good morning everyone good morning so this is the Drupal 8 Q&A session invited some other people on stage so maybe we'll start by doing a quick round of introductions Angie you can start okay I'm Angie or go by web chick on Drupal.org I I basically was the release manager for Drupal 7 and then in Drupal 8 I'm also a core committer and I help out basically trying to shepherd the issue Q commit patches when they're ready and review them and all that kind of stuff awesome I think we should can't skip me I don't know but I'm Dries for people that haven't met me started the Drupal project and the project leads and then Jess my name is Jess I'm XJM on Drupal.org I work in the office of the CTO at Aquia with Angie and Dries and I'm also one of the four leads for the views in Drupal core initiative hi I'm Kathy things I'm yes CT and I'm mentor and also I'm part of the multilingual team okay is this on no okay I'm Alex Bronstein at Fulgencia on Drupal.org I also work in the office of the CTO with Dries and Angie and Jess and I do a lot of patch reviews and some patch writing in the core queue. I'm Larry Garfield or Krell online I'm the web services initiative lead and kind of general purpose architectural gadfly and representative to the framework interoperability group so I'm kind of the de facto Drupal ambassador to PHP. Hi I'm Alex Porto, Alex Porto on Drupal.org I'm one of the core committers and yeah I'm also the CMI initiative lead. Awesome thank you for participating today so the way this works is we put out a blog post and we invited people to submit questions ahead of time so we have a list of questions so we organized them a little bit by topic but then definitely we want to encourage people to ask questions in the room as well so just as a warm-up we're gonna go through a number of questions that were you know submitted prior to the session but then by all means feel free to raise your hand or to walk up to the mic if you have a follow-on question to this question to the question that we're answering. Please just come up to the mic so it can be recorded. Yes and then if we have time in the end we would love to get you know just questions from the audience. Sorry, is that it again? Oh I nearly see her as well. We may have a question for you. Alright so let's just as a warm-up we got a few questions around the readiness of Drupal 8 and the first question which I'm gonna have Jess answer is when will Drupal 8 be released? That's everyone's favorite question. It really is the most important question I think that a lot of Drupal developers have right now so to answer this I'm gonna try to give a little background in context. The development branch of Drupal 8 opened shortly it won't actually it opened at Drupal Con Chicago in 2011 in March but it wasn't really it didn't really start to become its own branch of development until much later in that year I think the first major change was in November of 2011 so really 2012 is when development on Drupal 8 really started in earnest. We're now in 2014 a little bit over two years after that and the feature freeze for Drupal 8 was in December 2012 and then a feature completion phase after that. We said that we were gonna stop changing we had our API freeze deadline for wide-open changes in APIs last summer and so long since last summer we've been creating alpha releases of Drupal 8 so right now we're in the alpha phase. The next step is to release a beta release that's the release that contributed module authors can start hopefully using to start porting their modules it's it's more stable than an alpha it'll be more finalized and in order to do that I have a up on the screen here there are 15 critical issues that we need to fix before we can release the beta and this is this is when you might have heard in the keynote Dries offered us all ice cream so what we need to do is fix these 15 issues and we all get ice cream but in addition to all getting ice cream that also means that we move Drupal into the sort of the final stretch of the release cycle where we release beta releases get feedback from module developers but then after that once we get the beta out after that then I'm looking at my Drupal.org dashboard here you can see that there are 49 critical bugs and 48 critical tasks so those issues those you know 97 issues are the issues we need to get done to get your blade out so it's Drupal 8.0 is not going to be out this summer barring you know a miracle or you know hundreds of thousands of dollars of your enterprise clients time but it'd be okay to please help but it wouldn't when Drupal 8.0 comes out it depends both on your contribution and your activity and the issues and it also depends on us because so in these you know 49 critical bugs 48 critical tasks there are some issues in there that we might decide you know actually this is not worth stopping the world from using Drupal 8.0 Drupal 8.0 is already amazing the code base is radically improved over what was available in Drupal 7.0 in terms of its extensibility and its you know modern best practices it has amazing functionality in it and so I encourage everyone to when you're when you're looking at issues in the in the Drupal 8.0 Q really stop and ask yourself first of all is this something that really really should stop everyone else or slow down everyone else from using Drupal 8.0 and maybe is there a place I could direct my efforts instead they would help get Drupal 8.0 out sooner and I think we're going to talk a little bit more in a little bit about some of the other ways that you know if there's something that you think I really want to do this but it's not essential maybe it can wait and we have some more questions about how that can wait and how that's changed. Awesome and then so there's another actually another question which is a great follow up question so I'll give it back to you but somebody asks you know basically somebody has a potential customer or a customer that would like to build a new website on Drupal that website has a lot of API integrations which is something that Drupal 8.0 is better at than Drupal 7.0 and so the customer would like to launch or go into beta in three months from today and so the question is do I use Drupal 8.0 or do I use Drupal 7.0? Drupal 7.0 bottom line Drupal 8.0 will not be at a release candidate like I said it will not be a release candidate this summer barring something very surprising. The one the one time that I might change that answer is if you have the resources if you have developers you can devote to work on Drupal 8.0 core and fix problems and do what we call chasing head which means even though we're not supplying an upgrade path yet continue to keep up to date with the changes that happen in Drupal 8.0 even though we're not supporting it and there are people who already are doing this amazing labs you might have had a chance to see a session by Schnitzel I think it was yesterday so that there are people who have the resources to do it and if you do have you know if if Drupal 8.0 is important enough for your use case if only if you realize that there's no guarantee that we're not going to break your stuff every single day or every single month and if you're a small organization or if you really your only goal is to make a new site if you're looking at the next live site within the next you know two to six months then you should still use Drupal 7.0 because Drupal 7.0 is also awesome. Great some more some two other quick questions first one is going to be for Larry and the next one for for Angie so one of the question is why does it take so long to to develop Drupal 8.0 Larry you give me this question yeah like what's your take so there's a couple of factors that go into determining the length of any given Drupal release cycle I think one of the largest contributors is simply uncertainty about it the traditional release process has been version of Drupal comes out we celebrate we all start working on the new one and we keep doing that until Dries decides it's time and then we try and slow everything down again with feature freeze and betas and so forth that means there's a lot of new work that's getting done that we want to finish there's also we don't know how long we have so people have small plans big plans they don't line up and with each new version of Drupal that creates a longer and longer cycle because each version of Drupal takes longer it's for older versions to port to it in Drupal 8.0 in particular we had an awful lot to do and we decided it was time to really modernize the entire code base and you know as Jess said Drupal 8.0 didn't really get off the ground until 2012 which means we've jumped forward about eight years of development and evolution the PHP world in two years which is pretty damn amazing but that is a lot of work to get done and there's a lot of fallout from that to just clean up for those who is that the core conversation we had yesterday this time slots on the new release cycle okay a few people go watch the video for that we are changing the release cycle for Drupal 8.0 in part to address exactly this question where you know every version gets longer and longer so for Drupal 8.0 whenever 8.0 comes out we are then going to start doing monthly bug fix and security releases as we do now but not open Drupal 9 instead we're going to start work on 8.1 which will be a feature edition not API breaking release and that's targeted to come out about six months after 8.0.0 and then six months after that in 8.2 where we'll be able to add functionality improve the UI potentially add modules but not take things away not strip out APIs not break modules that are using the system in a supported fashion and hopefully that'll give us a much smoother evolution going forward so we don't have this huge boom bust cycle for core development we have a much more gradual cycle and then when we get to Drupal 9 we can focus just on those things that have to be API breaks and that becomes a much shorter shorter cycle as well so that's that's the current plan and yes I said the word plan there's another question Larry and it's a little early to talk about Drupal 9 but the question is so with these changes what does that mean for Drupal 9 do you think the development lifetime or cycle will be shorter as it relates to Drupal 9 you asked me to predict the future we want to hold you accountable I know you would my hope I'll put it that way my hope is that the time that Drupal 9 development is open that or 9.0 development is open will be a lot smaller than when 8 was open I'm thinking a year or less because we'll focus just on those architectural changes are those cleanup changes that are going to break APIs rather than hey developments open let's throw in all the new features we can think about just enable new features given that we're not going to start on Drupal 9 for some time 9.0 may still be four years after 8.0 but we won't have had a completely frozen base system in that time we'll have been able to do incremental improvements we'll be able to you know improve the UI improve the user experience improve APIs without breaking them so it won't feel like this frozen in time moment where we've got Drupal 7 out and then nothing changes until this big change of 8 so we'll probably still see