What would you do if someone handed you
an internship based on a skill that you
didn't actually have yet?
Fuck.
If you're Fonz Van Damme, you panic,
buy an actual physical book,
speed run Drupal in three months,
and spend the next fifteen years turning
that energy into building a better Drupal
ecosystem.
Fonz is a long-term Drupal community
member and contributor,
and the founder of Webhaven,
which is basically the culmination of
everything he's learned across a
decade-plus of agency life,
distilled into a starter kit that gets you
from zero to site launch in the least
amount of headache.
In this episode,
we talk about what it looks like to
build something alone in twenty twenty six
and specifically how A.I.
played a role in making Webhaven a
reality.
I appreciated his take on this because
Fonz had to figure out early how to
make LLM stop flattering him and start
being ruthlessly honest.
We also talk about the moment Drupal is
having right now and why Fonz is hopeful
that now is the perfect time for a
resurgence.
Without further ado, Fonz Van Damme.
Welcome, Fonz, to Community & Code.
Tell us about yourself and what you've
been working on.
Hello, thanks for having me.
My name is Fonz,
and I've been a Drupal enthusiast for
around fifteen years.
I've been working on and with Drupal for
all those years, and at the moment,
I'm working on a project to speed up
Drupal development,
and it's called WebHaven.
So, fifteen years,
what version of Drupal was that?
I started when Drupal six was still a
thing.
I know some ex-colleagues of mine and
people that were in when Drupal five was
still a thing, but six is really old.
Yeah, well, I mean,
I was thinking back because I know that
there's the kind of running gag of Drupal
seven forever, right?
And that's not that far off from about
fifteen years.
So I would have guessed about Drupal six.
Yeah.
What drew you to Drupal?
So Drupal was made by a Belgian that
is both that.
So I heard about it back in the
days when I was still in school and
I had an assignment on Drupal and then
I had the opportunity to do an internship
and they were looking for someone who knew
a bit of Drupal and I didn't know
anything about Drupal yet.
But anyway, I applied for the internship.
And then all of a sudden they said,
okay, you can do it.
And then I panicked because I had only
three months until the internship started.
And then I started to learn Drupal like
a madman.
But there wasn't a lot of stuff out
there.
You still had to learn it by buying
a book.
It's hard to imagine now,
but that's how I rolled into it.
If you need to learn Drupal now,
I think you ask ChatGPT.
Yes, I think so too.
And also,
you have a lot of video content on
Drupal now.
Back in the days,
Lullabot was already a thing,
but it was really hard to get into
it.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
And yeah, uh, I was,
I fell in love with the possibilities that
Drupal gave me the power.
It's really a powerful tool.
And once you are, you master it,
your imagination becomes the limits,
I think.
And yeah, still using it daily.
So, yeah.
What?
Talk about your sort of intro to just
technology in general,
like you were you're going to school,
would you go to school for computer
science or some some degree?
Yeah, but when I was a young kid,
I didn't like school that much.
But my dad is a doctor and he
was always very computer minded.
And that's a bit of a weird mix
for a doctor.
So he also liked Mac.
So we had one of those first Macintosh
classics at home.
And I have a picture of it.
I can send it to you after the
show.
And it was a portable Mac.
So my dad took it when we went
on a vacation.
And I think that's where it started.
And then when I was around twelve years
old,
I played video games and we had a
clan,
we were on clan base and we started
to make websites for our clan, PHP,
Dreamweaver, even Flash.
And I think that that's where it really
started.
I made my first scripts, a guest book,
how fast your page loaded and stuff like
that.
Yeah, to me, it always was amazing to,
we put together our own computers back in
the days and buy components online or in
shops.
And we made our own website for the
clan and the, the cheerless possibilities.
Uh, I, I haven't felt that with,
with anything else,
not even with building real stuff.
Uh,
Now,
I know you've mentioned in other
interviews and podcasts and things that
you still poke around at other CMSs just
to make sure that Drupal is still the
right thing.
Yeah.
Talk about that process, just what you do,
how you do that,
and what you have discovered by playing
with other stuff.
Yeah.
I've always had to fear that I've invested
so much time into Drupal that I was
a bit of a locked in because of
that and that it would be hard to
switch to something else or that I would
stay with Drupal because of that.
So I've always been interested in other
technologies and when there's something
new, I just set it up locally.
