Hi, I am SEO Joe with Powerful CMS, a sponsor for this event today. Today we have a case study from SPS. SPS was established in 1975 as being a provider of multilingual, multicultural content in radio and television. For those of you from U.S., I think the closest comparison would be the PBS. I hope that's alright. And the questions that, if you have these questions on your mind on how does SPS handle their content management system? Why did SPS choose Drupal? How is SPS managing Drupal? This conversation from Matt is going to be super exciting. Matt Costain, technical director, online engineering platform at SPS. Please join me with a huge round of applause for Matt Costain. Thanks, Joe. As he said, I am the technical director of online and emerging platforms at SPS, largely responsible for technical strategy, architecture, development and operation of our digital non-broadcast platform. We provide services and content to multilingual, multicultural Australia. The idea of that is to promote social harmony and inclusion. We're different again to other broadcasters here because we're a commercial, not-for-profit organisation. We're about 70% funded by government, 30% from commercial activity. We have a very strong focus in news and current affairs, football, cycling, food film documentary and in-language content. We actually have content in 68 different languages and that's across audio, video and web-based content. SPS online, which is where I work, we have two main supporting objectives for the organisation that is to increase our audience and be more relevant to our audience. We have over 90 websites, so the content management challenge is not insignificant. We have mobile sites, mobile apps, connected TV applications, as I said, 68 different languages and we currently deliver that content on 15 different platforms. Around 12 of those websites are of pretty large significance in terms of their size. There's probably 40 cookie-cutter small TV sites to support our broadcast. The rest are medium-sized or content-heavy pieces or standalone multimedia projects. We do about 1.5 million unique browsers a month. We serve over 2 million videos and about 20 million page impressions. Those numbers, especially in the page impressions and videos, serve to double during an event period such as the World Cup or the Tour de France. The challenge we've had is we've rapidly grown over the last five years. That 1.5 million newbies was 700,000 four years ago. As we've grown, we haven't had any real product development strategy and certainly no accompanying content management strategy. Over the last eight to 10 years that SPS online has been around, we've had about six different versions of CMSs, all developed in-house. We've had a changing roster of people, we've had a changing view of how we're going to deliver this content and changing technology stack. The one consistent thing is it's always been on PHP, using MySQL and previously everything was built on the Zen framework for the tech user. The challenges here, well, there were many. For a start, the current system presented massive maintenance nightmares. There were totally disparate features across all of our websites. There was no consistent way to be able to roll out features. We had one, say someone in the world game, which is Australia's largest football site, wanted to add Twitter or Facebook integration into their site. We then had to go and do that to every one of the other sites and build the appropriate back end into it to support that. Content became siloed. What I mean by that is that football content was available to the football site. Food content was available to the food site. Radio content was available to the radio site. There was no way to actually share that content without a non-trivial development effort. Sharing content between sites as a result was non-existent. There was no way for us to cross promote content between different sites and leverage the work that other people in the organization had done. The CMS, due to its reactive nature, was always built to support the current project's aims and goals. Totally reactive, totally unintuitive to use, to the point of it actually being a liability of content. There's no security around it. There was no scalability. Every time we needed to do a new site, we basically had to take a code base, kind of copy it, and then customize it. As a result, there's a lot of copying and pasting of code, and I'll show you what happens when you do that. So, you know, we got the runs on the board. We were becoming very successful. We've had, you know, 100% growth over four years in terms of audience. So, we needed to do something to actually take the network to the next level. Here's a screenshot of the current CMS. It's essentially a mess. It's called Redback, which is a very dangerous spider for our overseas guest. You can see here there's a whole heap of fields which have got random values in them, completely meaningless titles. Half of the things aren't even populated. We don't know what they're for. No one knows what they're for. But if you remove them or add data, something will break. Here's another, this is an image library. Again, there's no metadata around the images. There's a whole heap of vacant fields. Again, no one knows what those fields are there for, why they were put there in the first place. And just another shot. Somehow it all hung together. It worked. It was a bit of a minor miracle, really. Everything was totally coupled. We couldn't do anything with it. We couldn't curate our content.  Some pretty amazing websites. The world game biggest football site in Australia. SBS on demand is probably the most innovative catch-up platform in the country and also available on 15 platforms. We're the official partner for the Tour de France. We've got lots of news and current affairs websites as well. And, of course, we serve a lot of video, being a broadcast of that now. Key differentiator to a lot of the other sites out there. So we had to take a step back and look at what we were doing. The problem is, putting a new CMS in is incredibly disruptive. We've got business, being a media organization, we're 24-7. We have business as usual every day of the week. We've got this incredible fire hose of content coming in and out of the building. To actually stop all of that and put in a CMS was a big deal. But we had to do it. So we kind of applied, you know, there's this incredibly traumatic funding process within SBS and we applied for some funding. And after a period of time, people began to listen to us and saw what we were doing. So the CMS addressed four clear objectives, none of them technical. Increase the reach. SBS is reached by using multiple distribution platforms. Developing optimal delivery technology for SBS online. Developing capability to store, retrieve, and deliver content to these multiple platforms. And streamline processes, development efficiencies, and content production efficiencies. We went through a selection process for the CMS. My background before it at SBS was working in web agencies. I've had about 12 years of experience working for different media organizations. And I've implemented a lot of CMSs. Pretty much all of them failed. The reason this happens is, you know, people go, I want this, and this, and this, and they do a product comparison based on a matrix. That's great, the product can deliver. But you end up being locked to a product. No one, you know, you've got expensive training costs. Your requirements change, and they're not addressed by the product. Also totally ignores the users. And when I say the users, I'm talking about the back-end users, the people that are actually interacting with the system on a day-to-day basis. The business objectives are not normally made clear. We want to put this website out. It needs to serve 20,000 pages a second, and be just totally awesome. It actually doesn't address the real problems that a business are trying to solve, which were the four points before. To get around that, we brought in an independent VA. They sat down with the content editors, and users of the actual existing system looked at the inefficiencies that were in the