses it's like standard html and
then some curly brackets you can put for
loops and all that type of stuff in
there and then there's a the
component.yaml file the component.yaml
file will say hey this is a component
and then it'll also list the um
type of data that that Twig file is
expecting.
You know, so you say like,
I'm going to have a title,
it's going to be a string and,
you know, you can call it, you know,
title or something, you know, or,
you know, I'm going to have this,
you know, portrait landscape checkbox,
you see Boolean, you know,
I have an array, all the,
all this type of stuff.
Right.
And so,
so it describes what the Twig file is
expecting.
And then you have a couple of optional
files.
You can have a CSS file in there.
You can have a JavaScript file in there
if, if,
If it sees those,
it'll automatically be loaded whenever the
component is loaded.
And you can also like put into the
YAML file, you know,
stuff for additional CSS files or,
you know, dependencies on other type of,
you know, stuff too, if you want.
So at that point, you have a directory,
I mean, a single directory component.
And as soon as Canvas sees that single
directory component, it'll be available.
Now,
if something is screwed up in the YAML
file,
like let's say like you got your YAML
indentation incorrect or something like
that,
what's this kind of cool is you can
go to like a little reports page,
find your component in there and it'll
tell you exactly what's wrong with it,
which is super nice from a development
experience.
Um, but once that component is,
is there and it's working, uh,
like Drupal will know, Hey,
this is a string.
Uh, so I'm going to put a.
you know, a little text field in there,
you know, and you, and there's some other,
uh, like stuff in your Yammer,
you can add to say like,
I want to load a rich text editor,
you know, and there's,
there's some stuff in there that says
this, you know, you can say,
this is an object and it's going to
accept, you know,
this is going to be an image.
So that'll give you like a little widget
to browse to,
to an image load under your media library
and stuff like that, you know,
and at that point it kind of, it's,
it's kind of works.
So.
the development experience for creating
components is pretty, pretty good.
There's a couple of rough edges,
like a couple,
and these are being worked on, you know,
and I'm like,
I'm totally on top of that.
Um,
but even the rough edges have workarounds,
you know, and, and like,
if you go to the drip yard blog
and stuff,
I actually blog about this type of stuff
because it's kind of, it's kind of fun,
you know, it's fun to,
to like solve these problems as I'm doing
this and, you know, um,
As far as the development experience of
extending the actual editorial interface,
that's a good question.
Like, I haven't done that, you know?
Like,
Dripyard's editorial interface is built
within React.
But that being said, like,
when Gutenberg was, you know, started,
what was this, probably like five, six,
seven years ago or something like that,
React,
a lot more people know React than they
did back then.
You know, like React was common back then,
but it's much more common right now.
So like,
I feel that people will be able to
kind of jump in there and get into
it.
But that being said, like, you know,
people have not yet because it's not
technically stable right now.
Like as of the time of this recording,
it's a release can't like RC one,
RC two or something like that.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah, but I mean, that's interesting,
though,
because fundamentally what I'm hearing is
if you want to build something that can
be used by Canvas,
you don't have to learn a completely
different language.
And I think that that's huge.
I think that's a really big thing that
Canvas has going for it.
and like you said like even even beyond
that the the developer ecosystem today for
people who know react or people who have
encountered react is probably a lot
broader and bigger than it was five or
six years ago when we were talking about
uh whether we were going to use reactor
view to put into to build gutenberg on
top of so yeah absolutely so like just
the ecosystem is different
Yeah, well,
thank you so much for coming on, Mike.
I appreciate learning about Drupal and
having this extremely interesting
conversation comparing CMSs.
Where can people find you if they're
looking for you online?
That's a good question.
So my website is herschel.com,
and that's spelled with a C like there's
no S's in there.
So H-E-R-C-H-E-L.com.
Dripyard.com is my company.
If you're into Drupal,
check out our blog and, you know,
buy our stuff.
I'm on like blueskyatmike.herschel.com and
I'm on master.
You can,
I'm on like most of the things.
Oh, on LinkedIn,
I am Mike Herschel's disembodied head and
it has like my head floating right there.
And people have like come up to me
at conferences like you're the disembodied
head.
Yeah.
Hello, Mr. Disembodied Head.
Yep, yep.
Awesome.
Well, thank you so much, Mike,
again for coming on and for everyone else
for listening either now or in the future
if you're coming across this episode at
some distant point in the future.
And until next time,
we'll see you on the internet.
All right.
Bye, everybody.