a long time between 8 and 9 but it won't feel as long because we'll be able to improve incrementally over time at least that's that's my hope and that's my goal we'll see if we can pull that off with your help thank you a couple more questions on the Drupal 8 release management Angie one of the questions was you know of course once we release Drupal 8 you know a lot of the contributed modules may have to be upgraded and the question is like how long do you think it takes or do you expect it to be to be different this time around there we go hi can you hear me okay yes that gave me an extra five seconds to think of my answer so that was fine so the question is basically how long do we anticipate contrib taking a check catch up and then like is there anything different about Drupal 8 versus Drupal 7 in that regard kind of okay so in Drupal 7 we know it took roughly 12 months for contrib to get to a state where you could actually build a real site on Drupal 7 and there are a number of different factors that one was that minor releases weren't going out because we or minor releases of core I should say weren't going out because we were trying to get them under zero critical bugs and then eventually they're like you know what let's just start putting them out and then we'll fix the critical bugs as we go and that worked much better the other reason was that there's this whole ecosystem of dependencies so when C tools isn't ported yet then views can't port yet and if views can't port yet then commerce can't port yet and so on and so on and so on like this I think Drupal 8 is better oh and then the third thing in Drupal 7 oh thanks sorry the third thing in Drupal 7 was that although we tried to declare an API freeze there was in reality things that we were continuing to change despite that often for good like well always for good reasons but it's like performance or whatever the the problem was but the reality was that Drupal 8 or Drupal 7 wasn't really stable for developers to work against until very very very late so most people just said you know what whatever I'm just going to wait until it's out and then start so the three ways that Drupal 8 is hoping to combat those problems is one the beta release has been taking a very long time like like just said we're a year now past API freeze and we still haven't put a beta out yet but the reason for that is because we're trying to front load all the things that we know are going to bite module developers and these are also coincidentally in a lot of cases the most gnarly evil critical bugs that we have so the hope is that both one when that beta comes out it's going to be a stable target that people can code against there are going to be things that come up I'm not going to lie but hopefully those things can be a lot more self-contained a lot less like removing the earth beneath you kind of stuff which is exactly what's happening right now so that's a good thing and that means that module developers who do start porting in beta as opposed to in RC or post release will have a much easier time than they did in Drupal 7 the second thing is that a lot of those when we talk about contrib dependency ecosystems a lot of those things moved into core in Drupal 8 so views is in core most of C tools is in core now the plugin system and etc we moved key modules like date and any reference into core so all a lot of these things that other modules built off of are now in core and part of the thing so from day zero you have no waiting time to wait for somebody else to do a bunch of work before you can start and then I would say that the third thing that we can do is is in Drupal 7 we did a huge kind of PR that push around like D7 CX and was like portrait modules yay kind of thing you know I think we could ramp that up more in Drupal 8 and be prepared for that and kind of systematic about it something I did after I started at AQUIA back in 2011 but this was after Drupal 7 came out was I kind of made a dashboard of like here at the top here kind of the most important like say 30 or 50 modules and then did like you know painstaking like reach out to all the maintainers find out what they needed work with them to find out here the list of release blockers are and so I think we could start that work much earlier than we did in Drupal 7 and you know work on getting those folks funding or work on finding organizations that need those things too and and get their employees involved in helping so that by the time Drupal 8 ships a lot of this front and work could be done so that hopefully you know things so my prediction is that that was a very long answer to a very easy question my prediction is that I'm really hopeful we can cut that time roughly in half so I would hope that within six months of Drupal 8 coming out that we could build real sites on it but I want to emphasize that if you're by building real sites you're talking about pretty much any basic website you can actually do that with Drupal core out of the box it's got views it's got fields it's got entities it's got all of the things you need to build out your data models where you're going to run into trouble is if you do highly specialized things like say your Drupal commons and you need organic groups that is probably not going to be available on day zero or your Drupal commerce and you need the rules engine that is also probably not going to be available day zero although they are fundraising to raise money for that to happen so you should google D8 rules and check that out but so that's my my prediction is six months roughly and we'll see what happens and you can you can all make fun of me when it doesn't work don't worry I've made many mis predictions all right let's ask some quick questions to both Alex's here let's start with Alex B so one of the question questions from Grant Kruger is how long do we envision to support Drupal 6 and like how are we thinking about supporting previous versions of Drupal and I know Alex you've been involved with some of these discussions so I don't know if you can we may not have definite answers but maybe you know talk a little bit about where we're at and how we're thinking about this sure so you know as you know historically we've dropped support of the we've dropped support of the x-2 version on the day that you know x comes out so for example the day that 7 got released support for 5 was cut and that was that's pretty much been throughout Drupal's history so effectively what that meant was that if you were on a Drupal 5 site then you you either waited to upgrade to 7 but then that means the process of upgrading from 5 to 7 means that you had a period of time where you were running a Drupal 5 site that was potentially insecure or you had to go from 5 to 6 so that you could so that then you had time to go from 6 to 7 so meanwhile however with Drupal 8 we have the migrate module so and we've already built a lot of the migration path from 6 to 8 so we're hoping to enable people to be able to upgrade sites you know from to migrate sites from 6 to 8 and at the same time Drupal 6 is obviously a very successful release of Drupal like it has much more adoption than Drupal 5 did and adoption by organizations that really like must you know can't run an insecure version of Drupal so to enable that we are trying to find a way to support Drupal 6 you know long enough to allow a viable migration to to Drupal 8 we have where it's been a long discussion with the security team and with other sort of key stakeholders in fact we're going to have a discussion tomorrow to kind of keep that going so what you know the current proposal that's on the table based on that that Dries proposed based on a lot of feedback from a lot of different stakeholders is to continue security support of Drupal 6 for one year after 8.0 is out with the expectation that that is both enough time for there to be a truly viable migration path from 6 to 8 meaning contrived enough contrived modules already and and the migrate path the migrate module and and all the migrations have been you know well tested by early adopting organizations you know so that's that's the nice thing about one year and the other nice thing about one year is that that sort of works well with organizational funding if people know before Drupal 8 is out that it that it's going to be supported for one you know that Drupal 6 is going to be supported for one year after 8 is out and that's enough time to sort of get a website upgrade or rebuild or whatever it is you know funded through through organizational funding channels so that's what we would like to do but there's challenges in doing that it's it's it's burden for the security team it's it's burden for there's the question of you know what about contrib maintainers and people on the security team that also need to put out security announcements for contrib projects so those are the kinds of issues we're still working out we've we've made I think some progress in figuring out how we can accomplish this without it being more burden on the security team or by taking by moving the burden around basically so making making more sort of core maintainers also take more of the responsibility of fixing security bugs that are discovered by the security team whereas in the past like the security team would would both valid you know verify the bug but then also do the majority of the work in fixing it trying to find a way to shift more of the fixing responsibility onto the project maintainers and core maintainers so those are the kinds of discussions we're having so it's not something that's an official policy yet but that's the the current proposal that's on the table and as long as we can get buy-in from the security team and buy-in from you know figure out a way that makes it work for contrib maintainers or figure out a policy around how contrib maintainers can do it then that's what we're hoping to achieve awesome thank you Alex the other Alex Alex spots there's a couple of questions around the amount of changes we introduced from going from seven to eight and you know one of the questions is do you have any wise words for developers that need to go from from seven to eight and also another question is do you think we made too many changes maybe and so I know you haven't seen this question before so we're putting people on the on the spot here and I'm effectively giving him 10 more seconds I think but uh and you know if somebody else wants to chime in you're welcome to as well okay um so going back to the to the first part of the question um if you're a module developer um how difficult is it going to be to port your modules to Drupal aid um well fortunately there's there's a lot of great work that's been going on with with some automated tools to help people um move their modules there's also a lot of great examples in core of how of a modern module and and what that needs to do I would say that everyone should look at the contact module it's one of my my personal favorites because it actually has most of the the new types of things that we have in core it extensively uses uses config it uses config entities it has a content entity it has forms so it has all the basis basic parts that you need to learn and and the concepts of what is in a module from