fidzu : cms

Join Martin, Andy and Mike as they discuss what Drupal site templates are and how they differ from Drupal's traditionally bare-bones starting point, aiming to reduce setup effort and total cost of ownership while making Drupal competitive again for small nonprofits and smaller sites. They compare building templates versus client sites, covering the evolution from early Layout Builder/Recipes work to today's simpler packaging via a Drush site:export workflow, plus tooling like DripYard Recipe Builder for extracting reusable "recipe" parts.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/cafe018

Topics Martin Anderson-Clutz

Based in London, Ontario, Martin transitioned from graphic design to web development, ultimately specializing in Drupal in 2005. Currently working as a Product Marketing Manager at Acquia, he is Triple Certified in Drupal and UX-certified by the world-renowned Nielsen Norman Group. His key contributions include: As a speaker & writer, presenting at Drupalcamps and Drupalcons, and a published blogger across multiple platforms, including the Acquia Dev Portal and opensource.com; as a podcast host, participating in the Talking Drupal podcast, including as the "Module of the Week" correspondent; and as an open source maintainer, developing and maintaining popular Drupal contrib modules and recipes, including Smart Date and Fullcalendar.

Andy Giles

Andy is a Drupal back-end developer. In 2012, he founded Blue Oak Interactive, a development and consulting agency focused on complex Drupal site builds, particularly in e-commerce. In 2025, he partnered with Mike Herchel to launch Dripyard, a premium Drupal theme designed to reduce the cost of ownership and enhance the developer experience for modern Drupal projects.

Mike Herchel

Mike is a founder & developer at Dripyard, and is a longtime contributor to Drupal. He has played a key role in modernizing Drupal's frontend architecture, performance, and accessibility, and is known for helping bring Drupal's component-driven development into mainstream use. Mike has delivered projects for organizations including IBM, the U.S. Small Business Administration, and the U.S. court system. He is a frequent speaker on performance, accessibility, and modern frontend practices.

• What Are Site Templates
• Drupal CMS Template Picker
• Why Templates Matter
• Building Templates Workflow
• Recipes And Custom Tooling
• Canvas And Theme Strategy
• React Components And AI
• Drupal 11.4 Compatibility
• Canvas Patterns Explained
• Pricing Adoption And AI
• AI In Their Workflow
• Internal Templates And Wrap Up

Guests

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

Andy Giles - andyg5000 Dripyard

Mike Herchel - mherchel Dripyard

09 Jul 2026 4:01am GMT

coder.ddev.com gives you a full DDEV environment in the cloud, no local Docker required. This is a quick look at using it for a TYPO3 project with the freeform template.

For general background on coder.ddev.com, including access requirements and the other available templates, see the announcement post.

Watch the Video

What You'll See

• How to get access to coder.ddev.com
• Creating a coder.ddev.com workspace with the freeform template
• Cloning the rfay/typo3demo project and running ddev coder-setup + ddev start
• Fixing a trustedHostsPattern error with ddev restart after Composer brings in the rest of the code
• The working site and TYPO3 backend on the workspace's *.coder.ddev.com subdomain
• Two ways to share it: natively with other coder.ddev.com users, or publicly with ddev share

Steps

1. Get access to coder.ddev.com either via your organization having "partner" status with DDEV Foundation or by asking for access.
2. Log in to coder.ddev.com with GitHub and create a workspace using the freeform template. The project name you choose matters, since coder.ddev.com uses it to set up proxying.
3. Open a terminal in the workspace (web terminal, VS Code Web, or SSH via the coder CLI) and clone your TYPO3 project.
4. Run ddev coder-setup once in the project directory, then ddev start. If the project has a post-start Composer install hook, like rfay/typo3demo, it'll finish setting itself up automatically.
5. If ddev launch shows a trusted-host error, it's because Composer brought in the rest of the code after the first ddev start already generated additional.php. Run ddev restart to regenerate it, then reload.

Sharing What You Built

The workspace can be shared with other coder.ddev.com users directly, without any extra setup.

It can also be shared with ddev share, since rfay/typo3demo uses a relative base (/camino) instead of a hardcoded URL. Projects that do hardcode a full URL in base need the pre-share/post-share hook fix described in Sharing Your TYPO3 Project with ddev share.

Learn More

• Introducing coder.ddev.com: DDEV in the Cloud
• github.com/ddev/coder-ddev - templates and source for the freeform, drupal-core, and drupal-contrib templates
• DDEV TYPO3 quickstart

If you have questions, reach out in any of the support channels.

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This article was edited and refined with assistance from Claude Code.

08 Jul 2026 9:55pm GMT

Architecture choices become clearer when the CMS is not the whole application. Yii3 helps frame where Drupal should lead and where a separate PHP service may belong.

08 Jul 2026 11:51am GMT