Update on the Admin UI / JavaScript Modernization Initiative

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Mike and Matt interview members of the Drupal 8 JavaScript modernization initiative to find out what's going on, and the current status.

Episode Guests

Suzanne Dergacheva

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Co-founder and front-end lead at Evolving Web out of Montreal. Does trainings all over the world. Newly elected Drupal Association Board member.

Lauri Eskola

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Co-Maintainer of the Theme API, Drupal core committer, and frontend framework manager, Lauri is an engineer in the Drupal Acceleration Team at Acquia.

Sally Young

A smiling woman with long dark hair and dark glasses, wearing a white top.

Senior Technical Architect working across the full-stack and specialising in decoupled architectures. Core JavaScript maintainer for Drupal, as well as leading the JavaScript Modernization Initiative.

More about Sally

Daniel Wehner

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Senior Drupal Developer at Chapter Three, the most prolific contributor to Drupal 8, with his code everywhere you look.

Matthew Grill

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Senior JavaScript Engineer at the Office of the CTO in Acquia and a JavaScript Maintainer for Drupal 8.

Mentioned in this Episode

Transcript

Transcript

Matt Kleve:
For October 11th 2018 it's the Lullabot podcast!
Matt Kleve:
Hey everybody it's the Lullabot podcast episode 229 I'm Matt Kleve
senior developer at Lullabot and with me as always is co-host of the show senior front end dev Mike Hercel. Hey Mike.
Mike Herchel:
Hey how are you doing?
Matt Kleve:
Great, hey Mike we're talking about the new hotness, since 1995.
Mike Herchel:
JavaScript?
Matt Kleve:
JavaScript, yeah we're going to talk once again about JavaScript and see things going on in Drupal core development regarding JavaScript right?
Mike Herchel:
Yeah.
Matt Kleve:
I hear there's a whole initiative.
Mike Herchel:
Yeah, yeah there's an admin UI initiative and that's what we're talking about decoupling the Drupal's admin user interface with ReactJS.
Matt Kleve:
And we've had a lot of these guests on before talking about different parts of this right? But I don't know that we've actual gone over the whole initiative, what's going on in the initiative have we?
Mike Herchel:
Now's about the time.
Matt Kleve:
And with us we've got the right people to talk to right?
Mike Herchel:
Yep.
Matt Kleve:
First with us today we have the designer and front end developer at Ymbra and the co-organizer of the Drupal Summer Barcelona. She is an active member of the Catalan Drupal Association it's Christina Chumillas.
Cristina C.:
Yeah.
Matt Kleve:
Hey.
Cristina C.:
Hi there.
Matt Kleve:
Glad to have you back on you were on a while back with the out of the box initiative right?
Cristina C.:
Exactly yeah.
Mike Herchel:
Next up we've got Daniel Wehner who according to his D.O profile is not an Acquia Grand Master but is the most prolific committed on Drupal core with over 2300 Drupal core commits. Previously on episode 202 and 215 talking about the API first initiative in contento welcome Daniel.
Daniel Wehner:
Hi, how are you?
Mike Herchel:
Doing good.
Matt Kleve:
Also with us today we have another returning guest to the podcast on previously with 211 and 219 talking about react and modernizing Drupal he's a senior JavaScript engineer at Acquia and a JavaScript maintainer for Drupal 8, Hi it's Matt Grill. Hey Matt.
Matt Grill:
Hi. Hello.
Matt Kleve:
Next up we have Suzanne Dergacheva and it is her first time on the Lullabot Podcast-
Suzanne D.:
First timer, yeah. [crosstalk 00:02:14].
Matt Kleve:
You, if you don't know this Suzanne are the co-founder and front end leader evolving web out of Montreal. You do trainings all over the world, and you are also the newly elected Drupal Association board member so congratulations on that.
Suzanne D.:
Thanks, happy to be here.
Matt Kleve:
And to follow that up we have somebody who was on perviously on episode 219 talking about react. He's the co-maintainer of the Theme API in Drupal 8 core committer and front end framework manager, software engineer for Acquia, it's Lauri Eskola.
Lauri Eskola:
Hi.
Matt Kleve:
Hey Lauri, did I say that right?
Lauri Eskola:
Yeah, pretty much I guess. I think everyone is having a little bit of a hard time pronouncing the name but yeah that was a nice try.
Matt Kleve:
And last but not least we have Sally Young
