frost needs your support

Pitch video

The core of our pitch is a video that can be no longer than 2 minutes and 30 seconds. We're hoping to have Dries play it during his keynote, but it's also here:

Executive summary

Starting a Drupal site project can be confusing and daunting. Frost aims to make it fast and easy, by providing oft-needed local development, cloud hosting, and testing and CI/CD configurations right when you download the codebase.

And once you have a Drupal site going, how do you make a composable, flexible digital experience for ambitious site builders?

Layout Builder?
Gutenberg?
Acquia Site Studio?

Frost offers another way, using Paragraphs for components and some helpful theming.

Lots of components, lots of flexibility

Components are reusable, can be dynamic (placing Views listings anywhere you want on the page), and often have the exact right amount of dropdowns, checkboxes, and media library fields in the 'Settings' tab to match the look you're going for.

Frost already works — if you have 5 minutes free you can try it out right now — but as with anything it could always be better.

Pain point

frost is already viable, but it could thrive with a few things to graduate to the next level:

Contribution of additional features and documentation
Exposure so more people know about how cool frost is

The niche frost fills that other projects in the ecosystem don't exactly match:

"Site builder" options in Drupal largely fall into:
- Layout builder, which can get you pretty far, but may be limiting if you need to do things like layouts inside of layouts
- Gutenberg, which works but feels a bit off owing to it being WordPress-ish
- Acquia Site Studio, which is a subscription-based vendor lock product
- Home-rolled Paragraphs, where more often than not the client requests "Image + Text" also have a clone where the image is on the other side, or the image is a video instead, or has a background image like the 'Hero' section component, and you end up scrambling to make (and name!) lots of similar section components
- Rigid blocks, fixed layouts, and over-loading CKEditor with plugins
- frost, where you get atomic flexibility to make sections with images, text, background images, anything you want on day one, but can also add custom paragraphs easily as needed to make the content editing experience faster
The codebase you see in gitlab/GitHub is the one you'll be working with. No opaque composer create-project stuff
The custom theme that you modify is included, so instead of messing with subthemes or generators you can just get to tweaking CSS
Hosting configurations and local setup can consume your project's dev time. With the reasonable defaults in the frost codebase you can spend less time getting that all to work
Installing the site gives you great baseline configs, and most usefully gives you default content for pages you might otherwise forget about

Solution

The revolution of frost has already happened, so from here we're planning useful evolution and love to make the project even more viable for folks wanting to build Drupal sites with flexible storytelling content. Here's the roadmap for frost's development in 2023, prior to contributors suggesting more:

frost 10.1.0 (May/June 2023)

Enhance CSS custom properties to make inside/outside and horizontal/vertical spacing separately configurable
Refactor CSS custom properties for color to give an automatic color palette for a single color, perhaps using lab color functions
Add more boilerplate and documentation to the custom migration module that already has an article migration from Wordpress RSS ready to go
Diagnose, and fix, a bug with paragraphs_edit, and hopefully get the patch/MR merged to the contrib project
Add ddev support ("Needs Review")
Improve the template definition for platform.sh, so users can one-click install on at least one managed cloud host

frost 10.2.0 (July/August 2023)

Update the solr scheme and configs to ensure they match what search_api is looking for, and that lando, ddev, and the remotes all work from the same configs located in a sensible place
Provide a training document for end users in the repository containing all author/editor activities including thorough explanation of some of the more complicated components
Port the components and other styles from frost into a figma or other design file that can be used by designers to accelerate frost projects with custom designs
Fix a bug/edge-case to ensure the correct metatag settings get set during site-install (or shortly after)
Potentially change the directory names for config/sync and modules/contrib to alternatives, based on community consensus
Remove the legacy dependency on classy+stable in frost_theme

frost 10.3.0 (September/October 2023)

Test and potentially replace bg_image_formatter version to 3.x
Create and customize a gin or claro subtheme, or attach a library to admin pages for useful admin UI tweaks specific to frost (layout columns side-by-side, smush the SEO fields in the sidebar, etc.)
Add automatic high-performance and accessible dropdown and mega menu functionality to at least the main navigation if not others

frost 10.4.0 (November/December 2023)

Determine if imageapi optimization is still required now that frost serves all image styles as webp, and if not remove it
Investigate, and potentially implement, Components! and single-directory components as appropriate
Split some or all profile configurations into custom modules, to make installation options and cross-site usage more granular

Funding and resources

The frost project is asking for $5,000 USD to compensate contributors toward a goal of 400 hours of enhancement in calendar year 2023.

To accomplish this, project contributors can apply to receive $25 per hour worked on the project, totalling 200 hours for the investment. Brad will match the 200 hours for free, amplifying the commitment.

We already have four Drupal contributors who have volunteered to work at least an hour (with Hillary and Chris pledging more if we have a hackathon sprint where Brad makes something in his trusty crockpot), entered in the tracking table on this page. All contribution hours will be tracked here, so everyone can see our impressive progress.

For accountability, if our pitch is funded, we request the funds be deposited to the Michigan Drupal open collective. In the event of a dispute, zengenuity could arbitrate. If we don't use all the funds, they could be returned to the DA or used for a Michigan Drupal camp or other event!

drupal.org username	Primary focus	Hours contributed
ao5357	Administrative	0
hilly510	Backend	0
tomgeekery	Full-stack	0
Randy485256	Documentation	0
kleighm	Frontend	0