current processes, the tasks that they were doing repetitively, and came up with a number of practical evaluation criteria and use cases that we would use to select a new CMS. We then went out to the market, looked at what was available, both open source and commercial CMSs. These were initially shortlisted around being able to meet both our organizational requirements, and then we'd look at how the user experience was going to play out. I won't bore you with the details there, but after we did that, we got down to two vendors. Both of them were engaged to provide reference implementations against the use cases that the VA came up with. So we engaged them commercially at that point. I suppose if you look at it, it was a closed trial on a number of use cases. We evaluated these against the users. We had a point-based matrix about usability. Do I like the interface? Does it achieve what I'm trying to do? First and foremost, will this actually make my life easier, or is this just going to be another system imposed on us by developers without any real idea of what the user experience should be? Drupal 1. It was the highest rated system by a long way. It met every one of our criteria around technical, multi-platform, multilingual, multi-site, secure, scalable, and flexible. It also won out because of another whole heap of things which weren't really considered when we first went to market looking for CMS. For a start, as I mentioned before, we're a PHP development house. It was a really good match with our in-house skills. So going to something like Sidecore, which Drupal's often compared with, is a .NET CMS that would have involved throwing out our entire infrastructure, get retraining, or getting a brand new development team. It's open source. The virtues of open source are extolled in the last talk. And that's not something to be looked at lightly. And the Drupal community, I didn't realize how strong the Drupal community was until I went down to Drupal down under last year, and sort of blown away by the enthusiasm by the locals. Drupal has an increasing market share in large enterprise, whitehouse.gov, NBC.  There was an incredible amount of local support. You can see the sponsors of this conference. They're all present. They're all around. They're all willing to provide professional services. There's also a large amount of international support, largely through Acquia, but also a number of other organizations. The local labor market's fairly strong, highly competitive. It is difficult to get good Drupal developers, but they are out there. There's a module for that. It's very true. There's tens of thousands of modules. And of course, there's no vendor lock-in. All of this, we sort of hope, will deliver a lower total cost of ownership to us over the three to five years that we're sort of basing this project on. So the things to fix. As mentioned before, the previous CMS, it was tightly coupled to a database schema. It was essentially the administration interface was not really that different to just plugging straight into a database. The individual website features were also there on a site-by-site basis, but weren't common across the network. It was no easy way to share, repurpose, reuse content, and I've touched on that already. So some sweeping changes. We took all of this and went, well, this is not just a trivial problem about putting in a new CMS. What do we do to actually fix this across content management and also network-wide functionality and capability? We gave it the original title of Network 2.0, which has been shoot off because it doesn't make any sense. Network 2.0, though, was a consolidation of visual style, user experience, functionality, branding, templates, social and identity management function, advertising, and it was all underpinned by a platform agnostic content repository. We got a pretty ambitious two-year plan to migrate the entire network across. I would suggest that that will probably take a little bit longer due to some of the complexities which I'll talk about later. Quickly on Network 2.0, it was a current crop of SBS websites. They kind of look as though they're part of a network they kind of don't. There's a common header and a filter. The masked heads are reasonably similar. But it's not when you jump on the Guardian or on the BBC and you go, wow, I'm in the Guardian or I'm on the BBC site. So there was a very, very long and drawn out design and branding exercise that we're still in the middle of around what Network 2.0 should be. If you look at this page here, you can see color palettes, angles, design, layouts are all contributing to a completely new look for the site. The new site will start to take on this sort of approach. And you can see in this slide here, we've got locks of common functionality, headers, sidebars, right-hand column widget, lists, curated items, and so on. All of those things are going to be created as reusable components deployable across any site without too much effort, hopefully. The content repository is also completely key to what we're doing. As I mentioned before, the content repository is a platform agnostic store of all of our content. Each site previously had a number of databases that supported it. All the content went in there. We couldn't do anything with it. If we wanted to expose that content, we had to do a development exercise around writing APIs. We had to scratch our heads and wonder if we do this, what else will break. We're going to throw all that away. What we're implementing is a bucket of content that sits under all of our CMSs. Every piece of content that gets entered into the CMS, Drupal is the actual administration interface to manage the sites and the content. As that content is entered, it gets pushed into this repository where it's available for use for every other site. We've wrapped that up with our own services. We had to build it ourselves. There's too many standards out there for this kind of thing. None of them are completely useful and certainly not allowing us to do what we needed to do. For the techies, we're using MongoDB. We're using Symphony 2, which is a PHP framework. And we've written what we'll call a notification queue. And I'll talk a little bit about that. It's very important. Drupal itself communicates with the APIs that we've written, not with MongoDB. We've got a very traditional Drupal deployment on top. This content repository is completely decoupled from the system. If we move away from Drupal or we want to put other things on top of it, we can. Technical diagram. MongoDB. This is technical, but I'm going to touch on it because it's important. We have 90-odd websites with an undefined way to represent the data and content that we've got. MongoDB doesn't care about schema. It doesn't care about SQL. It doesn't care about all of those things that make building websites or used to make building websites hard. It doesn't care that our data is bad. It cares that we have the data. And the data web page might contain a title, an abstract body content, images, associated videos, other documents that are attached to it. We can just take all of that and throw it straight into the content repository and pull it straight back out. When we do that, though, we do need to be careful about how we map that back to the Drupal interface. So there is a fair bit of adaption that goes on. MongoDB has also chosen it super fast. It doesn't use that many resources. It's very scalable. As the content repository gets bigger, we can just add more servers and it scales out, doesn't really care. As I said, it doesn't care about our data. And also tagging, indexing, and search. We're moving away from an article by article approach to the way that we deliver content and more to a storytelling approach, which is, you know, SPS's tagline, 7 billion stories and counting, where we're really trying hard to tell the story, not just give you the information that you need. So being able to tag everything up and then pull it back out based on its topic or tag is absolutely fundamental. As I mentioned, content is created and ingested into individual Drupal sites and then pushed into this repository for all to use. We wrapped up the