ho has been on too many podcasts to count. She lives under a bridge collecting tolls from people who don't know modern JavaScript. Aside from that she's a senior technical architect at Lullabot and is also initiative lead for the modern JavaScript initiative and Drupal JavaScript in general. Welcome again Sally.
Sally Young:
Hi friends, and Mike.
Matt Kleve:
So lets kind of get started here.
Mike Herchel:
Yeah, let's dive right in.
Matt Kleve:
Yeah, so what exactly is the plan for the Drupal modern JavaScript admin UI. What type of goals do we have in front of us?
Sally Young:
So we just sort of finished one of our goals which was to get some good content editing demos in for Drupal Europe which you can see in the Drupal Europe note. So that's what we've been working on for the past few months since front end united and we just started coming up with our next set of sprint goals over the last six months which are going to be working on extension points, so how could developers come in and extend the React components that we've built, or inject their own functionalities, or remix it all together and then we're also going to be looking at how we can make the UX of the editing experience a little bit more modern which Christina can talk about.
Matt Kleve:
So as of right now, you can download and install the admin UI? Is that right? It's up on GitHub?
Sally Young:
Yes. So if you go to our GitHub it's JS Drupal, just go to the organization and the repo's pinned at the top, there's a one line composer command you can run so all you need it PHP and it will download everything, set up the Drupal backend with [inaudible 00:05:10] which is the demo recipe site that comes with Drupal 8 now, and it will also spin up the React application as well so you can go in and edit recopies and try it all out.
Matt Kleve:
So it gives us the ability to edit recipes and I'm assuming we can add new content, is that right?
Sally Young:
You can add new content, yes. It's very exciting.
Matt Kleve:
Yeah that is pretty cool, I mean does it look good in functional, fancy, works out page reloads and all that cool stuff?
Mike Herchel:
Yeah what does a user notice when they go use this?
Sally Young:
So I think you'll notice how fast it is. It's kind of amazing how snappy the application can feel when you don't have to do these full serve, a roundtrip page load things. So that's really nice. I think we'll find already a few small UX improvements like, silly things like when you delete content you don't have to go off to a separate page and it'll ask you, "are you really sure?" And then you have to go to another page and wait for it all to reload, it can all happen on the client side which is very cool.
Sally Young:
We used material UI for this as well so it does look fancy but it's not as fancy, hopefully as it will look when Christina's done all her magic.
Matt Kleve:
Cool. So as of right now, you kinda saw that and you sent us the content creation experience and content editing experience, besides the snappiness of the interface you said that there's some new designs coming?
Cristina C.:
Yep. We're working on a new design system but before that what we are doing is creating several user tests together with Suzanne and some other people trying to see what are the pain points right now and where people want to go in the future and what people is actually expecting on our modern UI. So first we are doing the scan off user test and right now we are working on the wire frames.
Matt Kleve:
Gotcha, so who is participating in the user tests?
Cristina C.:
You mean users, or people working on that?
Matt Kleve:
I guess both. Who is doing the testing and who is the testee and the tester?
Suzanne D.:
So at DrupalCon Nashville a few of us came together and formed a user study group to start doing some user testing and so it includes Xarel, Lo and Michelle Jackson from Palantir and a few others and we ran a user survey of content editors so we actually found some real life Drupal content editors to tell us a little bit about how they use Drupal and then we're leading up to doing actual testing of the wire frames once they're ready.
Matt Kleve:
Gotcha. So what are the current challenges with Drupal 8 as it stands right now, that people are running into?
Suzanne D.:
So people mentioned a lot of things in the survey, they said that the overall UI just seemed really dated, the seven theme, and people also mentioned media which obviously has already undergone a lot of improvements with the media initiative. Other things people mentioned were just things like the content overview page [crosstalk 00:08:48], translation.
Cristina C.:
Yeah, in general the things that they love is the flexibility but hated the complexity. Cause they needed-
Matt Kleve:
That's true developers curse right there, right? Without the flexibility comes [crosstalk 00:09:06]. Yeah, yeah.
Lauri Eskola:
I do have a question right there. So if more people hate the complexity or do more people like the flexibility? [crosstalk 00:09:20].
Suzanne D.:
It's the same people. So the same people in the same breathe they say, "Oh I love paragraphs, I love how I can model all my content and build these pages" and then they also say, "Oh and the UI is so complex" so it's really the same people who's saying both things, that they like the flexibility and that they wish that the UI I guess handled the complexity better.
Matt Kleve:
Gotcha, so that's a tall order to add that flexibility and at the same time simplifying the UI.
Suzanne D.:
Yeah and of course paragraphs isn't in core so that makes it even harder. Like how do you take something that people could use in so many way and that's part of contrib and then how do you create a better UI for that?
Matt Kleve:
Yeah, so you mentioned earlier that you're trying to make the modern UI extendable so modules like paragraphs can hook into it? Was I understanding that correctly?
Daniel Wehner:
So yes, so like in the really early phase of what ... I mean we don't know what we want to allow, like what you'll auth us to do, because it's just the React ecosystem is totally different to the Drupal ecosystem and we can't just say, "Oh yeah, lets just allow everything what you kind of can do right now already" because then you end with basically the same thing and it will look really similar and feel really similar so we are exploring.
Daniel Wehner:
The one thing we talked about it allowing modules to define like [inaudible 00:11:01]. So like the paragraphs with module 10 can provide like a paragraph specific in the user interface and then from there on we will see how this goes. But yeah, it's still really early and we all try to get the community involved. What are their needs? To which regard can we simplify things? Where do we need the complexity? Tricky question.
Matt Kleve:
So is the extendability going to come out with maybe phase one of this, or something? I guess maybe I'm jumping the gun, are there multiple phases?
Daniel Wehner:
That's a good question. We had a ... Matt do you want to talk about that?
Matt Grill:
I was just going to say I don't think we really know the answer to that question yet. I think the thing I was going to say is that we have some forward thinking plans by the time that DrupalCon Seattle rolls around we want to try and have something to present on the extensibility topic but the plan has sort of been to not ... it's like continuously releasable. Like if it meets your needs you could use it now sort of thing.
Daniel Wehner:
One thing, we asked this question during our session at Drupal in Germany and the question is like, who would think that the current version would be useful for anyone? So the current version would be without any form of extension plug ins and it just supports basically but it's visible in the demo and it was quite a low number which said yes that'd be useful as it is. I was just a little bit sad.
Matt Kleve:
It's cause everyone loves paragraphs right?
Daniel Wehner:
Yeah, because like people build complex sites with it. With it as in Drupal.
Matt Kleve:
Yeah exactly if you're building a complex site why are you using Drupal right?
Mike Herchel:
Well and complex sites that use more than just a structured data, things like interfaces like paragraphs provides.
Matt Kleve:
So what does that actually take to ... For that extension to happen? What does your framework need to do to support other things that have yet to be imagined? I guess I just don't understand how that would work.
Daniel Wehner:
So for example right now the React application is pretty dumb. It is not aware of modules at all so that's the first step we've been planning to take. So at first we will make the React application somewhat aware that Drupal has this module system and they should be able to do something and then as a second step, you want to build the specific API that the modules would be able to provide these React components that are suited for some specific use case such as field widgets. Those are the two steps that will be necessary it sounds simple when you put it into two steps but that's something we are planning to tackle in the next six months.
Matt Kleve:
So does that mean that after installing a module, that extends that React app through something else, is there going to be another build step or are you going to have to run a MPM install or something like that?
Daniel Wehner:
So we are exploring different trajectories of different paths that users might have to take to install modules we are hoping that, that wouldn't be necessary but it might be. So it's all about balancing between the devo operate experience and the experience that we provide for side builders and end users. We don't know yet. It's too early for that and we are exploring different kind of options. For example, [inaudible 00:15:04] has been able to, by taking a very limited approach under extensibility, they've been able to avoid the build step completely and we definitely want to look into something like that as well if it would actually fit into the use case that we have but if it doesn't work we will probably require the build step at least at first.
Sally Young:
And the other problem related to that is that we still want to keep this very accessible for JavaScript developers so one things that's very important for me is that someone who has done lots of react apps and is very familiar with this ecosystem and the kind of stuff that all these people are coming out of boot camps and are learning, I want them to be able to look at this and jump in straight away because it looks very familiar. I think we have to be careful with the way we integrate back into Drupal to not start tangling it up with loads of Drupal isms.
Matt Kleve:
I think a lot of people are going to thank you for that. [crosstalk 00:16:08]. So thank you, Sally. Sorry I told everyone you lived under a bridge earlier.
Sally Young:
Thanks.
Matt Kleve:
So you mentioned like use cases, obviously you might have a use case where a module, author, and wants to extend it, or you have a particular use case where I'm a boot camp graduate and I know React and I wanna mess around with this. Do we have those use cases defined anywhere?
Sally Young:
No.
Matt Kleve:
Alright, alright.
Sally Young:
I think as this has gone on a lot of people are very interested in this and everyone seems to have something that they want to solve through this initiative so i think we're still at the stage where we're trying to gain some kind of focus on these very long term goals.
Matt Kleve:
Is it hard to pair that down when people say, "Hey, this is a way that I could scratch my itch." But it's like well that's not exactly the target.
Sally Young:
I mean, input like that is always welcome.
Matt Kleve:
Sure.
Sally Young:
And that's the route of open source, people are coming in to scratch their own itch. So I wouldn't want to discourage that at all. I think it just gets difficult when everyone has different priorities and sometimes those priorities conflict and you focus on one and it's actually going to be detrimental to the other. We spend a lot of time talking about how we can meet the needs of the most people without annoying them.
Matt Kleve:
Well it sounds like that what you're describing there is kind of how Drupal came to be too though as far as it's current state of an administrative interface cause there are so many different ways of doing things that you can't really make too many assumptions but making some allows simplicity.
Sally Young:
Right and at some point we obviously have to make some decisions otherwise we'll never ship anything so and the other things too is obviously we've built Drupal and so we've got lots of things and lessons we can learn from how we built it and hopefully we won't run into some of the pitfalls that we have previously where we've coded ourselves into corners.
Matt Kleve:
So by developing this you're kind of dog fooding Drupal's APIs, how has that been?
Daniel Wehner:
I think it was an interesting experience. So we are now mostly using the base and API model which will be moved into core hopefully in eight seven and that was overall mostly positive but there are, lets say, a couple of features and things missing, or there's some misalignment between the way how JSON API thinks about things, and how Drupal thinks about stuff. Like in JSON API there's no way to say, give me all the notes which are in my system but rather you always need to say give me all the articles, or give me all the recipes. Which is fine for probably most users of this API but we build an administration interface for Drupal so we need a way to list all the content and I know Matt struggled with that a lot and he can talk more about that.
Matt Grill:
Yeah, I think the thing about what makes Drupal great, it's content modeling and extensibility and all that stuff, sometimes is a little bit problematic when it comes to observing those pieces of information via the API. For example to render the edit forms, there's four pieces of information, like four separate requests that have to be made just to render a single form because the information required to build that complete interface picture is spread across a bunch of different places. There's no easy access to that kind of stuff and so it can get a little bit challenging to know where thing's are stored and then build a complete picture.