And then I start to dig around in
it, see how it works.
And it's also good because I see what
other projects are doing.
A lot of projects are better and some
stuff and worse and other stuff.
And then I try to take that back
to Drupal.
I don't want to be the guy that
says that Drupal is perfect for
everything.
And I also like to work.
So I have a few modules on drupal.org.
So I also want to contribute to Drupal.
And that's why I'm always very curious how
other projects manage stuff.
For example, the edited experience.
Drupal hasn't always been the best in the
edited experience.
And for example,
that's something I was very curious about.
And other CMSs, for example,
WordPress with Gutenberg,
with the other
uh builders um and you know i think
it's interesting so i don't want to be
the the person that only looks at drupal
and doesn't know anything about anything
else and if if a friend or a
client would ask me if something is a
fit for drupal and it isn't that i
can also say no but i would look
at if i were you hopefully
So that's really important to me.
What have you found in that process?
Are there some other CMSs that are really
good at this type of thing or anything
that you're interested in and would be
interested enough that it would maybe lure
you away to play around in something else
other than Drupal?
Yeah, mostly editor experience.
I looked into a lot, like I said,
and I think WordPress was always better at
it.
And I've done projects in WordPress,
but then I missed some core
functionalities that were in Drupal.
So I always was on the fence about
that.
I think now
Really recently Drupal Canvas came out,
uh,
for Drupal and I've been working really
hard on that now.
And for me,
it's the missing piece of the puzzle for
Drupal.
Uh, and it's everything.
I think the Drupal community missed and
edited experience, uh, fee,
it feels to me like it's be resolved
that now.
Um, so.
That's really interesting.
But I also looked a lot at headless
solutions.
Then there are the more closed frameworks.
But in my heart,
I'm really an open source person.
So I always find it hard
to um someone asked me what what should
we build this in to advise something
that's closed because i don't know what's
going to happen with the project in the
future and if if if the code base
is not yours it can be that the
solution that i'm proposing then is not a
durable solution for them and then two
years later the the project stops and
They have to migrate everything to another
solution.
And I don't like that.
So I mainly look at open source solutions.
Is that the thing that keeps bringing you
back to open source is the community
around the technology that's being built?
Yeah, the people,
but also the ability to really dig in
the code and to understand what's
happening.
I tend to be curious and I like
to dig in how stuff works.
For example, I look in how Symfony works.
Drupal uses a lot of Symfony.
So for example,
Drupal adopted the routing of Symfony.
And you can just start using it,
but then it feels a bit like a
black box because you don't know what
happens behind the scenes.
And I'm the person who starts digging into
the code to really understand it.
more an helicopter view but i like to
know what happens behind scenes and i for
example i also look to laravel i did
a lot of work in code igniter in
the past so more the the mc the
mvp frameworks cake php stuff like that so
a lot of open source stuff
And Drupal is in sort of a period
of change,
and obviously if you look at the total
installations across all Drupal sites,
the number hasn't grown in a while.
But I think a lot of people,
and we've had some folks that are from
the Drupal community on the podcast
before,
But a lot of people believe that right
now is the time for it to maybe
make a resurgence.
What is your take on both sort of
the trajectory of Drupal up to now and
also what its future is looking like?
Yeah.
So what I have observed from my personal
view, from starting with Drupal six,
I think Drupal seven really was the search
and, uh, users.
And if you would look at Google trends,
it does lie since then it went, uh,
downwards, uh,
I think the main reason is Drupal got
really complex and it moved more to
enterprise and bigger projects.
And it's really hard to do small websites
in Drupal or it was hard.
And that's also, so yeah,
it was harder to jump into Drupal for
the smaller projects.
then WordPress would be easier.
And it's also one of the reasons why
I started to work on Webhaven because I
felt like I want to bring the power
of Drupal back to the little projects and
to more people because I really believe in
Drupal and how good it is.
And that's also the reason why I made
it.
but I think mainly because it shifted more
to enterprise and big projects.
And I think personally now, uh,
with everything that's going on in the
community and in Drupal,
there's a big chance that we can pull
it back.
And I'll try to be one of the
people that, uh,
helps to do that with web haven,
but also with my work on Drupal in
general.
Yeah.
Let's get into that a little bit.
Talk about what is Webhaven and what led
you to found this new company.
Yeah.
So Webhaven to me is like the ultimate
Drupal site starter.