content repository with our own service layer. It allows easy access by any internal or external system. We haven't actually opened it up externally, but the plan is much like in the way the Guardian and BBC have done to make our content accessible to all so that people can do interesting things with it. We are a public organization. The content belongs to the people. Schema.org is a way to describe things. As the internet moves famously to what's known as the internet of things, you need ways to describe these things. Schema.org is an initiative by Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and a few others to put some sense around the way that things on the internet are described. If you can think of any kind of content type, there's probably something in Schema.org that will help you describe it, whether for us a film and then a film review and an actor and a producer or a recipe and an ingredient and a measure that makes up those ingredients, it's all there. So we've basically used Schema.org to steer the way that we describe our content. And that's also important because search, people need to find your content. Schema.org gives you a really simple way to market up so that search engines can interpret it. Thompson Reuters have a service called Open Calle, which semantically analyzes your content. So every time a piece of content is added, we visit it through their service and it extracts all of the terms, it extracts the taxonomies, it says what it thinks it should be, where it should be classified. For a lot of the archive content, we do that automatically, we push it through there and we use what it comes back with. More generally, though, as people create content, push it through there. It'll suggest the appropriate taxonomies. And the people creating the content can curate the content appropriately. Drupal has incredibly good taxonomy support, so it plays really well with Drupal. So we're in the process of migrating our content to the content repository. It doesn't deal with all the legacy systems. So we've had to write a system that will capture any content changes in the legacy systems and push them into the content repository. Migration has been made somewhat easier by the fact that Mongo doesn't care about what our data is. But it's also, Mongo is not particularly good for searching. So we've actually indexed all of our data with Solar, which is another open source platform for searching. And that index is made available to Drupal, not Drupal talking to the databases directly. Use case here. I don't have a screenshot to show you, but if a user is creating an article on the food side about Italy and then wants to perhaps link to something about the Italian football team, they can type in Italy, hits the index, everything comes up. You can search through the different facets. You're looking for people. Are you looking for places? Are you looking for food? Are you looking for cuisine? And so on. And you can then just grab that content and use it. So Content Editor has the ability to create new content, link to existing content, or make a copy of existing content and repurpose. That's quite important when we're supporting 68 different languages. How do we actually, there's all this content in English, but we might want to push it out to Mandarin. We might want to push it out to Farsi. How do we translate that intelligently? And what happens if content gets edited? If I've used someone's content on my site that was created over here and then the source content changes, what do I do about that? So we wrote this thing called the notification queue. It basically looks after our content concerns. So when someone uses content that was created, not by them, but by another author in the organization or on another site as its source, they can flag how they want to handle that. As they use that, they can say, let me know if it changes, or just pass all the changes through. Again, for the techies, it works a little bit like a MySQL binary log. You can take off the servers, and it remembers where the content repository is at. When you turn it back on, it goes, OK, I'm here. I've got all these changes I need to run through and see if my site has anything of significance that needs to update. Another boring chart, which I won't go into. But essentially, it says here that if the content has expired on my origin site, it can send a notification that the content has actually expired. It gets marked as expired in the origin. The action on the client site might not need to do anything, but the status changes. So how do we do this in Drupal? Well, we're creating an archetype type site. This is a site that contains absolutely everything that anyone would ever want to use in SPS. Of course, it's a work in progress. We're targeting one site for launch. And this one site will have as much as required to get sort of a minimum viable product out the door. As new features and new sites come online, we will have to build on top of that. So every site we put out there will inherit from this. As alluded to before, it contains a library of modules, components, and features, accessible to any of the new sites. When you attach or you place a new component on a different site, you can just assign it a data source and it will populate that content. You can curate that content or you can do it automatically. All of those things are in Drupal. Makes life very easy. As a result, a five-page promo site for a TV show will be using this system as will a site with thousands of pages and incredibly complicated content structures. All good, but people still have to use the site. Network 2.0, as before, we're using a responsive grid approach for a device adaptation. We've integrated this into Drupal as a base theme. So every other site picks this up. Drupal 7, current production version of Drupal, does support server-side device adaptation and content delivery. It's a promise of it in Drupal 8, as better supported. But we, again, using a sort of platform-agnostic approach, we decided that we'd actually like to decouple the device adaptation and delivery from Drupal itself. So while there is a base theme that we're using, we're doing all of the detection within the browser of using CSS3 and HTML. These are actual screenshots of the work in progress. The food site for international guests, koalas, are on the menu. This is the big, broad, you've got a 1900-res monitor. You'll get that. Scale down to a smaller size. You'll get the one on the left. And then if you're on a mobile device, you'll get the one on the right. A little bit ugly, sorry, I didn't have time to get some nice, proper content in there. So things that Drupal doesn't do. It's not all roses, I've got to say. It's generally pretty good. But we've had to write a lot of custom modules to do all the system integration work that we previously had done using our own custom framework. Increasingly, at SBS, we're finding that the role of the development team is more about system integration. We're not a technology provider. We don't want to be rewriting commoditized technology. We don't want to be reinventing the wheels. So a lot of our systems now are outsourced. They're software as a service platforms. They're in the cloud. Things that manage our audio legacy systems. Radio is the oldest part of SBS, and we've got the dinosaur systems that don't work really well. And we have to manage that. We've got to come up with a, there's nothing in the community that will handle that for us. Video, on the other hand, we use an organization called the Platform, it's a US-based company that does video CMS work. There are Drupal modules out there that integrate with the platform. We've written another one, which we think is better. So we're going to really step back into the community. So everyone else that is with the platform and decides to go Drupal can use it. So single sign-on, always a big issue across multiple sites. Drupal does handle it reasonably elegantly out of the box. We have some sort of deeper concerns, especially from the marketing department, who want to integrate really tightly with our CRM system and start building up intelligence on our audience. And as a result, we