Matt Kleve:
So is that works that's being done to change that or is it going to continue to be that way and you're just going to have to kind of deal with that?
Matt Grill:
I don't know the answer to that question. I'm not on the API first team and I'm not involved really with their direction I just try and provide as much feedback as possible about what works and what doesn't, but I think to some extent, JSON API is following the spec that they're trying to implement.
Daniel Wehner:
Yeah there are bits where we push things forward in the API first initiative, like the need to have content between, not just articles but also all kind of content at the same time, I think we are pushing forward to that. The point Matt was doing, I think they are absolutely focusing, they, in quotes, don't care about the UI, which gives us the freedom to do what we want. So as part of this entire thing we built, we built a support module which kind of basically does all the dirty things that you need to deal with. But I don't think the API initiative is solving any of those hard problems for us right now.
Matt Grill:
Yeah I think maybe potentially down in the future it would be nice that if we could not, have to have the support module but right now to run the admin interface you need the support module which like Daniel says does the dirty things for us.
Sally Young:
Yeah, but we are going to need some kind of bigger changes to it later on because I'm thinking about revisions, like JSON API doesn't support revisions in the spec as far as I know, unless somethings been updated recently and the API first initiative are very keen to follow the spec. Stuff like that, figuring out how we're going to work it is tricky.
Matt Kleve:
We're talking with the Drupal JavaScript modernization initiative folks on the Lullabot podcast. Right after this we'll talk about Drupal Europe and how that plays into this. Coming up right after this.
Speaker 9:
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Matt Kleve:
Welcome back, we're talking with the folks from the Drupal JavaScript modernization initiative. So is it true that the modernization is spelled with a z in the middle.
Sally Young:
It's actually if you look in the text file in Drupal Core it's with an s.
Matt Kleve:
Who decided that?
Sally Young:
As a group we decided it would be an s.
Matt Kleve:
Wow.
Sally Young:
Well I'm trying to think. Someone tried to change it to a Z and we derailed the issue so much that it never got recommitted.
Mike Herchel:
Especially cause there's not a z on my keyboard. So I would be really confused.
Matt Kleve:
Is z like, some European phrase from [crosstalk 00:24:45].
Matt Kleve:
I think we're supposed to be talking about Drupal Europe.
Mike Herchel:
Yeah I think so.
Matt Kleve:
So yeah, so the team had a session at Drupal Europe is that correct?
Matt Kleve:
What exactly did you talk about and what was the feedback?
Daniel Wehner:
I think the sessions went really well it was basically a full room.
Matt Kleve:
How was the feedback, were people pissed off, annoyed, happy, excited, concerned?
Mike Herchel:
Yeah what kind of things were exciting to people?
Matt Kleve:
Yeah. What type of questions were people asking?
Cristina C.:
I think people mostly came there to see what was going on so it goes more like, I actually have a strong opinion on what you were just saying, it's just I want to know what's going on and there were a lot of people asking stuff about our JavaScript but also a lot of people asking things about the new designs, or the new wire frames, or the new, these kind of things so it was a really different kind of people that came there.
Daniel Wehner:
We were also highlighted on the keynote so there was a video basically demonstrating what we worked on in the last six months and I think the reaction from people when seeing the video was very excited and I heard multiple people after the keynote talking about it just randomly in the hallways.
Matt Kleve:
Was the video showing real code or vaporware?
Daniel Wehner:
It was us showing how the admin UI actually works.
Matt Kleve:
But it's honest to god, like it was working as it was written, it's not magic stuff?
Daniel Wehner:
Yeah, it was all real.
Matt Kleve:
Just checking cause some people fake that kind of thing, but this is real.
Daniel Wehner:
Yeah, I've heard about that but I've not been involved in that myself. It was really nice to hear that people were also excited about hearing that we are working on this next gen design that we've been talking about like making some little bit more radical changes potentially to the UI and overall it seemed like there was a positive vibe around the initiative and that was the feeling I got. I hope everyone else had the same feeling.
Cristina C.:
Yeah, the main problem is that we wanted something probably finished until, one or two releases, so one thing that goes asked for is to have like a quick refresh or something like that for the [inaudible 00:27:34] UI that we have right now because it goes mentioned that we can't wait until there's all this new JavaScript UI. So that's why there's going on also are refresh for seven.
Matt Kleve:
So a refresh on the seven theme right? That's what you're talking about?
Cristina C.:
Exactly. Yeah, the team here is trying to reuse or at least work under the same umbrella, both for the admin UI and the seven refresh. So when you jump from one page to another there is not that huge difference and trying to have components that work together maybe when you go to one page you'll see the new, cool, JavaScript, that it's super fancy and super usable and then to another page, you have the old file field or something like that. But at least we'll have a new set of colors and a new set of designs for the new seven and ideally we would like to have something for 8.7.
Matt Kleve:
A refresh to the seven theme in 8.7. Hey that actually makes seven make sense as a name again too, that would be great.
Mike Herchel:
So that's actually coming up pretty quick there, we are already on 8.6 so I guess that seven is like less than six months away?
Lauri Eskola:
Yeah maybe we should rename it the 87 or something like that?
Matt Kleve:
That works.
Mike Herchel:
It seems to me just knowing what I know of core development, that seems kind of ambitious but you're going to kind of stick to that [crosstalk 00:29:35]?
Matt Kleve:
What would that take? What kind of work is needed to make that happen?
Cristina C.:
So right now we are kind of finishing the main designs, the main components that we're going to need for seven. Once we have them, I guess for next week, we'll start creating issues on GitHub because we want to start doing work GitHub to speed everything up so we have something soon and we should try, our goal, I don't know if it's fine to happen but our goal is to have core patch by the end of November, ideally. So then we have some time to actually get that into Core. The main thing here is that we need help, not only on development, I guess it's going to be somehow easy but we need something to coordinate that in implementation.
Matt Kleve:
So you're looking for someone to help organize the various issues, help people at the right times, etc?
Cristina C.:
Exactly [crosstalk 00:30:49] welcome-
Matt Kleve:
Any project managers out there, will you get in touch with us?
Cristina C.:
Actually it's going to be needed some kind of knowledge of ... I would say the community or the commanding workflows. To welcome people to know how to get them to somewhere useful.
Suzanne D.:
I think what we really need is a tech lead.
Cristina C.:
Yeah, probably, yeah.
Matt Kleve:
You were talking about the designs that you were working on, do they exist some place that people can see that work being happening?
Cristina C.:
Yeah, actually we are working with Figma, collaborative tool that they just gave us for free for the community to work on that and we have several designers actually jumping in sometimes and the designs are accessible to anybody that wants to see them. I'm going to share the link here later so anybody can just go there and go try it on.
Matt Kleve:
Awesome, we'll put that in our show notes.
Cristina C.:
Sure. We're also trying to open an issue along [inaudible 00:32:18] before we implement everything.
Matt Kleve:
So question about, maybe a little bit more of a technical question on the redesign of seven, is it possible to use SaaS just because I know that unit six version of JavaScript are being compiled, is that on the table for this?
Daniel Wehner:
I don't think it's in the scope, at least what we've been discussing so far but it seems like that there is more use cases popping up in the Drupal core for using SaaS so I think it might be something we are looking into in the upcoming years.
Matt Kleve:
Gotcha, so no now but maybe later?
Daniel Wehner:
Yeah, and if it seems like there's a lot of momentum around that. I'm not saying that it couldn't happen it's just that any of the people who are working on it at the moment haven't, at least mentioned that they would be interested in something like this.