So the name says it.
You can really spin up a project in
Drupal really fast.
It's like a blueprint,
so it holds everything that I've done or
seen in the last fifteen years.
So to me,
it's more like the Olympic minimum.
What do you really need to have a
quality Drupal site from day one?
And then people can take that as a
starter and do their own thing with it.
Where does it come from?
The idea has always been in the back
of my mind.
And it felt like it was something that
I had to get out of my system.
I've been working really long on Drupal,
and I also had the feeling if a
good friend would come to me and say,
Fons, can you please make this in Drupal,
that I didn't have the tool to say,
yes,
I'll come to your house tomorrow and let's
go.
We're going to make it together.
And now I do.
And I also felt like I had a
lot of stuff in my mind,
but not in a project.
So I wanted to make it tangible.
And that's where it came from.
And then also, like I said,
Drupal was moving to the big projects and
to pull it back and make it viable
for small projects.
And I think that's now something that is
able with Webhaven.
And also a lot of people say Drupal
is hard to learn.
And that's also something that I want to
work on with webhaven to to to make
the barrier lower also for newcomers and
learners to have a good starting point and
to to start right right away with a
project and that they know they start from
best practices but also for drupal experts
or for example agencies that are now doing
wordpress but are curious about drupal for
example
Is Webhaven something like a premium sort
of thing where you would go to the
website and pay whatever amount and then
download the package,
or is it purely open source?
What's your business model around it?
Yeah,
I'd love to offer it indeed as a
premium package that you can pay and
download it.
And it has a visual installer.
You have a lot of options because it
consists of recipes.
So it's like a menu card and you
can select what you want.
It sets it up and you can go
from it right away.
And then developers or people who want to
learn Drupal can put in their own stuff.
But it has a lot of stuff from
the go.
And as I understand it,
you've sort of built it out from like
years of, of experience in,
in sort of like agency work and like
solving the same sort of problems over and
over.
Um,
talk about like the thought and care that,
and like, you know, how you approached,
uh, like architecting it, uh,
from that sort of, uh,
perspective of like,
these are just like the five or ten
things that we have to do every single
time.
Yeah,
so I've worked in a Drupal agency for
ten years.
So I started as a Drupal developer and
then more moved to Scrum Master and Team
Lead.
But the company was struggling and we
always had a hard time to find someone
to do the commercial side,
so the sales side.
And I also was helping to find the
right fit for that role.
But we didn't really find the right person
or it never clicked.
And I was so fed up with that
process and to see how the company was
slipping away and that I started to do
the sales.
I didn't know anything about sales,
so I had to learn everything by doing
it.
And that's when I learned what was
important for clients because I was
talking to them all the time.
I also always thought sales was really
boring.
But then I also realized that sales could
be a creative process and I tried to
do it my way.
The way that I did it wasn't scalable
at all.
So that was a huge problem because I
had a unique way of doing it,
but it worked really well for us.
And that's really where I learned
what needed to be in the projects because
and that back in the days i also
did the analysis because i didn't only
want to do the sales so i also
did a lot of analysis and wireframing so
i had a lot of hats but that
was a really nice period for me to
figure out all that stuff and web haven
really is all those hats in one uh
platform um
I always wanted to make it together with
my colleagues colleagues back then,
but it was always hard to get everyone
on the same page or why I wasn't
good enough in, uh, explaining my vision.
And that's also where the rise of the
LLMs really helped because I had it all
in my head,
but I was doing sales analysis,
wire framing, and I wasn't coding, uh,
daily anymore,
only in the weekends or after hours
because I always liked Drupal.
So I kept,
I didn't want to be the sales guy
that didn't know anything about the
product.
So I kept really active in that.
And with the rise of the LLMs,
all of a sudden I was like, okay,
the barrier for me to get back in
the building game lowered.
you have no excuses anymore.
Now you have to just go for it.
And it's also a bit scary because there
are no excuses left.
So I just have to do it now.
And that's where we are right now.
So I have a demo environment and stuff
like that.
I'm finishing up on WebHaven and then we
can start selling it.