Drupal seven hasn't already changed you have hook menu was it it was what it was in Drupal seven we have a routing file in Drupal eight so as long as you're okay with the concepts it's about seeing how they've changed so you can look at the contact module in Drupal seven and look at the contact module in Drupal eight and see what see what's happened um and I think this is a good thing because PHP has changed and PHP is moving quickly so if you if you look at the way that Drupal seven was it's it's built around PHP four types of ways of working Drupal eight is built around PHP five point three ways of working five point four five point five and it's it's behoven of developers to stay current just because we've done things always that way it doesn't mean that we should continue to do them if we want to play in the modern world Dries talks extensively in his keynote about how the web was changing in order to meet those challenges we need to change the way in which we code and we have and Drupal eight will be better for that now I'll add a little bit more color to that that answer as well um like my personal opinion I think um a lot of the concepts remain the same at the same time the introduction of object oriented programming and symphony is definitely disruptive um or you know there's also a bit of a move from convention based approaches to um more you know declarative using a configuration and so that that's definitely a conceptual change so while a lot of the concepts remain the same other concepts really changed in my mind uh and that that I think is definitely disruptive and people will have to relearn these parts um but I don't think we'll make that kind of change uh in Drupal nine I mean this is like a big change and it's kind of a it's a bit of a one-time only change uh and hopefully in Drupal nine the changes will be much more incremental there could still be many changes but there'll be a little bit more incremental in my mind I don't know um Larry if you agree with that or not but um yeah um one of the things I said in Prague Drupal eight is going to be an exceptional release exceptional meaning really cool and really rare and has exceptions in it no absolutely uh so one of the really great parts of Schnitzel's talk yesterday was when Amaze built their site in Drupal eight uh the the developers and themers are not necessarily core contributors not all of them right so it was kind of their first look their first project and he said um after they finished the project they do not want to go back to seven so even though there are new things to learn and some things to figure out how they changed those developers and themers were really excited and they loved it so much once they started using it that is great one thing that I've been doing a lot of Drupal eight training recently either on behalf of Palantir or on behalf of the Drupal Association and a pattern I've noticed that I don't think we explicitly targeted this but it works out almost everything you do in Drupal comes down to implement an interface and tell Drupal about it or extend a base class and tell Drupal about it that's 90 percent of what you do in Drupal eight and it's a lot clearer what those things are you need to do for the implement interface or extend class simply because the language gives you a better hint about what it is you're supposed to be doing um so I think once you get over the initial hump of oh there's this class keyword around Drupal eight would be easier to develop for than Drupal seven that's certainly been the experience for most of the people I've talked to great another question is from D Maus is D Maus in the house rhymes not not here all right so the question is while we're on the topic of symphony um you know obviously Drupal eight has taken advantage of symphony quite a bit so sort of more a question about the future but um the question is someday will Drupal be you know separated into smaller libraries so I don't know on the right side of the the table here Alex Alex or Larry or or even here if there's any um any thoughts on that yeah well we we started the process of thinking about that early on in the in the Drupal eight cycle by by moving to PSR zero um which is a a namespacing uh standard that was set up by the PHP fig group um and and we we we created a folder in in in the Drupal library called component which is exactly for stuff that that we think doesn't have like dependencies on on the whole of the Drupal ecosystem that we we might share at some point um with the rest of PHP um and we've now started to move our packaging and the way in which we commit different files to to Drupal to try and support that we're not probably even 50% of the way there we're not using composer correctly in call um and and there are there are some things to iron out but we're definitely thinking about it and yeah I think the future I think the future will be that when you're developing on on Drupal you'll you'll be able to create a composer file that says I want this bit of Drupal this bit this bit and then swap out something to something completely different for another part or not even get the theming engine if you don't care about the front end because you're doing angular js it just won't be in your distribution because the theme engine might be separated to that that could be our future that's all great um on on the on that topic you know the uh symphonica- symphonication of Drupal and increasing use of symphony also um caused caused some performance concerns like you know people a couple of questions here are like are rumors that the introduction of symphony has a negative impact on performance is this correct I don't think it's correct but I'll caveat that um when we introduced symphony to Drupal and by that I mean we pulled in many of the symphony components to help rebuild the the core of the system we did that by taking an existing known test at architecture throwing it into the middle of the system and letting the ripples flow where they will and that had the desired effect of giving us a base to build on and guidelines to follow as we refactored everything else uh around it it also meant lots of things have changed therefore a lot of the old performance optimizations we made no longer applied once we got to the point where okay now we know more or less what the system looks like we're able to go in and make more optimizations um two examples I can think of their not symphony but one of the things we've been doing as part of uh Drupal 8 is eliminating global states eliminating global variables which in turn allows us to actually use render caching effectively uh Drupal 7 had caching support for render arrays it was rarely used because it rarely worked in Drupal 8 a lot of the changes we've made make it possible to automatically turn on render caching in a lot of more places the more we do that the faster things get another example in Drupal 7 menu links and menu routing information were tightly coupled which was bad from an architectural standpoint but meant we could make optimizations like you know joining across tables naturally uh when generating menu links those got separated out into separate pieces in Drupal 8 which means we lose that optimization which means we have more database hits when we're creating menu links so we added a component that preloads the common routes and you know that performance problem went away so that kind of optimization is happening um I actually I was talking to someone from a hosting company yesterday I'm not going to say which one in case they don't want me to quote them um but they've been testing Drupal 8 on their cloud platform and they said it's actually on their system now a little bit faster than Drupal 7 um so the changes for Drupal 8 it is larger there are more moving parts but the structure we've taken gives more opportunity for optimization for more opportunity for caching for adding efficiency so the more we do that the faster it's going to get um and then there's a lot more individual sites can do so I think Drupal 8 out of the box being roughly on par with Drupal 7 performance is an achievable goal and I don't know if anyone's going to yell at me for that um a little and yeah okay yell at me for something else um but yeah I think saying that simply made Drupal slower is a gross oversimplification new architecture means the optimizations are different and we're still making those optimizations is the the more accurate we are putting it awesome Alex yeah sorry so I'd also like to just point out that you know Drupal 7 you know alpha 10 was several you know times slower than production Drupal 6 so it's it's sort of just I think the nature of a lot of software projects that you know pre beta software is slower a lot than the than the previous versions production release so there's room for optimization and um and yeah as far as you know whether comparing sort of Drupal 8 performance to Drupal 7 performance is a you know you sort of have to think about what's the question that you're asking you know what specific scenario are you testing so for example the way in which a lot of the optimizations in Drupal 8 come from the render caching which is huge and enabled you know out of the box and works you know small sites big sites you know whether the sites just using default database back end for everything or optimized to Mongo or whatever it's like those are you know every site gets the benefit from render caching and so it may be that you know we'll see but it may be the case that um you know an unprimed you know unprimed caches Drupal 8 is slower than Drupal 7 but once caches are well primed then you know under certain situations and situations that both small and large sites encounter and are common you know that Drupal 8 ends up being faster than Drupal 7 but it's it's too soon to tell you know there's a lot of optimization left to do and a lot of you know figuring out of you know where the caching is benefiting us where it's creating overhead that we don't want and yeah I would agree that it's not it's not accurate to blame it entirely on symphony because it's you know there's there's a lot of things you know we built the configuration management system that had nothing to do with symphony we built you know we've we massively improved the entity API to support both better code as well as you know much better handling of multilingual sites and the ability to do full restful apis to support web services I mean and that's all stuff that we wrote you know that that wasn't symphony and that's also where a lot of our performance problems are so so I agree that it's uh it's just new architecture new code and and the time between beta and release is optimizing it you know optimizing both cache misses and being able to you know one of the things that all the architecture buys us is the ability to cache much more effectively excellent so I want to be sensitive of time to have a couple more quick questions for Kathy but feel free to get your questions ready I want to make sure there's time to to get you know questions from the audience as well not just through the blog post but a number of questions Kathy around contributing to Drupal and you know people wonder as somebody who has never worked on Drupal Core or never