Matt Kleve:
Cool. Yeah.
Matt Kleve:
So what challenges are ahead of you right now, and is there anything where people can come in and step in and maybe get to work right away or is the deeper knowledge needed?
Suzanne D.:
Well on the user studies side if anybody has access to content editors and they wanna help us run user tests, we definitely need help with that and that's not something where you need to have a real technical knowledge so if you have time to do that or interest you can jump in this slack channel and let us know.
Cristina C.:
Yes, the channel is the ... I mean UI channel.
Matt Kleve:
So it's the Admin UI channel under Drupal's Slack and you can go to, what is it, drupal.org/community for links on how to join the Slack community if you're not already there.
Mike Herchel:
People who might be out in podcast land listening about all of the great work that's being done here, and they say, "Hey, I understand React" or "I am one of those Boot Camp fresh out of developers that happens to know something about Drupal" and they want to help out. How can they do that? Or what can they do at this point?
Sally Young:
So I would start by joining the JavaScript channel on Drupal's Slack and we have meetings there every Monday and I think it's 4:30pm UTC. So join in and you can see what we're arguing about that particular week and if you want to jump in on some coding we have a bunch of issues that are open on GitHub. We were doing a lot more coding right before Drupal Europe, I think right now were in the planning and thinking stage so if you build React application then your input would definitely be good because we want to make something nice for you. So yeah, join our meetings, tell us your opinions and then when we start building stuff again you can jump in.
Mike Herchel:
Sounds great. Hey Matt Kleve
o you think now's the time to talk about the Drupal Genie?
Matt Kleve:
I think we better get the Genie out again.
Mike Herchel:
Yep, so let's go down the list and the question is that we have a magical Drupal Genie who can get one thing done with Drupal, whether it be fixing the APIs, creating a editor experience, decoupling the whole thing.
Matt Kleve:
And no wishing for more wishes.
Mike Herchel:
Yeah, you can't do that. You get to wish for one things and Cristina you're at the top of my list here so what would you with for?
Cristina C.:
The last one.
Mike Herchel:
The last one, what was the last one?
Cristina C.:
[crosstalk 00:36:26]. No I would say, tha-
Mike Herchel:
Refactor Drupal into Node, I know that's what Sally's going to pick.
Sally Young:
I picked that last time.
Daniel Wehner:
I have one.
Mike Herchel:
Yeah, go ahead.
Daniel Wehner:
My wish is that Drupal figures out who it actually wants to be for.
Suzanne D.:
[crosstalk 00:36:56] Yes.
Daniel Wehner:
Because right now it's kind of the metric weapon trying to solve all the things. Like we are talking about structured content, unstructured content, an API platform or no it's just a tool to build some small little webpages quickly, like micro-sites or, is Drupal meant to be like that, like it solves all the problems or should we focus on some of them and the metric thing could just answer us this question and tell us what, like what Drupal should be 'cause I think nobody can really answer this question.
Matt Kleve:
I would argue that the reason Drupal is Drupal is because it does fit all of those needs fairly well. I mean it's not perfect by far but neither is anything else.
Mike Herchel:
And Daniel don't you get to decide the direction you want to build as a part of this initiative?
Daniel Wehner:
To bet fair that's more of like a product manager level decision. Which ... maybe even [inaudible 00:38:05] level decision to be honest.
Matt Kleve:
So Suzanne, do you have something that the Drupal genie could help you out with?
Suzanne D.:
I don't know how to answer this question.
Matt Kleve:
You can take a pass if you want but this is your only chance?
Mike Herchel:
This is your chance.
Matt Kleve:
Yeah.
Suzanne D.:
Well I think if I'm putting on my content editor hat, because I work with a lot of content editors and I watch them learn Drupal and sometimes it's really painful and so I have a whole session that I've done at DrupalCon about how to make the content editing experience better and I still see site builders set up sites and they don't follow that advice and people think that Drupal's hard to use. So if we could just fix the first five things on that list I think it would make a huge difference, I know it's a long way down the road but I think it's the right direction. Because there will always be content editors even if Drupal is trying to be a Square Space or Drupal is trying to be a Sitecore, whoever Drupal's trying to compete with, Drupal is still always going to have content editors.