can start to deliver better personalized content. We can target advertising. We can do all of those things that people spoke about in hallowed terms about five years ago. We're not doing it yet. We are aiming to do that. Out of the box, Drupal's identity management is pretty good, but we've actually integrated an external system. We're using, for those that are interested, it's Jan Rain. And we're using LiveFire, which is another software as a service platform, to do our comments and social integration. The other thing it doesn't do, I mean, there's plenty of Drupal themes out there. And there are things that will adapt to devices and give you a nice experience on different platforms. But one of the things that when I came in with a bit of prejudice with Drupal, because so many Drupal sites are really ugly. And people put the sites out there just using what's available in the community. And there's nothing wrong with that. But we want beautiful, elegant, functional designs. So we've had to go and kind of almost reinvent the wheel a little bit with that theme. So where are we at with all this? Look, we follow an agile methodology at SBS. For those familiar with that, we're four sprints into the rollout of our first site. So we're about eight weeks into the development of our first site. We've probably spent about three or four months in the back preparing everything else, getting the content repository up and running. The content repository's there. It's basically ready for prime time. The responsive grid, as evidenced by the rough screenshots before, actually works. You can hit this in TVs. You can hit it in your iPhone. You can hit it in your Android phone. You hit it on your tablet. And you will actually get a really consistent user experience tailored to that device. Content will adapt. We will serve up different things based on what we think you should be seeing when you're on that device. Things are moving a little bit slower than we'd like. The Drupal learning curve is reasonably steep. I've got a highly talented development team, but they have found the change from, even though they've had training, moving from a bespoke platform where it was free for all and there were no rules, moving to Drupal, it has been a little bit difficult. I will say, though, that in the last month, our development rate has rapidly accelerated. Once you get it, it's pretty clear. And things do start happening. And I'm very confident now that we will meet our prime frames and probably exceed them in a lot of ways as well. Another problem with that is Drupal offers you tens, if not hundreds, of ways to achieve exactly the same results. So trying to work out what the best practice is and actually deploy that can be a challenge as well. Again, we're leveraging the community. We're leveraging people providing professional services and support in the city to help us with that. That's going pretty well as well. The other thing we're a little bit concerned about is the upgrade path. It's Drupal's famously difficult to upgrade compared to a lot of other systems. Drupal 8 has a lot of features that look incredibly appealing, especially for media organizations such as ourselves. Whether we choose to jump on that bandwagon before everything's better done or not, not sure yet, a little bit scary. Yep, that's mostly good. As I said, development velocities are rapidly accelerating. We're now getting to a point where we're actually able to plan our projects out and know where they're going to be and what sort of development rate we're actually going to be able to hit. Importantly, costs have been constrained and contained. Development resources are not cheap, but I'm pretty sure that given the amount of resource that we've thrown at this, we'd still be hundreds of thousands of dollars ahead of if we use the commercial CMS. Part of that is because the bespoke hardware and infrastructure used to actually run this environment, it's just a standard Linux box running MySQL and Apache web servers. The developers, you can train PHP developers up to use it. There are no software licensing costs. Well, yeah, there aren't, it's open source. You can actually go and get a lot of support for Drupal, which we are doing to a degree, but I'm still pretty convinced that this has been a very cost effective exercise for us. Check out SBS in a couple more months. It will be radically different to what it is at the moment and hopefully almost entirely Drupal powered. So to sort of wrap this up, we have worked with a few people and quite a few people have actually helped us get to where we are. We partnered with Previous Next, a local Drupal development house. They were instrumental in getting us and our architecture up the scratch and helping us with best practice. Hostworks, hosting company, based out of Adelaide and Sydney, their Drupal isn't their specialty, but they have come to the party and given us a big hand with what we're trying to do. TenGen provide MongoDB support as the official Mongo supporters there. They're ecstatic that we're using Mongo in such a context in this area. We're going to be one of the larger, and if not the only media organizations in the country doing so. Of course, Acquia, they've been with us all the way. They very came to get us on board and have provided excellent support, consulting, access to community, and so on. And New Relic, US-based company that does application performance monitoring, has incredible Drupal support. You just drop a module in and it will tell you absolutely everything about your app, where the bottlenecks are, where your database is falling down, even down to the code, and it's like this piece of code here is operating really slowly. So without all these people, we probably wouldn't get to where we are. That's about it. So anyone got a question? The question is, when delivering to a mobile device, can we push out a low bandwidth version of that site? The answer is yes. Tomorrow at 5 PM, there's two of the guys who are lead on this project. They're doing a deep technical dive about it. So if you're around, I encourage you to go and see their presentation. They will touch on all of that. Yes, the answer is yes. I couldn't tell you which library we're using, but there is a, we are using a library that will push out a low bandwidth version of the site. We're also looking at in-network optimization. So using something we're not actually using at the moment, but it could be web acceleration technologies either delivered from a company like Akamai, or our own hosting provider, or an off-site sort of proxying service that will do those optimizations in case you can serve it back to the user. It's certainly not private information as such. I would have to have a look at what confidentiality agreements will be signed, especially the two organizations that provided the reference implementations. In terms of the ranking and weighting based on straight out-of-the-box features, that's fine. I could probably put that up somewhere. Yeah, I mean, those kind of references we use, we leverage them heavily, especially right at the start, like, is Drupal actually going to do what we need it to do? There was a presentation, it goes to about an hour. It was a Drupal versus Sitecore, and I'm actually quite impressed with Sitecore of the CMS. It does a lot of the things that we need it to do, and it's very heavily marketing-focused, marketing guys love it. It's got a lot of stuff out of the box that's prettier, and all these things. Stuff like that is incredibly invaluable, because you sit down and you look at it, and you go, well, yes, Drupal does do this, it does this, it does this. Oh, it doesn't do that. OK, well, how are we going to fill that gap, and what's the effort required to do it? So yeah, we'll take that on board. OK, sure. So if you're interested in, say, the Syrian conflict, and there is an incident that's happened, and it's capturing headlines, and you go to it with the news article, and you read it, and you go, wow, that's incredible, but why did that happen, what's the back story? How do I find that? So many news sites, so many content sites don't actually frame that story within the actual greater