contributed to Drupal Core and I'm eager to contribute to Drupal Core where do I start how do I get involved when we have a lot of ways for people to get involved in no particular order come to a Drupal event almost all Drupal events have a room somewhere with a table somewhere and there are people there working and you only have to go and sit down at the table with those people it's really hard it's scary it's uncomfortable but by the end of the day you're going to be excited you're going to be laughing you may cry a little bit and then you'll laugh again so here's a joy here's a joy so going to an event and being brave enough to sit down next to somebody is so rewarding and it's accessible the other thing if you can't go to an event you can I think that same kind of rewarding experience you can get on IRC and I know people new to contributing who don't understand the love of IRC think it's crazy but it's real-time interaction with other people and and that's really great so pound Drupal to ask just any old questions but to contribute you go to pound Drupal dash contribute and you can just say hey I've never contributed to core before what should I do and somebody may answer you and somebody may not but that's awesome there are specific also hours core office hours that a crew of mentors attend and those are exceptionally good and another way of getting involved could be if you are interested in a particular topic find out the people the other people that are working on that topic and find out when they're meeting we're doing a lot of meetings to organize the work on triple eight and coordinate it and so that's another way of interacting with humans and and they will bring you along and they will you know give you feedback and help you figure out something that's good for you to work on so we have oh those are the core office hours I do the what is my Monday night ones and then there's a whole bunch of people who do the the Wednesday ones but so for example I know that there's an entity meeting right like you guys have a weekly meeting and and multilingual has a weekly meeting and so kind of figure out like what kind of general topic do you want you know and when do they meet and show up and I'm trying to think the other thing that could be less terrifying for people might be to try triple eight like just site build like just open up the thing and be like gee if I were going to build a triple eight site what would I do maybe I would make a page right or maybe I would change the site name like just anything and yeah simply test me is amazing right that's Patrick D all the way and it's really enabled a lot of people to play with this because you can have your own version of triple eight and you don't you can do it on your phone you guys can do this right now all right you can admin triple eight on your phone and you don't have to have a local you know developments set up or anything my one bit of advice for simply test me is if you log in you get to play with your site for three and a half hours versus only an hour if you're anonymous so anyway I think that would really also contribute to core just firing it up and trying it does contribute to core and then if you want to take the next step you can you know look for a bug when you find one and if you can't find an issue or any existence just open one that would be hugely helpful that was excellent thank you no it's great so let's open it up to people in the audience again if you have a question please walk up to the mic so we can record it for other people to to listen to so maybe quickly introduce yourself before you ask the question I'm Ryan from Vietnam where do we go to quickly see that list of beta blockers um you can go to the Drupal core issue q which I'm sure everyone has in their autocomplete Drupal org slash project issue slash search such Drupal and then you search for the beta blocker tag where it says issue tags is one of beta blocker so these these 15 issues are the gnarly scary well some of them aren't scary but a lot of them are scary issues that we need to solve in order to get that beta out so Drupal orgs project issues search Drupal and then search for the beta blocker tag or if you like go to the you know the Drupal core page you can click through it but you know everyone everyone has this in their autocomplete but I would add we can do that that's a very good idea I'll do that and the second thing is also in addition to this you can also um not just the beta blockers but the other in addition to these 15 issues there's another 82 that are also um critical um blocking release although some of them are targeted for beta some of them are not but they're not blocking the beta and if you have these contributor links on your Drupal org dashboard you can see I have my your dashboard type on Drupal org um you can see there's a link right there to the critical bugs and the critical tasks and all the beta blockers are in those lists um because every single one of them is critical I'm not sure it was a legit question or you're trying to say you need to make it easier to find the beta blockers we should probably make it a little easier for people to find that list okay go ahead uh k van wolkenberg from own sourcing uh a lot of us are working pretty hard on documentation and I think uh you know the vision uh that we're working under might be a little bit out of date is anybody here able to articulate uh any revisions to the notion of documentation um yeah so uh that's a really great question uh in the past what we had is documentation team lead which is a person and more or less that person would burn out after some period of time between six months and two years what we've moved to now is a as an actual governance structure uh similar to like the technical working with the community working with there's actually documentation working group which is uh baddie golex jennifer hodgdon uh joe schindler from lullabot and uh lee hunter who was the other the former documentation team lead so now it's a working group that manages that they put out this post on the Drupal Drupal org slash core group called this month in Drupal documentation and this is how I know to find this is this is why we need a Drupal redesign because we're all like I know the url to go to define anyway if you go to Drupal groups at Drupal that's like a couple of posts back in there there's a link to their current priorities goals and and these kinds of things and it actually is out really well it's like this is where we've been this is what we're trying to do that's the group to get in alignment with I think and of those people the only one who I know is here is joe schindler um so hopefully he'll be at the sprint tomorrow he usually leads the community man uh like the intro to core session um so try and grab him he'd be a good person not to else that's that's all written up there very well documented because it's the documentation working group um and jennifer hazen is almost always available in irc as well and she's a great person to reach out to so for those who are perhaps less focused on uh documentation who might not make it to that blog post are there a couple of key salient points that yeah good good question so there's a groups that Drupal org slash it's either documentation hyphen team or docs team or something like that there's a there's a group on groups that Drupal org for that um there's also a twitter account Drupal docs where they tweet things out and announcements so yeah if you're into um and and all those monthly posts will be cross posted to both of those resources as well so yeah if you're into documentation and you want to get started there I will say uh it's a wonderful time to get involved in documentation because there's really no one taking strong leadership in that right now so you literally can do almost anything and be super helpful right now um you're not going to step on anyone's toes nobody's going to be offended just jump in do stuff but yeah I would say if you can do it in concert with what the documentation working groups trying to do that would be the ideal thing so you know we said documentation right but that means a whole bunch of different things to different people right sometimes those are pages on Drupal org right like the api's uh documentation that um people have been putting up is really excellent um there's also a really great efforts going on to improve the documentation in the source code right so there's a lot of different documentation things available if I could also plug tour module in core is awesome we need more people writing good tours I believe Lee Rowland is trying to coordinate stuff around that so if you want good built-in tutorials in Drupal itself or in a module itself that's another excellent place where we do need people working on it tour module to you are you are if you haven't used tour module it's awesome it gives you it's a way to define very simply a walkthrough for a given screen so in core right now the only place it's used is views but if you go to the views page in Drupal 8 today up in the top right corner there's a trigger for it and then it gives you pop-up balloons explaining what each part of the display does you can click next to see what the next part is it'll walk you through what you're supposed to do it's a wonderful wonderful thing all right well just maybe demos it we can take the next question hi Zach Schlemmer um my introduction is kind of encapsulated in my question going back to how someone can contribute in the past few years I've moved my focus from coding and development more to that of a system administrator project manager role for edu based research center how either tomorrow or in general other than providing test environments resources some of that what can I use my current strong skill set for tomorrow at the sprint or in general to help contribute yeah um that's an excellent question so if you're if you've kind of transcended development and you're more into sysops and sorry dev ops you don't even know the words but anyway transcendence is the right yeah ran away screaming from I don't know but yes so if you're more into like Linux see things and stuff like that um yeah it's actually a really great time to get involved Neil drum is over there he leads the Drupal org software working group as well as a Drupal infrastructure working group and I know tomorrow there will be Drupal org sprints going on with members of the infrastructure team and some big projects that they're working on are like revamping the test spot to be all Jenkins can docker blah blah I don't know the words but you know like very using a lot of like modern infrastructure best practice technologies opposed to building our continuous and integration environment on Drupal which is like it's cool it can do that but probably not very smart um so there's a lot of that kind of stuff happened they're trying to do a lot of work to puppetize the existing configuration to make it more useful so it's actually a really exciting time to be involved on the Drupal org infrastructure side if you're if you know if the idea of working on a site with about 40 000 authenticated users at any given time and you know like 150 different domains that we have to manage I mean it's