And
One of the things that my experience using
ChatGPT and Cloud and other things is
pretty good at is especially if you have
a whole bunch of things in your head
and you're just like,
I'm just going to brain dump in this
chat box, right?
it's like were you also sort of using
it to kind of synthesize those ideas a
little bit and like like basically help
you say okay this is the approach that
you should go this is how we combine
all those disparate ideas i've went to
different phases in the first phase i made
a mind map of stuff and i chat
if i would ask a colleague or a
friend
it it's hard to get them to be
ruthlessly honest and llm has no problem
with that so so first the first phase
was my brainstorming phase and have an llm
bash on it
and also strip away stuff because in that
phase I had a lot of shiny object
syndrome.
So I really had to get to the
basics.
And then also in the building, uh,
it really helped out a lot in architecture
and stuff that I would normally ask a
colleague, but I, then I would, uh,
wouldn't be sure if if they gave me
the the rootless answers that i needed and
an llm lowered that barrier that doesn't
mean i didn't ask people but i first
went to the llm and then showed people
or asked people that i knew would help
so yeah it really speed up the process
for me
It's interesting that your first response
to that was how LLMs don't have the
polite factor,
particularly because I feel like I have to
constantly fight with...
uh chat gpt and other things to get
it to be a little bit more objective
a little bit more uh ruthless in your
words uh to to be like no actually
tell me like what you act like the
the objective
response to this as opposed to making it
pretty and stroking my ego.
Have you gone through and put in specific
instructions to kind of tune it in that
way so it's a little bit more blunt?
yeah by default uh what it gave back
to me was was was useless because
everything just went with the flow and
good id and that's also when i started
reading about it and how to prompt and
first to put the llm in an in
a role for example you are a
elite and you are very biased.
You don't want to go with this solution.
So you have to make a lot of
context and put it in a situation where
it will object a lot.
and then let it bash on what you're
proposing.
And I also think my sales experience
helped with this because I experienced a
lot of objections.
But it's really important.
I think most of the work and the
prompting went into getting it into that
state and not the prompt itself.
But it's worth it to learn that by
doing it.
There's no magic formula for this.
It's really learning by doing, I'm afraid.
I don't have silver bullets for this.
Sorry.
No,
but I think that's a really good insight
because I think that it's...
very tempting because the interface that
most of these LLMs use is just a
chat box, right?
It's tempting to treat it like just a
conversation
you know, like I'm talking to you, right?
I'm not going to go to you and
say,
you're a developer and this is all of
the things that you think.
And like, you know,
like I'm not going to do that because
you are a human being and you have
an experience and like, that's the whole,
like, that's the right.
But like the LLMs don't have that.
Right.
So like, I think it's,
I think it's a valid point to,
to take the time to set up the
stage and,
And I know it can be a lot
of work to even like come up with
like what you want that to be because
anything is sort of possible.
So I think that's a really valid point
to like sort of spend a decent enough
time on that part to get the better
results.
Yeah,
if I if I can add to that,
I think it also comes back when I
told you on Symphony that I like to
dig in how stuff works.
I had the same reaction with an LLM.
How does it work?
How can you improve?
And there's a lot of out there how
you can improve your prompting.
And that was something that I learned fast
and that helped me a lot.
And to understand, OK, how does this work?
How can I stage it into a role?
How can I
make sure I get what I want out
of it, because otherwise they just say,
oh, great idea,
go for it or just add this or
that.
But that's that's not what I wanted.
I wanted to be to to be brutally
honest and really be harsh on my ideas,
challenge them more than a human would do.
And it works really well for that.
Yeah.
And it also hurts a bit when you
do it well and then, you know,
that it works well.
If an LLM is like, oh, good idea,
I'm mostly like, uh-oh, this is not good.
Right, right.
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah.
Whenever I get a response that says that
that's a great idea,
I'm always suspicious.
That's a good reflex to have.
I've been using ChatGPT basically since it
became public and just watching it change
over time and using it for different types
of things.
My experience with it has been through
using it for non...
I play Dungeons & Dragons,
I run Dungeons & Dragons games.
I was at the time when I first
started starting to read H.P.
Lovecraft stories,
one of the first tests that I gave
it was write a romance story in the
style of H.P.
Lovecraft, with the idea being H.P.
Lovecraft has never and would never have
written a romance story,
so what is it going to do with
this challenge?
How is it going to approach these two
disparate ideas?
And then I use that as a sort
of a metric.
Every once in a while,
a new release comes out,
and I'll be like, okay,
what is this version doing?
How have things changed?
