After two years of attending events online due to the pandemic, I was looking forward to attending DrupalCon Portland. Sadly, that plan got canceled as I had family, work, and life priorities that needed my attention. Fortunately, there are more in-person events for me to look forward to in the remaining year, including DrupalCamp NJ and DrupalCamp Atlanta.

Even though I wasn’t able to attend DrupalCon, I watched the Driesnote, where Dries Buytaert, the project lead, provided updates on upcoming releases and current strategic initiatives and discusses new initiatives. Every few years, Dries revisits Drupal's overall strategy, and at DrupalCon Portland, he recommended that our strategy and focus move from "building ambitious digital experiences" to "empowering ambitious site builders."

To empower ambitious site builders, the Drupal community is working on improving the user experience for finding, configuring, and updating modules and themes. The Project browser and Automated updates initiatives are already in-progress, and they will make it easier and faster to find and update modules and themes.

Making the site builder experience easier and faster is an overarching goal and one result of working to empower site builders. Making it easier to get started is another quick way to empower site builders. Along this line of thinking, Dries also announced a new "Starter templates" initiative.

My understanding is that 'starter templates' will bring together groups of modules and configuration settings to build a specific site feature or functionality. Depending on the quality of the starter templates, I see an opportunity for them to establish a standardized way for site builders to set up a website. For example, a starter template for building events would provide a default 'event' content type. An added benefit of multiple websites using the same 'event' content type, is that these websites should be able to share event data using Drupal's APIs more easily.

Stepping away from the specific goals of the project browser, automated updates, and starter templates, I am starting to realize the broader goals: Empowering ambitious site builders means standardizing, simplifying, and accelerating the process of building a website. Happily, standardization, simplification, and acceleration became the key benefits of the Schema.org Blueprints module, which I am looking forward to doing a show-n-tell about it for you below.

As stated in the conclusion of my last blog post about the future of our Drupal CMS and Schema.org: APIs, UI, and UX, I finally decided to take a crack at building a Schema.org-first POC module for Drupal. The module is named Schema.org Blueprints because the module provides blueprints for building a content and information architecture in Drupal using Schema.org. The Schema.org Blueprints project page summarizes the module's benefits, approach, recommendations, and roadmap.

Below is a short overview (10 min) and a full demo (30 min) explaining the Schema.org Blueprints module and showing it in action.

This short presentation explains the what and why behind the Schema.org Blueprints module and shows how to use it to build a Schema.org Event content type in Drupal.

This extended presentation walks through the background, configuration, and future of the Schema.org Blueprints module. It provides an in-depth demo of building an entire website architecture that leverages Schema.org types, properties, and enumerations in 5 minutes.

I am hopeful that the Schema.org Blueprints module aligns with the Drupal community's new goal of empowering ambitious site builders to create ambitious digital experiences.

At the very end of the Driesnote, Dries mentions.

I am optimistic that the Schema.org Blueprints could be a step in the right direction for improving how site builders create rich reusable, sharable content models and information architectures in Drupal.

Please watch the above videos, take the Schema.org Blueprints modules for a test drive, and post feedback and questions below or in the module’s issue queue.