context. So taking something like, we'll use the Syrian conflict as an example, marking up content in a number of ways, saying, well, yes, this is Syria. This is where it happened. Here are the geo-coordinates. This is the time it happened. Being able to plot that on a timeline, or plot it on Google Maps, surround the article that you're actually looking at with all of that back story. We've got these great ideas about how we can visualize that information, how we can navigate that information, which previously we haven't been able to do. So having all of that in the content repository, having all of this metadata around the actual piece of content itself in all of those different aspects will allow us to do innovative services on top of it. That's the idea. It's about the story. Exactly. So you might do a search on Google about Syria and land on airspace site. Instead of taking it directly to an article, we'd rather take you to our topic page on Syria, which will allow you to then navigate the actual story, not the actual article itself. That's the kind of end goal. We're a fair way from that yet, but we're working towards it. Up the back, I think, this first. The question was, have we been following what the BBC have been doing around open data and semantic? Yes, they're massively ahead of us, largely due to their infinitely larger budget. It's exciting. I mean, that's kind of the benchmark, I think. No, I don't. That's a really tough question, because in terms of pages, like outright article pages, if we just took our football site, for example, there would be hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of different pages. Every game that's been played in the European leagues have all had their individual pages. So whether we do that dynamically or whether there's a separate mode for each one of them, we're still debating. We're not touching football yet. It's a really complicated website. Things which are article-based. Again, we've got hundreds of thousands of articles. They expire. We might get a dump of content from our news providers, which add more nodes. So we're talking millions and millions of nodes. Good question. As an organization, especially within the technical part that I look after, I encourage the guys in the team to strive for best practices. We've also, the production team, and led by the head of digital, is always looking at what other people in the world are doing and how they're doing it and should we be following them or should we be doing something completely different. So it's a continual process, specifically around Drupal and what we're doing around the network redesign. We've probably spent around about seven months looking at the technical aspects and probably about three months in development or maybe four months in development with ideas ticking away for a couple of years beforehand around the network side of things, probably close to it a year in terms of theory and testing hypotheses and so on, either against internal users or against our content. And that's still evolving alongside the technical. So short answer is it's always been there and better it's evolving. Right, so the Solar Search Index is every single piece of content in there. They find it through the Drupal interface. As I said, I don't actually have a screenshot of it now but it's pretty cool you start searching. It will then auto complete the terms as Google does and sort of start dropping things down. Once you've found the term you're after, it will then break it out into the different taxonomies that that term exists in. So whether it's people, place, thing, object and then all the different facets. And so you can drill down and find that term in a number of pieces of content then you can search for that content again to actually find the relevant piece. We're not quite, we haven't quite finished that yet. It's working to the facet level but to actually put it in front of users and make sure it's really useful, not just what a developer thinks is useful needs to go through a bit more work. Yes. No, the thing is a media organization, what we continually need to do is measure, measure, measure, measure and make decisions based on data. The other platforms that we're bringing in to Drupal provide incredibly good analytics around what our users are doing. We can see in a much more efficient manner how much, how users are engaging with our content, whether they're sharing it, whether they're posting it on their Facebook wall, whether they're doing stuff on-site, whether they're off-site and these platforms allow us to aggregate that information and report on it and then make decisions in a much more meaningful way. Did we do something? Sorry. Yeah. Oh, sorry. Sorry, I missed the question. Ah, look, it's pretty straightforward to get out of the box, install it on your machine and I'll talk to you about it after this invite. Pretty much, yeah. Yeah, it might, which version of it goes out into community? We're not sure, but yeah, the intention is, one of the, and again, one of the reasons we talk on Drupal is because of the community and it doesn't make sense to be such a heavy user of it without giving something back.


Hey Hello, hello. Oh that light back there might make someone go crazy. I'm gonna turn it off All right, it's five o'clock Shall we shall we begin? Let's do it Rebecca you're on two In two incarnations Hey Anthony, I know this isn't official. Hey Anthony. How you doing, bro? Yeah, you can't unmute yourself. It's okay Hey, okay, so this is watch me work Where the me in the title is you and what this is is a work session for all of us, but Specifically, it's a work session for you. It's given all y'all Wonderful people an opportunity to talk with me about your work and your creative process Well, we don't have the time for you to read aloud from your work or anything like that We do have lots of time for you to talk about Your work and get some tips Helpful hints suggestions and definitely a lot of encouragement about you and your creative process So what we do is first we thank the public theater and howl around And lolly and everyone at the public theater and howl around for helping us get this zoomed together We've been doing this show for about 13 14 years. So uh, yeah And uh, second, we tell you how it works. We work together for 20 minutes by this timer And then we take your questions All work and all questions are welcome and lolly will help you Figure out all the other cool stuff Yeah, if you would like to ask a question and you're here in the zoom with us You can do that by raising your hand You can use the reactions tab which is likely in the bottom of your screen to raise your hand If you have any trouble finding it, uh, feel free to message me in the chat and I can help you out If you are watching live on howl round with us Feel free to send us your questions via the public theaters Instagram or twitter accounts or watch me works twitter account, which is at watch me work SLP with the hashtag howl round that's hashtag H-o-w-l-r-o-u-n-d and that's how you'll ask your questions All righty We're gonna work for 20 minutes Okay, and Oh Now comes the fun The more fun part So, uh, if you have a question about your work and your creative process and Feel free to do it lolly.  Awesome. Anthony. Uh, you can unmute Oh, okay. Thank you. Uh, what's up s lp? Um, can we tell them? Can we tell them how how we know each other? Yeah Recently made his Broadway debut in top dog gun dog. He is a fabulous actor and also a writer So I told him come Come to watch me work. So here he is. Hey bra. How you doing? Yeah, good. Good. Thank you for inviting me. This is this is really dope I had no clue about this um So thank you. Yeah, but I just had a question about Your screenwriting specifically I'm curious to know what the biggest because I've just recently gotten into screenwriting in the past couple years And I'm working on something right now um, and I'm just curious The biggest negotiation you've had to make From playwriting to screenwriting, right? I'm hearing a lot of um A lot of Words around, you know show don't tell around that principle of you know You can't have as much dialogue in a screenplay as you can in a stage play um, but I mean I as a writer I think I enjoy characters with a lot of dialogue So I'm having trouble trying to negotiate that plus I see Aaron Sorkin do a lot in in his work, you know what I mean So I'm curious how True that notion is If you've had to negotiate certain things moving from one medium to the other Well, that's great. That's great those things you said, I mean I I think the the biggest thing I keep in mind or I would suggest one keeps in mind when they're writing a screenplay Is you got to think big Big the screen.  