And then a friend of mine gave me
the idea of running it through their
online...
uh like language uh tests or you can
like put a like like teachers sort of
use it so you can like it gives
you like a score on like reading level
and comprehension and that's like what
sort of age group or what sort of
like you know uh academic level does this
correspond to um so i i would like
again sort of like get the metric of
like putting lovecraft into that to see
what he actually wrote in and then compare
that with what uh what the ais can
do
and see how things have changed over time.
And so you can learn a lot by
playing with it and doing these different
sorts of things.
But I think that a lot of the
sort of deeper technical stuff that has
come out of it is like, yeah,
you really need to,
if you want something beyond just great
idea, you're amazing,
you really need to create that sort of
baseline for it
Yeah.
Yeah, totally.
You have to really dig in how it
works and experiment with it.
You have to embrace it,
which isn't always easy when you go to
the change topic or how people embrace
change, which isn't always easy to do.
Yeah,
I feel like I feel like in order
to really, like,
I feel like I need to know a
lot about how it works.
And I need to know a lot about
how it works by using it to be
able to be critical of it as a
technology as like,
where is it going in the future?
the things that it's affecting now and the
things that it might be affecting,
you know, ten years from now.
Because without like actually using it,
you just are like basing your information
on things that people have told you.
But like, there's a lot of like,
there's so much hype about like,
it's going to change everything,
it's going to cure cancer,
it's going to do whatever.
And then on the other hand, there's like,
yeah, X is using it for porn.
Like, you know,
like there's just like this broad spectrum
of like, you know, what,
what we're being told it can be used
for versus yeah.
What's actually being used for.
It's,
it's something that I have really mixed
emotions about because, uh, sometimes I,
the more I use it,
the more I think that, okay,
maybe we even uh under hype how big
of a change this can be but that's
when i dig into domains for example the
the coding one in the last couple of
weeks and months it's insane the the the
change that i've seen personally
But I'm on the fence about it a
lot.
Sometimes I'm like, okay,
it's totally overhyped.
Then some days I'm like, this is insane.
I think people are underestimating how
crazy it is.
But it has so many domains that AI
is touching.
So it's hard to grasp sometimes.
So I think change management.
It's something that I don't read a lot
about or don't see a lot of articles
about now,
but change management in companies is
probably one of the most important things
to read about or to get skilled in
because it's everywhere now and how to get
a team to embrace the change,
how to deal with fear or the FOMO,
a lot of FOMO in
act on emotions mostly they don't take the
the best they don't make the best
decisions so yeah it's really it's really
I'm uh I'm really uh baffled about the
speed of only the domain that I have
expertise in how fast it goes so it's
it's hard to to grasp uh how it's
changing the world
Yeah, yeah.
We'll swing back to that in a bit
because I want to talk about how AI
and Drupal intersect.
But I want to go back to Webhaven
for a second.
A few months ago,
we had Mike Herschel on,
probably less than a few months ago,
who created Dripyard,
which is a theme development shop for
Drupal.
Yeah.
How is Webhaven different than what Mike
is doing?
Yeah, I've seen their work,
and I really love it.
I think there have to be multiple
solutions in the Drupal world,
and that's also a good thing.
For me,
WebHaven more is like a total package.
So it has an installer,
it has recipes with features,
and it also comes with a team,
a base team.
and if you go to the webhaven.io website
now you see it in action so it's
more than a team so i see it
as the full a full package it's something
that i've also been thinking about a lot
isn't it too much for me as one
person to do it from installer to end
product
but I like challenges.
So I was like,
and I had it in my mind and
I, I said, no excuses.
You have, you, you, you can do this.
You have to go for it.
Um,
but it could be totally possible in the
future that there also is an, uh,
installation of web haven without a team
and that it, for example,
also works together with a drip yard team.
Right.
I'm open to work together with other
people.
For me,
the main goal is to get Drupal back
to the small projects and also show more
people the power of Drupal,
more organizations,
because it's really powerful technology
and I want more people to benefit from
it.
What sort of options are part of the
installation process?
Like I know that when you're installing
Drupal CMS, it gives you like, Hey,
are you going to do this type of
content, that type of content?
Is that sort of the workflow that you're
working with as well?
Yeah, it's the same vibe,
just other nuances.
In my opinion,
Drupal CMS is more like a showcase of
what Drupal can do.
And to me,
I was already working on Webhaven when I
dug into it.
But to me,
it felt a bit too bloated.
