Talking Drupal #561 - The Aaron Winborn Award

Today we are talking about Aaron Winborn, The award named after him, and what winning is like with guests George DeMet & April Sides. We’ll also cover Summit as our module of the week.

For show notes visit:
https://www.talkingDrupal.com/561

Topics

• Who Was Aaron Winborn
• Award Origin Story
• How Winners Are Chosen
• Why Community Matters
• What Winners Share
• April Learns She Won
• Handcrafted Award Stories
• On Stage Emotions
• After Winning Reflections
• How To Contribute
• Nominations And Makers
• Surprise Award Ideas
• Wrap Up And Contacts

Resources

• TD Cafe #018 - Drupal Site Templates
• Aaron Winborn Award Winner
• AskWookiee

Guests

April Sides - weekbeforenext
George DeMet - palantir.net gdemet

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan
John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi
Ashraf Abed - drupito.com ashrafabed

MOTW

Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted to create a website purpose-built for an event like a Drupal camp, that collects, moderates, and schedules user-submitted sessions, and do all of that within the Drupal CMS installer? There’s a site template for that.
• Module name/project name:
  • Summit Site Template
• Brief history
  • How old: created in June 2026 by yours truly
  • Versions available: 1.0.0, released yesterday
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained
  • Security and test coverage
  • Documentation some in the repo we’ll talk about later
  • Number of open issues: no open issues, though there are a couple of open issues on the Event Platform Starter, from which Summit was created
• Module features and usage
  • We’ve talked before on this podcast about the Event Platform that grew out of an initiative from the Event Organizers Working Group. The goal is to remove friction for anyone organizing a Drupal camp or similar event in creating a website that sets them up for success
  • The Event Platform was created before Recipes were a thing in the Drupal-verse, even though it was initially built in ways that were similar to recipes
  • A couple of years ago, I started working on the Event Platform Starter recipe to help spin up a fully-built event website in a single step. That ran into some technical complexities, so it ended up being being a time-saver, but still required a number of manual steps
  • As the newer concept of site templates took shape, I could see that the Event Platform ecosystem had the necessary elements to become a site template, in particular a theme and a battle-tested a content architecture
  • I ended up needing to decouple the configuration and the functional code that had previously been in Event Platform. The configuration would reside solely in the site template, so the functional code was moved to a new project, Event Platform Helper
  • Along the way, there have been a number of significant changes: Canvas integration for a fully customizable homepage, also a set of Canvas components to allow building new, custom layouts, a new, custom cache context, improved management of event information, and more
  • Now, you set everything up with a single click in the Drupal CMS installer. There’s an open issue to get it into the Drupal CMS installer by default, but today it’s just a composer require away
  • The repo does also include an AGENTS.md and CONTENT-STRUCTURE.md files, to help human or AI agents who want to work a site built using Summit to understand the initial state of the content architecture it provides, as well as the different logical components and how to troubleshoot them, individually or in combination