Do you see what I mean? It's like it's like you're seeing the sky and then you can see a Seeing in a coffee shop and then you can see a scene in someone's bedroom And then you can see a scene on the street on the boardwalk and then you can see, you know, what I mean So so you can so that's what I mean by expansive Thought although there are plenty of great films that take place in in one room or two rooms or whatever. So So nothing's a rule. It's just um, whatever you want to do you want it to work Right. So the thing about dialogue, um, I I Would say keep that in mind You know, I would say I would say keep that in mind because a lot of times say you have a character who's Who's standing in a field and the sky is big behind them and they're talking maybe they only have to say Where were you? You know, because the the sky is going to speak for them and the the size of it all is going to because there's a lot of dialogue going on or being conveyed in What the eye is taking in Yeah You should be in in a play and we just think about top dog. The eye is taking in a pretty One one set right and two people moving around or sometimes just one person moving around But in a film the eye is taking in a lot more stuff It's being bombarded with a lot more information So maybe that's a good reason why we don't need so many words in a screenplay got you, you know Yeah, so just be keep keep your ear on that, you know when a character is going on and on and on you might go Okay, let me trim it down So that you're writing your first or second or third screenplay you're at least being mindful of the rules or the conventions Right when you write your first play or your second play your tenth play you would you you just want to be sort of like I know the convention You know, if you choose to depart from it, that's That's okay too I was also what you want to do is even in a play, but especially keep it moving Keep it moving You know what I mean don't sit on anything for too long That's what I would suggest. Yeah. Yeah, okay keep it moving. Um Some some I've heard some some suggestions like get in as late as you can and get out as quick as you can You know what I mean? So start the scene as late as you can and get out of there as quick as you can keep it What's the scene about boom? It's the same thing though in a in a well in a well written play like top dog underdog, you know, wait Yeah, what's the scene what what's it about? What are they doing? What do they want home home here? They are now they're gone. You know, we don't we don't linger wallow or you know unnecessarily unless that's part of The real integral part of the storytelling Mm-hmm, you know also in a film you can use voiceover. Whoo You can you know, um, so there are all these cool things you can do in film that you that you can't do with a play Um, also read lots of play uh screenplays That's super helpful, right? Yeah, for sure And watch lots of movies, you know Yeah, that's the phase that I'm sort of in right now is just like taking in a lot of film Just to watch the structure of it. Yeah, watch the structure of it. It's that's fun. That's enjoyable. You know, that's a real enjoyable thing Yeah And it's relatively inexpensive now that we all have you know these laptops and whatnot, you know, right, right, right Is that is that hope what oh, yeah, no that that's that's extremely helpful That was my that was just like my burning question that I have for you was just the negotiations that you found that you had to make Moving from one to the other Um Yeah, because I I mean, I think my own eye is more tailored to you know, I study theater So it's more tailored to theater and plays Um And texts but I'm learning that it's it's just a different medium in film.  What's the story? So the story is really important um You know, however you decide to tell that story that's still very important No matter if you're working in film or or tv or theater For sure. Yeah, so thank you. Hey, you're welcome and come back. We're here. We're most monday Okay, dope dope dope. Thanks, bro. Thank you MC Hey, MC. Are you really on a beach or not? Are you no? I'm visiting some family in new jersey and it's freaking cold. So I was I was transporting myself somewhere warm. Very nice. Yes. Um so I've been thinking a lot about point of view And a novel not a play right now, but I'm About telling this story and part of it is set in in New York in the 1940s and then there's a segment that's in the 1980s and I have been I've started just grappling with I I told it from the guy Leo's Close third I was doing that a lot. Uh-huh. And I thought oh, maybe I should Maybe the modern The 1980s him I could do in like I first person Okay Distinguish the time periods, but I don't know I I can't tell if it's uh I don't know. I'm just not sure. I'm in that sort of like Just got to keep at its stage, but I'm gonna get a notch like what's your what's your take on point of views? Sure. Sure. Um I'm trying to hear What you're saying So do you think so quite a couple questions? Do you feel that you need to Change the point of view from the in the time period so that the the reader will know that it's a different Do you think that's the only way they can distinguish? No, I I just you know, I didn't know It's this guy's story He's He's an immigrant. I mean, you know, but he um And he had to flee some pretty terrible things in his hometown and he had to do some really cruel things to be able to stay in And I didn't know whether I should try to I don't know. I didn't know what was more authentic. Am I using the word right if I say that authentic?  Um Just about the word authentic.  So you're good on the use of that word Number one number two How can we um Help you choose which groove to run your River in Yeah You know and this I'm leaning to you. I'm hearing you talk about him. Um, so here's a question another question Uh, in your writing. Have you written more plays or novels or short stories? Um, I would say novels Okay, okay. Okay. I did a couple play unfinished. I mean it just I don't I don't think It's all good. It's all good. I'm just trying to I'm just trying to help you find the the groove um What uh, did you come up with against some obstacles with the third person? I was afraid I was describing too much and too much exposition, you know, so what you said really um Earlier really resonated with me the you know Start the scene late getting get out because you know, I tend to linger And yeah, but but but mc. That's for a film. You know That's for a film.  He can you can be you look there. He is walking in the park. You just describe him The lingerie all that that that you can trim down and editing later Okay, all right. Okay. So try try try third person I will thanks And you said third person close. What does that mean? I don't understand that term Sometimes that I've been reading those craft books So sometimes, you know, instead of the omniscient you go really close like, uh Leo counted the spaces were there to so you're you're right beside him sort of like Okay, okay. Good. That sounds that That sounds really gorgeous Leo Encouraging by those words Those sounds gorgeous. Do you have a game plan that's going to get you to the first draft the end of the first draft um I thought I did but I I think I need to Tweak it a lot I don't have a great game plan. I thought I had one ending and then I wanted to um Then I'm not sure so But but you have sort of a like today you're going to do x amount by the end of the week you will have done y amount I like oh like word word sort of oh Yeah, yeah, I want I want the sketch Schedule Yeah, I want the shitty final draft first draft done in um In Two months Good Yeah, because I've been working on it a long time Very good. Very good. Okay. Good Good and remember it has to be a shitty draft If you make it like really good, you're not doing your job. Yeah Just you know get to get to the finish line. Okay In the third person close. I love that Leo counted the spaces Yes All right. Thank you. Yeah. Great question. Thanks Thanks, MC. Uh, Kimmy you are next Hey Kimmy Hi, thank you Look at the shadow. Is that a shadow?  