So I kept it more.
It's more stripped what Webhaven is.
To me, it's really the Olympic minimum,
the essentials,
and you can build on top of it.
But now I have the baseline.
So of course I have a lot of
more stuff in my head to do with
it.
So now you have recipes,
basic recipes on form building, SEO,
landing pages, normal pages,
then optional is a blog events showcase
where you can make success stories,
you can add your projects,
you can add customer stories.
But of course,
I want to go beyond that.
And I would also love to have,
for example,
a recipe that I'm working on now and
brings AI into the mix.
where the AI helps you in content
structure.
I don't want it to just generate slop,
but in my personal experience,
when somebody or something helps you with
a good structure and you start working on
that,
it really boosts your workflow and also
the vibe that you have.
uh yeah it really boosts that so that's
something that i want to get into that
but yeah it's not the the goal to
let it generate blog posts in ten seconds
without any human supervising it so
content quality will be a thing but also
on the developer side and it's something
that i'm experimenting experimenting a lot
with so for example now i have webhaven
and it has this base and i try
to document everything with ai so every
agent that would dig into the project
would know what it is how it works
and in the beginning it was really hard
because i was making a lot of components
but there was there was no reference for
the ai to look at so most of
them i made with ai but
I had to do a lot of manual
thinking.
And now there are a lot of components.
And it's really easy for me to tell
the AI, here are your dirty components.
Look at those.
And we're going to make this now.
It has this reference or this library of
components.
And now I see that it speeds up
my development already.
And I also want it for others.
And all the components that exist now have
the best practices.
And I try to put the instructions in
there for the AI to help people make
stuff so they can invest their time in
the cool stuff and not the boring stuff
that you have to do on every project.
Who's the audience for, for web payment?
Is it individual?
Like, uh,
like I have my own business and I
want to, uh, set up a Drupal site.
Is it for agencies?
Is it like a little bit of a
column, a little column B?
Yeah,
it's something that I want to keep open
now.
So I'd love to have Drupal newcomers and
learners,
people who say Drupal super interesting,
but I heard it has a high barrier.
How can I get into it?
Then to me personally,
the best way is learning by doing with
web haven.
You can set up your, uh,
project really fast.
Uh, once version one is life,
I would also,
I also want to invest more time and
video content.
So I would want the dream is to
make a web haven academy where I also
make content for the different roles.
So for newcomers and learners,
for example,
I don't want to make long courses.
So snackable content, for example,
together,
we'll make your portfolio websites and
we'll have it up together.
And we're not going to make thousand
websites that look the same.
You'll also be able to add in your
own, uh, your own vibe,
but we can go through it together.
But I also want it for,
for seasoned Drupal experts that already
use Drupal.
Cause if we jump back to,
to what we talked about earlier,
a lot of change in the Drupal community.
Now, a lot of new projects.
I don't act every,
everyone is already using all that new
stuff.
So, uh,
I dug in all of it and sometimes
it was overwhelming,
but web haven uses all the new stuff.
So also for existing, uh, Drupal experts,
it's a easier way
to level up and the,
and to make projects faster.
And also again, they can,
it's not my plan,
so they don't have to do anything anymore.
But for example,
they have dirty hours to work on a
project,
spend those dirty hours on what will make
the difference for this project.
Don't spend it to get it to work.
It will work in the forest at the
first two hours and use the other time.
to hire the bar.
So your projects will be better then.
And I hope people will also enjoy what
they are doing more.
And then also for agencies, of course.
But it's hard to imagine how that will
work.
But for example,
if an agency wants to get into Drupal,
learning all that stuff, it's a high risk.
So also with WebHaven,
I want to lower that risk.
I don't know if agencies,
if that will be enough.
So if an agency would be like, okay,
Fonz, you have Webhaven,
but we also want to hire you for
consulting and to get us going.
I'm also open for that.
I don't know if agencies would like that.
And again,
On those experiences,
I could maybe make new video content,
but I see it as a product.
But in the beginning,
if people want me to work on it,
we can talk about it.
And I would take all those learnings and
invest them back in the product and grow
from there.
Yeah.
Let's sort of close on Drupal.
There's been a lot of work with the
recent versions of Drupal and the ongoing
sort of AI project,
and you mentioned AI and Drupal a little
bit ago.
What are your thoughts about how
Drupal is integrating AI into the project
as a whole.