it's it's pretty cool and there's actually starting to be some real um organization and leadership behind Drupal org so that would be my recommendation to you so I don't love my uh coding skill rustiness shy me away from tomorrow absolutely not all right yeah no so that's true for anything not just for DevOps stuff yeah right so uh tomorrow at the sprint you you don't have to be a coder you don't even have to know like even if you are a coder but you're like oh I don't know PHP Drupal's made a PHP no that's right like it doesn't matter who you are right we have something where you can help and be productive yeah one other suggestion um if you have both you know developer skills as well as DevOps skills like one area where you could get involved where we need a lot of help is performance testing so you know installing Drupal yeah like definitely we need people to benchmark and profile Drupal and and figure out where we can make it faster and documentary process or getting set up yeah thank you guys thank you great question I've been a Drupal lurker for about five years and about this time for Drupal 7 question came up as to whether the automatic testing mechanism was going to include automated load testing and performance testing so if a change is made we can know within 24 hours rather that's going to you know cause problems down the road and I don't know if we've had the time to actually do something about that I just heard a couple mentions of testing so I mean we've been dreaming about that for years but I don't think we have that today we don't have it yet but the Jeremy Thorson the maintainer of our automated testing infrastructure is currently working with the Drupal Association to sort of modernize the texting architecture and once that project's done I think that we'll be able to enable a lot more different kinds of automated testing you know performance testings one testing in different environments front-end testing more behavior testing rather than so there's there's a lot of potential there not necessarily that's not available yet but that within a few months we'll be able to start working on some new projects so is Jeremy in their audience I don't think so is he at the conference yes yeah so go go look for Jeremy yeah microphone I can repeat it too yeah so so what this is Neil Drum over here he works for the Drupal Association so so what he said is that Jeremy Thorson will be also at the sprint tomorrow sprinting on that new architecture so look for a sign that says Drupal.org testing infrastructure or architecture something like that or just the words Drupal.org if you're interested in helping out with that because we could we could definitely use more people working on that awesome my name is Divyash I'm from eSource in Boulder my question is for for Dries Dries I'd like to know your vision I know we saw your most of your keynote two days ago and it was awesome thank you some of it did seem like it's fine in the sky a lot to achieve with what we're trying to do so and I know a little bit let me back up I'm new to Drupal I've been with Drupal for a year I used to be a Java guy so I have heard a little bit about where Drupal 8 is going and why it's going that way but I don't quite understand I want I want to hear maybe a one-line mission statement from you and why you did certain things like a symphony I've heard that object oriented programming is coming back I know that there are a lot of skeptics so if you can address them yeah it's interesting like if you look at the history of websites like there's definitely been an increase in complexity I mean building a website five years ago is was completely different than building it today and five years ago was completely different than ten years ago right and so there's this acceleration of innovation on the web like you know I feel like when I started Drupal in around 2000 I feel like I could wrap my arms around everything that was happening on the web like I saw oh somebody's working on RSS and I would implement RSS and I felt like I could see everything that was going on on the web at the time and so today of course I mean there's you know things launching every day new startups new services there's so much stuff going on and so I think the only way to stay relevant in that future where it's only going to accelerate is to be a platform it's to be a platform that other people and organizations can innovate upon and build these kinds of integrations you know with these all these other things that are launching and a lot of what we've done with Drupal 8 is rethinking our platform and making it so that we can integrate easier and innovate faster so if you look at Drupal 8 there isn't all that much new end user facing stuff compared to 7 but hopefully it will be a platform that allows the contributed module space to really accelerate to build more modules that integrate with more different systems and to do that easier and better than we've been able to do so in the past and I think and so it's interesting because we don't really know yet if that's going to be the case you know but there's anecdotal evidence from talking to different contributed module maintainers that it that that it will be like I talked to the media module team yesterday and they were very excited about Drupal 8 and how it actually simplifies their module so it's a it's a good early indicator in my mind that the contributed module space will flourish on top of Drupal 8 and I think that will so you know make make for I mean that's great news for Drupal and our ability to stay relevant because I don't think I think the only way to stay relevant is actually to be an open source platform and I think all of the proprietary vendors are unable to keep up with the speed of innovation of the of the web the only strategy that they have is to unbundle and to build these integrations as well but it's impossible to build you know like if you think about Drupal we have 20,000 something modules like you know I mean no proprietary company can build that amount of modules or very few will be able to so thank you and welcome hi my name is Rife I'm working for a for a Drupal shop in Germany and my question is what is the state of of pennies and pennies everywhere for Drupal 8 I do not know myself anyone knows to enter anyone in the audience maybe I can try to speak to that um so there's somebody knows like I can oh no so just to repeat that for the recording and for people who couldn't quite hear there is a sprint on layouting in general in Zurich next week was it and I think you can probably I think that this is probably another shop called mb systems if you if you look on their blog you'll probably see some more information about it so they're going to talk about sort of the layouting ecosystem panels and similar models integrate I'm also right now looking I just went to look at the repository for panels itself and it does not appear to have um an 8x branch open right now but I know that obviously layouts is the big the the next big thing that we're going to want to put into along with media maybe into like uh into core and we could think maybe an 8.2 8.3 or something like that so this is a very important part of Drupal and I I'm sure that there will be if it's not a you know exactly the panels we've known there will be a robust solution in Drupal 8 um just to say something a little less dire um I happen to know I happen to know that uh Tim Plunkett is working on a port of the page manager module which is the thing that powers all of the panels previously previously part of C tools that right as the only part of C tools that didn't make it into core more or less and and it's it's working he like has a video and it's like it's doing stuff and it's it's awesome there's also still work happening in core uh that's not building layout but trying to improve the apis that layout type tools are going to use to make it easier to build you know panels or it's a successor or other approaches to that problem space so that's an area I'm still working on is just trying to line up some of those dominoes and apis to simplify that process for contrib awesome okay thank you all right we have um two more minutes and two questions my name's Eric Hammerly I'm from on assignment I'm more a staffing firm so I had the pleasure of upgrading about 15 to 20 of our sites from six to seven about two years ago and um yeah we had a test module it was fun so I believe I used the coder module I think to get me most of the way there so my question is um as far as seven to eight what's the suggested method for converting the modules and then more importantly because there's been such a drastic difference between seven and eight versus six to seven how far does that actually get you yeah that's a great question so the question is are there any like tools that can help expedite the porting process um yes so uh in Drupal six uh it was called Deadwood in Drupal seven it was called coder upgrade it was moved into the coder module in Drupal eight coder wants to kind of just be coder again and the coder upgrade maintainers didn't have really any interest in continuing down the open source gpl path so um at aquia when we did our hackathon in February we built a thing called Drupal module upgrade we figured maybe we'll just call it what it is so people might find it um I will say it's not very well maintained at the moment just because like we're not in out of beta yet so there's not really uh there's point in working on it but it's like things are still changing so um if you're interested in working on that I would love to talk to you I was sort of the team lead on that um I think what it does currently is as of three months ago or whatever February was it would um convert your info file convert your blocks to plugins convert your menu uh hook menu to some routes stuff it was you know it was demo quality it wasn't like a complete but the the foundations are there and it's built on something called PHP code sniffers so you actually get IDE um integration telling you this is what you need to change in this so like yeah it's pretty cool but it's it's very early so I don't want to I don't want to oversell it but yeah I think very soon right yeah yeah but I guess I I did want to put a plug in for that because the people in this room are the people who are going to need it and they're also the people best poised to help develop it so I think you know if we all as reporting our modules kind of try to write a rule or two or even just it's cool you can actually just write a notification so just like here's a thing you should read about it over here or you can actually try and fix it and I think if we all just you know maybe at the next Drupal con just hammered on this and like got a bunch of notifications up that alone would be awesome because for your particular module it could tell you these are the out of the 300,000 change notices these are the 40 that mean something to you Drupal module upgrade it's also up here on the screen and I can put it in the session notes Drupal module upgrade all one word on the project there's one other thing oh I'm all right real quick okay there's also um the Drupal 8 console scaffolding module from Jesus Molivas uh Jay Molivas so check that out too