Matt Kleve:
We're also always going to have site builders that are going to mess things up right?
Mike Herchel:
Not after the genies done with it.
Matt Kleve:
Yeah, alright.
Matt Kleve:
Matt Grill. What would you like?
Matt Grill:
What did I genie wish for last time?
Mike Herchel:
I don't know but it was really good.
Matt Grill:
It's probably not done yet so whatever I said last time.
Matt Kleve:
That's a horrible answer, unless you can remember what you said.
Matt Grill:
Hmm. I don't know. I don't know what I would wish for right now.
Daniel Wehner:
I think I know a wish for you.
Matt Grill:
Yes?
Daniel Wehner:
The metrics system.
Matt Grill:
Oh yeah, great. America adopt the metric system.
Matt Grill:
That's my Drupal genie wish.
Matt Kleve:
And use more s's apparently.
Sally Young:
Yeah it's really annoying how Drupal's CSS uses inches everywhere, I can see how that would be a problem.
Mike Herchel:
Wait hang on, seriously though, CSS can do something that isn't inches, what do you mean?
Sally Young:
Yeah, feet, miles. [crosstalk 00:40:45].
Matt Grill:
CSS now, what is that?
Matt Kleve:
Lauri?
Lauri Eskola:
I probably would wish for a Drupal module that reviews all the patches.
Matt Kleve:
That's a pretty good one. Is it going to tell you if it's a really good idea or not? Or is it?
Lauri Eskola:
Yeah, it can review all the things so it will tell me that eventually.
Matt Grill:
Automate himself out of a job.
Matt Kleve:
Will it create a bike shed type issue that goes to three pages?
Lauri Eskola:
No that's not possible.
Matt Kleve:
Okay.
Lauri Eskola:
Just use machine learning and put in the [inaudible 00:41:24]. [crosstalk 00:41:26] It's good that we have a plan in place already, how to implement this.
Matt Grill:
Blackchain will solve the problem I'm sure.
Mike Herchel:
Stock values are up.
Lauri Eskola:
We need some big data as well but I think that's not rationale anymore.
Daniel Wehner:
How about augmented reality? Will that be part of this vision that you have in mind?
Matt Grill:
No it would be virtual reality, come on.
Sally Young:
Yeah it would be like lawn mower man but for you review patches now.
Mike Herchel:
Do you get toasters?
Matt Kleve:
Have we talked about blackchain reality ... alright well thanks for coming on.
Sally Young:
Don't I get a wish?
Matt Kleve:
Absolutely, Sally-
Matt Grill:
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, we don't want to let Sally have a wish.
Matt Kleve:
Oh come on now, Sally what's your wish? What do you think the Drupal genie should bring?
Sally Young:
Just ban M Herchel
rom Drupal.org So I would wish for ... And I think this is something we can work on with this initiative is to have less extension points. So I have a good analogy of this. So I recently switched to Linux as you all know from the audio problems I was having at the beginning of this podcast and I was incredibly frustrated when I first started using it, I was using note and then Daniel suggested I switched to KDE and the reason it was much less frustrating is, hopefully I'll get this right, there was a more sort of central way for applications to declare how they use in keyboard shortcuts and all of that so it was just like really minor things but when you're using all these applications together and everything sort of works in a very similar way it's like a million times less frustrating so I'd really like Drupal to have less extension points and the one that we do have, a bit more prescriptive so when we do build all these modules and site builders can click everything together, yeah sure you can do a little bit less but overall the experience that you have as a content editor would be much more consistent.
Matt Kleve:
I think I like your vision.
Sally Young:
Nice. You should switch to KDE as well.
Matt Kleve:
Thanks for coming on, I'm now assuming by the next time we talk all this will be completed.
Sally Young:
Yeah, obviously.
Sally Young:
I actually already finished it. I've just been keeping it in my Git stash because I wanted to get on a few more podcasts and stuff.
Mike Herchel:
But the first podcast you had to say it was impossible right?
Sally Young:
Exactly.
Mike Herchel:
Yeah.
Matt Kleve:
Well hey, thanks everybody for coming on the Lullabot podcast we appreciate you coming on and telling us all about what's going on.
Cristina C.:
Thanks.
Matt Kleve:
Thanks everybody.
Sally Young:
Thanks.
Matt Grill:
Bye.
Daniel Wehner:
Thank you.

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