Talking Drupal Newsletter #491
#491 - OpenY
Today we are talking about OpenY, a distribution for YMCAs, why it was created, and how it’s used today with guests Avi Schwab and Brent Wilker. We’ll also cover AI Media Image as our module of the week.
Topics
What is OpenY
Why is it important to the YMCA
How many Y's use it
Is each Y independent technologically
Why doesn't the Y create a platform as a service
How do you get the message out about OpenY
What does a Y pay for and how do they pay
What is the governance layer like
Any thoughts on recipes
How does theming work
New features to come
How does ImageX support OpenY
Resources
MOTW
YMCA Sandboxes
https://sandboxes.y.org/
https://sandbox-carnation-std.y.org/
Get in touch with ImageX about Open Y
Avi’s sourdough recipe base and flour
https://www.janiesmill.com/
Guests
Brent Wilker - ImageX.co brent.wilker
Hosts
Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan
John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi
Avi Schwab - froboy.org froboy
Module of the Week
with Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu
Upcoming Episodes
#492 Pantheon Content Publisher with John Money & Chris Reynolds. Recording March 4.
#493 Drupal Developer Survey with Mike Richardson. Recording March 11.
#494 AI in EDU with Michael Miles. Recording March 18.
Submit your questions on the #TalkingDrupal channel on Drupal Slack.
Talking Drupal Numbers
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Downloads for 2025 by country.
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5 Questions with Avi Schwab
Avi came to Drupal for the community and has been active in it since 2008. He is a founding organizer of MidCamp, Midwest Open Source Alliance, and the Event Organizer Working Group. For pay, he supports over 40 YMCA associations in the USA and Canada. For fun, he bikes, bakes, and enjoys time with his family.
What was your first Drupal website?
The first site I can remember working on was the University of Chicago Film Studies Center, a Drupal 6 site, in 2010. I’d dabbled with a few other small sites, but this was my first major project. They paid for the central Web Services office to develop a theme (in Photoshop) which I then converted into a Drupal theme with the help of Emma Jane’s “Design to Theme” course. My coworker wrote some custom PHP to search a FileMaker database of their giant catalog of films and I developed the front end for the functionality. Headings were done in sIFR, the amazing but ultimately doomed method of rendering fancy fonts on the web with Flash. Here’s their prior site, and here’s the “new” version I worked on.
What is your first memory of technology that impacted you?
My dad is also a technologist, and I was steeped in it as a child. We got our first family Mac when I was 4 or 5 and I remember sitting on one of those amazing ‘80s “ergonomic chairs” playing Cairo Shootout and Dark Castle and lots of the classic Mac games. Then we got a modem and I was on BBS’s playing Legend of the Red Dragon. All of that led in a pretty straight line to my career. I worked tech support at an ISP (which was really just a big room with a stack of a few dozen modems) for a hot minute in high school. I supported a bunch of vintage computers at local schools as a Peace Corps volunteer in Tanzania. I fixed grad students’ printers and helped tenured faculty figure out their email while doing desktop support at UChicago… and then Drupal fell in my lap.
We all have professional disaster stories; do you care to share one?
One I feel particularly sad about is “that time I lost 300 sites to Wordpress”. At the end of my tenure at the University (almost a decade ago now), I had inherited a massive multisite instance with over 200 live department and office sites. The sites were technically stable - multisite was great at maintaining a standard theme for hundreds of sites and pushing updates to them. Our service model was struggling to match the needs of our clients (doing lots of custom stuff) to our business needs (doing cost recovery) and our costs were way too high. Eventually I ended up leaving and soon after the sites moved to a managed Wordpress provider that was able to provide similar services for 10% of the upfront cost. It still makes me sad, but I think it’s been a good guide for some of the needs we still struggle with in the Drupal community.
Do you prefer quiet or noise when working? What is your noise?
I love listening to music. I’ll usually alternate between the NPR All Songs Considered new albums of the week and my playlists of prior finds. Occasionally I dive into friend’s recs and an old coworker’s incredibly prolific music blog for inspiration. I have a handful of classic favorites - Talking Heads, Flaming Lips, Andrew Bird, Kishi Bashi - but I also really enjoy finding new artists across genres. I keep playlists of the new albums I discover each year. Here’s 2024.
I absolutely can not listen to podcasts while I work, so they’re relegated to non-work hours. People talking just take up too much space in my coding brain (sorry TD’ers!).
What is your favorite sport and team to follow?
I have zero interest in following sports, but we enjoy going to White Sox games to support our home team. We were around for 2005 when they won the World Series, but “$5 Tuesdays” then the team isn’t so hot are just as fun for us. Now that our daughter is older we’ve been riding our bicycles the ~5 miles up the lakefront path to the stadium. The highlights of last year were buying upper deck seats but then getting told that level was closed (at multiple games) and getting to sit just a few rows up from the field for less than $20. It’s as good as the minors! 😀
Avi can be contacted at www.froboy.org
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