thank you one more question we're out of time so I don't want to make people I hope this will be sort of short my name is Mark I work in the Washington DC area where obviously Drupal very strong presence and I was very curious about I'd love to just um hear if there were any lessons learned for the Drupal organization from the healthcare.gov they asked which you know unfortunately we we didn't get to work on I was curious why Drupal did not have a role in healthcare.gov would it have gone better yeah I think that was actually one of the questions I was submitted as well that was yeah sorry we didn't get it didn't get to that question yeah I mean I think you know there's so many lessons learned I think from healthcare.gov like all the way from you know maybe they should have used open source instead of a custom built implementation I believe it was all the way to you know software methodologies like I don't believe they used agile techniques apparently not apparently yeah I and also the people who could have worked on it if we could have engaged the as curious why Drupal was not selected so yeah I don't know to be honest there's usually a lot of different reasons sometimes it's political but oftentimes it's still especially in sort of the enterprise and in government world it's still fear about open source and Drupal and you know how does it work and does it scale and is it secure and for us that's all natural to use open source but you would be surprised for how many organizations it's still a big leap to take to to actually use open source for these kinds of large implementations so I think we have to keep evangelizing keep promoting the benefits of Drupal and open source and then hopefully that will solve that problem thank you well thanks everyone for submitting questions thanks for asking questions also to wrap things up there I also wanted to just give you like three next steps these are the three things that you can do to help us make Drupal 8 successful and get it done soon and then get it done beautifully number one come to the sprints tomorrow there's a full sprint day on Friday there will be hundreds of people working together it will blow your mind if you haven't been to one of our sprints tomorrow previously number two is give your developers time to play with Drupal 8 if you own a shop or if you're working for an organization that's looking at it give them time to explore use it maybe even give them some time to contribute back and thing number three is if if the thought of you know committing your own organization's time to Drupal 8 is like you just you can't figure out how you could fit that into your current timeline there's a very simple way that you can contribute financially to Drupal core development there's this site gettip.com that allows you to refresh okay yay so on gettip.com there's a team of developers who are working on Drupal core these are the people who are receiving money from this group are developers who are working on core either partially or completely in in their free time they're not being funded by any organization so this is the way that you can you can give back and contribute and and support people who are doing active work even if you don't have time to do it yourself thank you very much


Rick Ross has been busy enjoying the warm weather at his Atlanta mansion recently, whether he's lounging by the pool mowing his 200-acre lawn or showing off his luxury car collection. I really don't think the rappers had much trouble being hold up at home for quarantine, either considering he owns the largest mansion in the state of Georgia. He bought this monster palace back in 2014, and prior to that lived in Florida where he still spends a lot of time. We'll be taking a look at Rick's mansions and we even found the listings. William Leonard Roberts II, aka Rick Ross, is a rapper, songwriter, entrepreneur, and record executive. After releasing the track, Hustlen, he was the subject of a bidding war between Diddy and Irv Gotti's labels before going on to sign a multimillion-dollar deal with Jay-Z and Def Jam. These days, although he's worked with the best of the best, Rick went on to start his own record label, Maybach Music Group, back in 2009, which he released plenty of albums with. He was also the first artist signed to Diddy's management company, Sorok Entertainment, and even more recently, he's an author releasing his memoir titled Hurricanes. All things considered, Ricky Rosé is one of the wealthiest rappers in the game, with an estimated net worth of $40 million or more. It's no wonder he afforded himself a mansion almost as big as the White House. Hey guys, it's Karen, today we're doing another house tour here on Famous Entertainment. We'll be taking a look at where the legend Rick Ross calls home in Georgia, which is reportedly the biggest single-family home in the whole state, as well as his previous mansion in Florida. Although he sold his main Fort Lauderdale house, he still spends a ton of time there. If you like these videos, make sure you're subscribed during that bell to be notified when we post, you can always be up to date. We've also done house tours and likes of Jay-Z and Lil Wayne, and we'll link to some at the end. Follow me on Instagram to chat, and as usual, let me know whose house tour is next in those comments down below. Now let's get into this video. Before we get into Rick Ross's insane Georgia estate, let's look at the Fort Lauderdale mansion he lived in just before. He sold the home in 2016, and it's also reported his mother was living there at some point. Although the rapper originally listed the Florida house as high as 9.25 million back in 2014, it ended up selling for just over 6 million, still a million dollars more than he purchased it for. Rick still spends a ton of time in Florida, and I'm not surprised because it's where he lived most of his life. He apparently grew up in the Carroll City area of Miami, and other reports claim that even before this home, he had a spot in the Long Lake Ranch's community of Davey, Florida, which he got in 2008 for 1.25 million. Anyways, the mansion Rick sold in 2016 was located on a canal in 7 Isles, and according to the listing was a three-storey Mediterranean-inspired villa estate. It's at on almost half an acre of land, all of which was kept secure by big iron gates, and also offered 150 feet of waterfront, a must-have in sunny Florida. Inside his previous mansion, there was over 10,000 square feet of living space with eight bedrooms, 11 full baths, and two half baths. The home was elegant and combined the best of indoor and outdoor living. Walking in Rick's Florida home, there was a dramatic entryway, of course leading to the main open-plan living spaces. The highlight here was definitely the two-storey great room with 20-foot ceilings and balconies from the upper level looking down on the space. Now to mention, there was a two-storey fireplace and Florida-stealing windows on one end of the room. There was a kitchen with marble countertops and access to the outside area as well as more family and dining rooms to gather in. Some of the features in Rick's mansion included a home movie theater which looked a bit dated from the listing pictures on the all-right interior, an arcade room and a home gym with flat-screen TV and mirrored walls for selfies or perhaps motivation. There's also a full bar, elevator to move from floor to floor and an in-home sauna. Rick's master suite offered shiny marble flooring and an expansive layout with sitting area, fireplace, and attached private terrace. Bath came with a large center tub, dual vanities, glass-enclosed shower, and pillars to make everything feel royal. Moving outside his previous mansion, there was a huge backyard entertaining area with outdoor kitchen and dining. Heated pool with built-in bar and spa as well as a gazebo. Not to mention, all of that waterfront with easy access to the ocean and even a private concrete dock built for a true mega yacht. Realtor.com assumes that these days, Rick's Florida home is worth about 5.9 million so if that's true, he sold the place at the right time, making almost a million more on the sale. After unloading his 10,000-square-foot-plus home in Fort Lauderdale, Rick made quite the upgrade buying this current mega mansion in Fayetteville, Georgia. And it's not just any house. This place used to be owned by the heavyweight boxing champ Evander Holyfield and it even has a name, Villa Vittorio, meaning The Victory. Apparently, the home used European influence from its native Malta in the design with contemporary timeless architecture. The rapper purchased the home in 2014 for 5.8 million after it had fallen into foreclosure while Mr. Holyfield owned it so it was really quite the steal. Rick resides in Fayetteville, a city in Georgia which is only about 20 miles or so from downtown Atlanta. And like I mentioned, his mansion is the biggest single-family residence in all of Georgia, only 1,000 square feet less than the White House. It covers a whopping 235-acre lot and insidespans 54,000 square feet with a total of 109 rooms. The Maybach Music founder hosted NBA star Nate Robinson at his mansion and set about the stately home. It took me 2-3 days to walk through the whole house, just absorbing it. Which doesn't surprise me. Out of the 109 rooms in Rick's house, 12 of them are bedrooms and 21 are bathrooms which I wonder how do you even use that many?  The front driveway has a center fountain with landscaping and embellished with an R for his initials so it's the first thing you see. Walking in, there's a stadium-sized entry with dual-winding staircases, marble flooring, a rounded ceiling and white columns all over. In fact, listing photos showed that most of the rooms were gold accented with columns and floor-to-ceiling curtains. Rick has likely updated the mansion quite a bit over the last few years. The formal dining room in Rick's mega mansion has the ability to seat approximately 100 guests and has been featured on shows like Drop Dead Diva.  There's also a boxing gym, recording studio and full-size indoor swimming pool. Of course, Rick had to choose from the 12 luxury bedrooms here which he would stay in and his master suite is nothing short of impressive offering a ton of space and a walk-in closet and dressing room. The master bath is spa-style and even the jacuzzi tub has large pillars surrounding it. Outside on the grounds of Rick's mega estate, there's a 4,000-square-foot detached guest house and a seven-stall barn. Not to mention, it's as close to a sportsman's paradise as you can get with features like a handball court, basketball court, tennis court and even a softball field complete with lights and a scoreboard.  If that's not enough, Rick has one of the largest private pools in all of the United States on his property. His swimming pool sits at over 350,000 gallons. According to Ross, his swimming pool is so big, he was offered good money to allow horses to train in it saying, I hold the world's greatest pool parties in the summer. I was offered six figures by horse trainers to allow race horses to train in the pool. Rick also previously invited in movie cameras on other occasions into his mega mansion like when they were filming the movie Superfly. All features considered, Rick Ross has quite the crazy mansion. I haven't seen as many as big as that. But opulence like this does come at a cost and he definitely does have to cut up some sizable checks. The monthly electricity bill for the mansion is estimated at 17K while the cost of the year round up keep is said to be the neighborhood of $1 million.  