Uh-huh Yeah, I I'm sitting in the sun getting some vitamin D Eyes eyes taking taking full advantage of my location Um you and anybody who's cold is welcome to come stay with me. We have a we have a spare room So if you get six 20 degrees Um, so thank you so much, uh, everybody's questions I I I feed off of all of that as well and it struck me to to talk about The last time we talked I was struggling with The fact that I'm changing the the character from being an alcoholic and a drug addict to just, you know Finding her way Through sexual childhood abuse without any Trope I guess um Because it really I know it's loosely based on my life, but it is that's something I I have not experienced So I don't feel that it's authentically mine to say um So I was trying to struggle figure out. Okay. Well, how did I survive? How did I get through all of this? How did I? and I was talking to a friend of mine who's an actor and out of Out of no place. I just said I just went into my jersey I was like so you sat for two hours and there's no arc. There's no nothing She don't know how she got from A to B why because life don't have answers all the time You don't know you just put one foot in front of the other. Why because I'm a woman That's all I know how to do but but but but but but but and he said there's your ending because He says I was immediately captivated and he said and sometimes we just don't have answers sometimes And I was wondering what you thought of that as an ending All endings are great. Everything. Yes Yeah, you know kimmy Whatever is going to get you there Is a great Way place to be you know what I'm saying?  I appreciate that Do you have a game plan As to how much you're going to write every day and when you're going to reach your ending You know, you just ask them see that and I thought to myself That's a really good question because I hadn't until you asked her that and I thought to myself You know, I really can put this to to good use and I I can have it. Don't even think about barking My dogs she's sitting right here I don't have a game plan but as soon as you said that I thought to myself, you know By the end of January, I should have this rewritten again with the revolving door and a new ending Great There you go And so by the end of January means, you know, and you'll look at your calendar or whatever and it means a certain number of Pages a week or whatever. You know what I mean? Yes Yeah, and just because really what else are you doing? Do you know what I mean? Yeah, it's kind of the best thing to do. So yeah, I do appreciate that so very much.  I just and I've met a lot of people but I just find you so I don't know what it is about you, but you speak to my heart. You speak to everybody else's heart And we're just better writers because of you and I really thank you so very much Thank you. Oh, thank you, Kimberly. That's so kind and loving. I really appreciate that But that's why we're here, right? Yeah, it truly is This is why we're here. I'm so I really appreciate the the public theater and howl round for Coming on board so be I mean for supporting the show way back in 2008 when we started but then coming on board During COVID and helping us with the zoom and the whatnot because it really makes it easier for people to to join to join in and and I really feel like it's an integral part of the public theater's mission to provide You know a community some community engagement, you know what I mean with all kinds of folks Yeah, I mean, I'm a better writer because of Being here and listening to everybody listening to the questions and listening to the answers You know and to the struggles because sometimes I think I'm by myself in those struggles And then I hear somebody else, you know, we're we're I hear a struggle somebody had and I didn't go Oh, shit. I didn't even think of that You know, so it's just it it has changed me profoundly as a writer and as a person So I really I thank you so very much and everybody Is and it's and it's fun All right So, uh, yeah, especially and hold on to those those feelings, you know During the holiday season because the holiday season can be kind of you're fun and festive and it can also be kind of a drag So, you know, it's never been fun for me.  So, you know Keep the good feelings Close and and it's so great that also howl round of the public that we they uh, what do you call them lolly stockpile these what do you call it archive Yeah, we have an archive Archive them.  So everybody's drunk or dead or hung over so It's always been a drag So this is uh, this is such great advice because when I'm steeped in a creative project I don't think about other stuff like that So it's really good advice to to go to the archive. I never think about that. Thank you cool cool Anybody else have a question? And then we'll do mary afterwards Hey, Larry. Okay. Hey, how you doing? Good to see you. That's all me. Yeah All right. Well, no one was talking. So I thought I have something I'm curious about. I don't know if it's a Question it might be a little bit of a can of worms But I was wondering if you any experience Uh, I haven't done this myself, but I have a writer friend who I meet with every day And he kind of went down the rabbit hole of using open ai as a writing tool And I'd wondered if you'd experience this because he's been sending me samples And it's eerie remarkable scary How strangely eloquent like the the computer learned his style he fed in a bunch of Pages of his writing and asked it to write a scenario in his own style And it certainly didn't do it perfectly But it wasn't bad And I just I just wondered if you'd had any encounters with this technology and And if you had any thoughts about Is it is it fair to use this kind of technology as a tool? He had to kind of figure out You know where he was starting to feel like it was a A little bit of a drug You know and where he was losing himself and where it was actually Uh, a sounding board kind of tool So he's sort of uh shared with me his process of learning to engage with it Constructively, so I just wondered if you had any thoughts about it. Oh, oh, that's a really good question. Oh boy. Um I think and I would say it depends what you want A lot of people want to have written Yes You know, right Yes We all want to you know, because because sometimes, you know, the the creative The creative act is is it's difficult, you know, so we all want to have written um So there's that so if if one not you Larry, but if somebody is a person who wants to have written Then this is a great tool You Style hurrah, you know what I mean? Um, that's what one wants If you want to write Then Then that involves a certain amount of Work and discovery, you know And so I would say that's a little it gets a little tricky there, you know I would all say that what one one style that's very interesting because for example my style 20 years ago is not my style now So if I were to feed in my style, what does that even mean? You know me as a person 20 years ago We we we what did it?   Am I going to ride the subway or am I going to walk? Well, I want to be that I want to ride. Yeah, I want to get this one So there's there's ways that we can all say well, you're not really doing it for real But it depends what you want And that's a question you ask to yourself in your heart and be like You know, what do what do I want? Yeah Yeah, I could I couldn't do it myself because I thought I would be up at night thinking was it my idea And it would actually start to block me because I But for him it's sort of uh, I don't know for him He sort of found this this groove with it where it it challenges him back and then he responds. It's sort of like a A partner. So I was just uh, yeah, it's just interesting Especially to see the examples there They're sort of remarkable So, uh, thank you. I was just very really interested in your thoughts that Your answer makes perfect sense. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's so funny. I guess I wouldn't want to see I mean, to be honest, I'm gonna say something kind of weird I see a lot of people writing in the store in the in the style of susan lorry parks People do it I'm like, thank you, you know So, you know, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I'm I'm but I probably would if I could No, but I Computer and go I'm doing and have to figure it out. You know what I mean? Like who am I today? Yeah, this writing this kind of play. Oh my god. What does that even mean? What does that mean? I'm growing Oh my gosh. What does that mean to the world? You know, I I enjoy those kind of challenges Yeah, that's interesting. I have a friend of mine who who talks a lot about getting current with yourself Which reminds me of what you just said and I I think that's That's really profound. So that is exactly it lair You want it? You want to get current with yourself? You want to?   What you got for me? and that's a then you're in the field of great possibility Love it Yeah, so But what a great question. Oh my gosh. Now we all got to go and try or get it over the holiday Thank you We have mary up next and then lin will put you on deck if we have time. Um after mary Thank you Hi Hello Hello So I wanted to Talk about getting to the shitty first draft Because I have a hard I have a hard time with that. I'll tell you specifically why So the first so I've been working on a play That was born Meaning like the the central idea the first scene the The contour some characters jump The ending wasn't Took me a long ass time to figure that out what I finally did and now I'm just like Talking to people and rewriting it and I feel very comfortable in this space the editing the Well, what does she want? What does he want? What is happening here that process? and other Other sort of bursts of writing that kind of come out where I feel like I have a handle or or I can kind of really channel the character's voice I feel comfortable with that And I think it's because my um I started out as an actor. I started out in my body and as an interpreter I I don't want to say this out loud, but That, you know, there's a little quiet voice that that says, you know, like, okay I'm not a writer, but I'm writing So I don't want to go there But there is something about the language part of it that it's just it's not It doesn't come Easy it's work and I'm down for it That said So I have another two ideas for these plays And these aren't these aren't like born they they've become sort of I have I have the stories The contours I have the characters and one is a farce. I love farces.  And then the other one is Is like a fake documentary theater so And the people are they're very different from me like I need to go hang around some people like the people in these plays Get you know get a feel of the language That would be fun Okay beyond that When I sit down to even just be like, okay, I'm just going to write whatever and not judge it it's um I feel like I'm in like I'm a first grader Just like learning how to write it's that sort of Painstaking even if I don't have a judging voice even if I really said you're not here right now so Yeah, it's it's so I'm just wondering like how can I like Get it so I can just write a shitty draft in two or three months Um, that's a great question Larry's got Larry's got an AI program I mean that that's an idea if you I mean, I'm sure you can go online and get one of them, you know, that'd be cool. Um, okay, and and okay Number one Mary be great. I love your question be mindful of everything that comes out of your mouth So folks when we go, I don't want to say this.  Why are you talking to me like that right or or some version of that? Wouldn't you I mean right you'd be like, why is she saying that about me?  It also works The other thing is use a timer How many pages are you after just let's do the farce? The one that you don't know how to write that's funny. Whatever farce is I'm not really sure I didn't go to grad school But you know what one is you love farce's you love them How many pages is it gonna be? I don't know 110 110 pages great. Okay. What page are you on now? Uh Zero I have a ton of notes Great. Okay. So you start writing like how many pages do you think you can write a day? If you spent 30 minutes a day writing are you a fast typer? I'm a very fast typer um, I must I'm uh, a more methodical thinker Good. So type faster than you think Okay Done thinking stop thinking mary stop. It's not helping Okay, so I'll see you have an outline. Do you have an outline of your play? I'm sorry. I'm looking at the clock. We've got two minutes. I want to help you because then it's gonna be the new year Do you have an outline of your play? Do you have a game plan? You have a roadmap? I I have I have major contours. Yes, I have characters Great, okay, so you know the signpost you know general direction. Yeah, okay.  You win. You get to go on to the next day and do it again And just keep doing it and I can write at any signpost like I I would suggest writing in order Mary stop thinking stop stop Really, I'm serious. This is up for me to you It's not going to help you You need to surrender yourself to the power of the spirit who is a better writer than you All right, and you need to fall into the arms of the great river and say here I am I'm just going to trust that you're going to get me there if I put my boat in the water That's a big part of writing And that's why we do it because we love that feeling And allow yourself to have that beautiful feeling that comes when you say I am surrendering myself to the great order of the universe You've seen the pictures on that new telescope. They got Dang, right? Don't you want some of that to help you with your work? Oh my goodness. It's out there for you It's saying hello. I'm here or hello. Yeah, whatever it sounds like right right Okay, it's out there.  Let let me let me carry you a little bit right All of us it's there And not even because it's christmas almost or hanukah happy hanukah people Happy mary kwanza mary happy kwanza hana hana christmas You know i'm in all the holidays. We love all the holidays. We love all the spirits. We love all the gods and goddesses and entities right Okay, but now's the time give yourself a gift Right The world is a you know can be there's a lot of really great energy in the world Give yourself a gift to connect to that energy and it starts with you with you with the way you talk about yourself The way you think about yourself You owe it to yourself get and the world needs your positive energy It really does and if you don't believe that then believe something else But right doesn't it doesn't the world need the love that you give Doesn't it so the best way to give love is you start here by giving love here and it helps you give love to other people All right. Thank you slp.  It can be five. It can be one It doesn't have to be 30 minutes. It can be 15 minutes. It can be an hour whatever you're comfortable with Just give yourself a holiday gift Of like i'm gonna do i'm gonna do some of my work And it's It's gonna help you feel so good and then you're gonna be able to share that good feeling with people in your life or total strangers All right, we love you when are we back lolly we are back in january Yes, we are back on january 9th So we're taking a short break for the holidays and then we'll be back and the sign-up sheet's already on the website So register for january 9th and we'll see you then Thank you lolly and seriously if you feel like you want to have some Some watch me work go into the the the lockdown. What's it called? The archive? The archive and there we are talking just like this and it's it'll help you feel that comfort and joy You can also turn if you have a tv turn on the fake fire You know the fake fireplace. It's really nice. Just say it So we love you guys Happy hana kwanza We love you. We'll see you in 2023 Okay Thank you