What are the things that you see as
things that are good things for it to
explore?
What things should it avoid?
That sort of thing.
um i think drupal it to me it
looks like it's one of the front runners
in the open source space and the ai
adoption so that's really nice to see
there's a lot of energy around ai it's
a hot topic so that's that's really nice
um it's going in all different ways and
I'm not the person to say, uh,
we have to contain it.
I think it's a good time to just
see where it goes now.
And then on the different domains,
there's enough people, uh,
looking at it to see where we can
get it.
Uh,
what I want to avoid is to have
it, to become a slop slop factories.
So.
For example, for Webhaven,
I'm already looking at a solution.
If you would generate pages with AI to
have an indicator that it says to grade
the content, for example,
this is pure slop.
And then if people start working on it,
that they see that they are improving it
to maybe add gamification.
So I don't want it to replace
The creativity of people, for example,
content, uh, people, marketeers,
they have to use the tools.
They have to get an Olympic minimum and
do their thing with it.
And it has to be enjoyable.
Um, and to me, you know,
it would be a bad thing if that
would all disappear and it would be all
automatically generated because the
quality probably won't be as good.
So that's something that I'm thinking a
lot about.
A lot of people talk about Drupal
specifically like the reason or propose
the reason why it's sort of leading this
sort of AI development integration thing.
And I know Dries has definitely said this
is because sort of like the way Drupal
was built fundamentally supports the way
that AI approaches things and looks at
things.
Can you like speak on that a little
bit or like is that something that you
also see?
Uh, yeah, it's, it's a lot of, uh,
it's an article that I read and that
I thought about a lot.
Uh, and it's true,
but I think it's totally by accident that
it's this way.
Yeah.
Uh,
so was their skill involved in getting
into this position?
Yeah.
Of course skilled people made Drupal,
but it's also luck, I think,
but
What you say is true.
All the rest, the recipes are there.
And that's also, I was on a point.
Should I,
I left the agency where I worked to
Drupal agency.
Should I stay in the Drupal community?
Is it time for something new?
Is the Drupal gonna die?
And I was like,
the more that I read about it and
I stepped away from it, uh,
look to it.
And then I was like, okay,
but there's a huge opportunity now.
And if this works, it, it will,
the story maybe only starts now.
Yeah.
So I will see.
Yeah, I have my,
my sort of hot take.
I've been thinking about this a lot
because I come from a WordPress
background.
Um,
and I've been thinking a lot about like
the personalities of the founders of these
two projects.
Right.
And like, and,
and the backgrounds of them and how that
impacts the way that the projects have
been built sort of fundamentally over
time.
And, and,
and Dries comes from a computer science
background.
Like he did a dissertation in JavaScript
or Java, not JavaScript, Java.
Like he obviously approaches things from a
very analytical computer science
perspective.
Matt Mullenweg did not.
He came to WordPress when he was sixteen
and taught himself programming,
so it becomes more of an organic evolution
over time, whereas this is like, no,
we're building it from a very
structured...
And there's pros and cons to both of
those approaches, right?
Drupal, fundamentally,
because it's coming from this computer
science background,
They're like each version of Drupal up
until eight was like a whole new code
base that had to be like important You
know like so and that that creates and
that's the reason why there's this like
seven to eight or seven to modern Drupal
gap is because the each version was just
a really big lift Whereas WordPress
because it began and grew organically It
doesn't have that it always like tried to
be backwards compatible and
So I do think that there is something
there about like the structure,
because if you're approaching things from
the way that I guess a computer would
work and think about things from the
start, it sort of just follows that,
oh yeah,
a computer could pick up and learn from
that and be able to like make assumptions.
Yeah, totally.
I think you're spot on with that analysis.
Well,
thank you so much Fonz for coming on.
Where can people find you on the internet?
Where can they learn more about Webhaven?
I have a personal website, fonsvandam.com.
You can go to webhaven.io.
You also can get notified there when
WebHaven launches.
You can find me on LinkedIn.
And sometimes I also share some of the
stuff I'm working on on X.
And both when you type my name,
Fons Van Damme, you'll find me.
People can always reach out,
watch the demo, ask questions.
I love to interact about WebHaven or
Drupal.
Well, thank you again, Fonz,
for coming on.
Thank everyone who may be watching this or
listening to this in the future.
And we'll see you on the internet.
Thanks.