We can even see from his Instagram it seems the man is always getting a new set of wheels to show off. The man behind the success of rappers like Meek Mill also revealed that he names all his cars, his favorite being a Rolls Royce christened Rihanna. This is Rihanna right here. I would say my favorite. What's your favorite? Yeah, that's my rave. That's the first Rolls Royce they made with the stars in the top. And I remember when I first got it, I just rolled around listening to Umbrella. Once you get inside this and sit under the stars you need Umbrella. You know what I'm saying? And Rhee, I hold you Umbrella baby. Besides that new Maybach military Hummer he just got delivered. He owns everything from a Ford monster truck to a Maybach 5.7 worth over 400K. Some of Rick's cars include a Lamborghini Murcia logo, a Ferrari 458 Italia, a few Mercedes-Benz's, a Rolls Royce Phantom Drophead Coupe, several classic cars and much more. So now we've taken a look at where rapper Rick Ross calls home and I gotta say it's one of the craziest rapper mansions I think I've seen. Like the home was expensive at almost 6 million dollars but you'd think the biggest home in Georgia would be even pricier than that. I guess that's one of the perks with foreclosure. His current home has everything from a bowling alley to an entire baseball field and even one of the biggest homeswimming pools in the country. What was your favorite feature of Rick's mega mansion? The home is personally too big for me. I think I'd lose my dogs in there with 109 rooms but if I had to choose I love the classic features best like the huge ballroom and the great room because they look like something from a palace. Anyways, after looking at Rick Ross's mansions like his current 54,000 square foot estate in his previous Florida home which one did you like best? Be sure to let me know in those comments down below as well as what other celebrity houses you'd like to see. Follow me on Instagram if you want to chat and I'll see you all next time. Bye.


Live from New York, it's theCUBE, covering Inforum 2016, brought to you by Inforum. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and George Gilbert. Welcome back to the Big Apple, everybody. Jeff Abbott is here as the Senior Vice President of the Inforum Partner Network. We're talking ecosystem with Jeff. Jeff, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks, Dave. So we look around. Great show this year. Attendance looks like it's up from New Orleans. Oh, no doubt. Right?  Of course, New York City helps as well. But at any rate, how's the show going so far? What's happening out there? Lots of excitement on the floor, guys. We're, you know, we actually, to your point, about attendance, we've had greater and greater partner involvement in the show, and this is a record breaker for us in terms of partner involvement. The number of sponsors that are here, they're partners, and they're bringing a tremendous amount of their customers to the show. For the reasons you've probably already mentioned this morning, just the transformation that Infor's taking its customers through, and partners have seen opportunities that they've never seen before from any vendor in this field. So talk about that whole, you know, dynamic a little bit, because Infor's different.   No mods is your sort of mantra. Right. Yes, ah, you think ERP and SAP and all the, you know, recurring revenue from that. So what's an Infor partner like? What are you looking for? What are they looking for and describe that? Yeah, great question. So we have two big communities. We have the systems integrators, which in the last three or four years, we've done a lot of work to bring in relationships like Accenture and Deloitte and Cyber and AVAP. And these are your go-to-market partners that essentially align with our field sales organization, introduce us into accounts that they already have relationships in and we win business together. We create transformation strategies together in the market. And you're right. You know, all cloud has been an intimidating factor for them, especially in the last few years, but they've found a way with us to transform their businesses just like we are, right? And they've found ways to essentially create cloud value, right, for their customers. And going to market together has been great because as we've learned and transformed our business in the cloud, so too we have this ecosystems of services partners going with us and understanding the change that customers are going through and the value they can add. Then on the other end of the market, in the SMB, the small and medium business market, we have over 750 channel partner resellers around the world. Again, same transition guys. They're learning very quickly on how to do the no mods, the turnkey implementations, and so on, and create value by presenting a solution in the cloud. So, you know, 1,500 partners total. All of us learning together with this transition to cloud is all about, but finding the value spots along the way. And now, so that's interesting. You talk about the service partners. At the same time, Charles this morning was talking about to put up some slides on how much you've invested in services. So how do you walk that fine line? What's the message to partners? It is a fine line. We're offering a lot of the latest opportunities in the market, whether it's industries or solutions to the partner community first. So, well, Stefan will meet with our top flight services partners and our alliance partners and suggest, why don't you expand into the Middle East or parts of Southeast Asia or parts of Eastern Europe? Our solutions are growing there. And in a lot of cases they are. They're opening new offices. They're creating new practices on our latest solutions and so on. But we still have to service those customers where we don't have the same strength in the alliance partner community. So I have a giant kind of wall map that shows our coverage model for the alliance partner community by industry and by solution. And where we have those gaps, Darren and his team are filling them in by hiring and training their own people. So we love the whole ecosystem play. You've seen so many companies leverage it. I mean, VMware is a classic example. Todd Nielsen, former president of VMware, used to throw out a stat for every dollar spent on a VMware license. 13 is spent on the ecosystem solutions and that rose to 15 and then 18. And you could see the ecosystem growing. My question, Jeff, is what about innovation that comes from the ecosystem? You guys talked a lot about investments you're making. Can you get, and how do you get a multiplier effect from the ecosystem? Great question. And that's something that we actually pride ourselves as a differentiation in the market. I like to say that your ecosystem is one of the last strategic competitive advantages in enterprise software and we believe that's true. So we have to present those opportunities for them to expand our solutions to innovate and to grow. So things like our development platform, Mongoose. On this platform, we invite our channel partners to go into micro verticals. I'm not talking about just auto but automotive aftermarket parts. Very specific micro vertical industries where they can then add their own intellectual property, their own content to our reporting, pre-populate business intelligence reports and so on and then perhaps even develop their own extensions on our solutions and build out next generation software right there for the customer. Out of the box. Correct. And we're actually going to put a marketplace in place where they can post their extensions so any customer in the world that happens to be in that micro vertical can leverage it. So that's our strategy is to grant kind of a landscape to both alliance partners and channel partners to innovate freely. Are those partners who are building, essentially, I mean if you're thinking about it in consumer phone terms, it's almost like a new skin. Right. Are they also the ones who do the sort of implementation configuration work or when it's a cloud product, they, the activities change. They do. Talk about how a partner's sort of business had to change what we were talking about earlier from when it was purely a non-premises product to a cloud product or a hybrid. Yeah, great point, George. So actually I'll give you a very specific example. We have an excellent partner in North America, Copley, who decided, you know what? We like where your cloud suite product is for a med device, but we think we can do even better with it. So, Copley has built some extensions specifically for medical device, that sub-industry, that extends the reporting and extends the functionality, creates real specific value in that industry, value that speaks directly to those customers. And at the same time, they've retrained their own services organization on what it means to implement in the cloud and what it means to pre-populate those reports and so on. As you said earlier, Dave, out of the box, those customers get the content they want, the reporting they want, and all the while, to your question, George, about what a channel partner does, that partner escorts them through the transformation. So all the demos, all the discovery on what business value they're trying to create through the sales process and the implementation and support. So our channel partners are full service partners. They do all of the selling, implementing, and a lot of them long-term support of the customer. When you say long-term support, like in the older, on-premises era, that would include the patching, maintenance, security, upgrades. But what does that look like now? Yeah, yeah, so that has changed, right? Whereas those same partners were kind of visiting the customer on site all the time, it's been less so, now that they're transitioning to the cloud, it's been more remote, remote implementations, data migrations, the tuning of the solution, but they're still business advisors, right? Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, I want to key off that business advisor comment because it sounds like even though there's a role, there's transition from the on-premise role to the sort of cloud provider role, but it sounds like the skills involved in the partner are very, very different. They are. So whereas the entity, the partner entity can make the transition, not all the people there can. So funny you say that, so this morning I have held about 10 partner meetings so far, a lot more to come, but in each and every one of those discussions, we're having that hard conversation about the transition of your staff and the transition of your business model and your mentality. So between Infor and all of our partners, we created a mutual business plan, right? So that, and that's important so that they understand where our products are going, where our overall strategy's going, but it's equally important so that our customers have a level of confidence that I'm transitioning the best knowledge I have available on what a cloud transformation looks like to my partners. And one of the top challenges they have is bringing in that, call it millennial level talent of folks who don't remember client server and who don't remember the historic side of enterprise software and more so are used to, no, no, no, it should be turnkey. I should be able to just, you know, log in in the cloud, have what I need, where I want it, and if I want to change the configuration, partners have to adopt that mentality. They have to pick up the talent that understands that that's the industry we're now in. Well, a lot of companies, software companies, are looking at the cloud saying, oh, hey, we can claw back some of the channel and cut out the middleman. Ah, cloud's simple. We can, you know, take some of those millennials, put them in the phone, hire some athletes about a, you know, whatever, you know, San Jose State and put them on the phone and go crazy. You're taking a different approach contrast that you're the in for philosophy.  It's more than just picking up the phone and making contact with a customer and explaining what the solution does, the value in a channel community, the value in a partner ecosystem overall is extending the knowledge that a vendor provides and extending the capabilities that we provide.  Didn't want to say it, but I'd say it for you. Irox, you know what Irox stands for? He knows. Go ahead. Idiot right out of college. Yeah. That's that. You guys can say that. Exactly. You know, somebody who doesn't have any experience in the industry, can't speak the language and then the first question they get kind of goes, hold on a minute, and they're flipping through their script, trying to find the answer, just doesn't work, right? And that's the value, again, that's why I think a competent ecosystem is a differentiator, because you can provide the value, you have the experience, you've been there, done that, and you can give, you know, customers who are putting down a lot of money to transform confidence that they're doing it the right way. Oh, to be in IROC again, this is the best time of your life, by the way. Support for partners. What do you guys do? Pitch me, I'm a potential partner, what's in it for me? Well, first of all, for anyone who's interested, Wednesday, we're kicking off the Partner Summit here in New York, very excited about that, but we constructed the Infor Partner Network program about five years ago, and it's now a four-time five-star channel program, or partner ecosystem program by CRN, channel reseller news, so we're really proud of that, because that means that we are a top flight enablement program for our partner community, and that's the name of the game with the partner community, is enablement, right? Making sure that they're getting the proper training, the proper access, that we've got the right portals in place for them to self-service, gather the product roadmaps to gather all of the online training, and, you know, what I say to a new prospective partner, and we're recruiting new partners all the time, I think we have 1500 now, I think we could easily have 2000 in the next two or three years.  So, unlike a lot of our competitors who will take, for example, a market, and they'll pile 15, 20, 50 partners in the same market and say, go at it, we don't do that. We're intimate with our partners, we select very few, but we try to select the highest quality partners, and we make them successful with direct relationships in either channel or alliance management. Enablement liaisons, we do conferences like this every year where we invest a lot of money to make sure they're getting access to the best of info. So there's some degree of exclusivity, I don't want to say exclusive, but there's a quasi-exclusive, a selective process. It's a good way to put it. I would say it's very selective, not exclusive, but very selective. Customers still have choice, right, amongst both our alliances and our channel community, but we do put a lot of investment to make sure that no matter who the partner, they're highly competent, highly trained, and they're proven. So, again, think of it this way. If when you walk in and you're evaluating a new car, a lot of times six guys jump you at the same time, nobody likes that, right? That's not us. What we do is put a knowledgeable person in front of you that knows already the kind of car you might be interested in and has already done their research and their homework to make sure that they're presenting the best possible solution for your need. Have you guys sort of figured out a bracket for the size of the company customer that you can go after with your channel model? And how would that stack up with, I don't know, NetSuite or even SAP or Oracle if they could possibly reach that far? Yeah, our segmentation is very clear and transparent. So essentially, for new prospects or new companies interested in enforced solutions, all customers $75 million in annual revenue and below, that's the market that our channel community serves. Now, companies $75 million to $500 million, we kind of call that a coexist zone and that's where either a direct sales rep or a channel partner can serve the account. Depends on where the relationship is and who's got the experience and so on. But we create that transparent segmentation, George, because number one, customers want to know what's the coverage model. But number two, we're trying to minimize channel conflict. I really don't want to have a direct sales organization presenting at the same time with channel partners. It doesn't make sense, it's not efficient. So that works well for us. Compared to our competition, I think we've actually maintained very steady segmentation model where when I look, our competition's kind of all over the road, like we were saying. Some are now abandoning their partner communities all together in favor of an inside sales model. Some kind of flip-flop those segmentation lines every year, but we've remained very steady. In fact, that segmentation I've talked about has been the same, it's been for at least five or six years now. Worse, very well. You gave an example earlier, Jeff, of a customer actually said, hey, we can improve upon this functionality and develop some additional capabilities. What about the developer world? I haven't heard much about the platform, Infor is a platform that you're going to open up to the world. Is that something that's in the world? How, where do developers play? Yeah, no great question. So, like an ISV community, right? An independent solution vendor community. It's not something we've had in the past. We do have solution partnerships and a lot of them are here and sponsoring and they're great solutions. But we are pressing to do more of what you're describing, Dave. We think that there is, with the advancement of the solutions and kind of us now taking all of them to the cloud, there's an opportunity to create a community of developers who, you know, on their own build extensions and solutions either in the vertical sense or in the solution sense. So, it's something that we're just getting started. Don't really have an announcement about it, but we do have a platform. The Mongoose platform is built for exactly that. Right, and so, you can't take that lightly. So, you've got, the key thing I'm hearing is you've got the tech. And now you need a business infrastructure to support that. Correct. And there's a whole new marketing initiative. And a marketplace. Yeah, right. Exactly, exactly. So, stay tuned. It's on the horizon. All right, what else is on the horizon? What should we be paying attention to in terms of the ecosystem? Things that we should be watching in terms of indicators of success and growth? Yeah, great question. So, I would say, you know, when I'm on stage on Wednesday and presenting to my partner community, I'm going to show them a couple of really, really encouraging graphs. Number one, we have a steep up and to the right graph on cloud adoption in the channel partner community. It's not been an easy transition for them, like we discussed, but they are adopting cloud. And I would say one out of every four or five deals now in the channel community is a cloud deal. And that might not sound like much, but it's accelerating. On the alliance's side, I'd say one or two out of every five opportunities our direct sales force is working on is with a partner. So, in total now, one out of every three deals is a partner's engaged. So, we're seeing, and that's what we want. We want the ecosystem to be very active in the growth of the company. So, for example, channel accounts for 20% of the company's current sales growth or overall sales target. And in the alliance's side, again, one out of every five direct deals sold by a direct rep is included in alliance partner, and that's increasing. So, I think if we met a year from now, those numbers might even, you know, not double, but they'll be up and to the right. It gives you so much leverage, so much coverage, you know, and, you know, talking about overseas opportunities as well. To me, it's critical. Critical part of a company's growth strategy for a $3 billion company that wants to be a $20 billion company. And customers, they want that. They want a healthy ecosystem, especially the multinationals who say, that's great, you've got excellent services here in the United States, but I have locations in Japan and Singapore and Australia, New Zealand. I need kind of a full services package, and that's where the ecosystem's critical. We're up against the clock, but go ahead. Quick question. Dave brought up the topic of how about platform as ecosystem. And I was thinking about GT Nexus, how about network as ecosystem. What is that, I mean, that allows you to think of much broader deals, might be harder to sell, you know, or more of a senior level sell, but it's a very different game. It is, and the GT Nexus team has done a phenomenal job of creating alliance relationships for that exact reason. They've got systems integrator relationships at the highest level across several different industries, including automotive, some in retail, et cetera, whereby those partners are essentially advising their clients, this is the right platform for you to drop in your supply chain and your needs from suppliers all the way through to distributors and end-use customers to create transparency across the entire vertical, as Charles discussed on stage this morning. So those alliance partner communities are seeing the value of the GT Nexus. It's actually, you know, I remember in the late 90s, everybody thought we could create all of these super networks and so on. GT Nexus is one of the only companies I've ever seen that's pulled it off, right, and gotten a tremendous amount of liquidity on that platform, and the big SIs all see it and they're advising their clients to get on it. Excellent. All right, in for investing in its ecosystem, bringing innovation, of course, we're bringing content to our ecosystem with theCUBE, Jeff Abbott, thanks very much for coming on. All right, keep right there. Everybody will be back to the Big Apple right after this word.