Talking Drupal #491 - OpenY

Talking Drupal

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.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/491

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
  • FLDC session: From Chatbots to Content Magic: The AI-Driven Future of Drupal
• YMCA Website Services (OpenY) Glossary
• 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://tartinebakery.com/stories/country-bread
  • 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

MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

• • Brief description:
    • Have you ever wanted to use AI to generate images, and save them directly into the Drupal media library once you have the result you want? There’s a module for that.
  • Module name/project name:
    • AI Media Image
  • Brief history
    • How old: created in Feb 2025 by coffeymachine
    • Versions available: 1.0.0-alpha2
  • Maintainership
    • Actively maintained
    • Security coverage: technically, but needs a stable release
    • Number of open issues: 2 open issues, neither of which are bugs
  • Usage stats:
    • 9 sites
  • Module features and usage
    • We have talked before on the podcast about a couple of ways you could use AI to generate images directly within a Drupal website. One used all the latest OpenAI APIs and the other had media library integration, though it only worked through its own admin form. Both were built to specifically DALL•E, OpenAI’s image generation service.
    • This new module is a big leap forward because it’s based on Drupal’s powerful and rapidly innovating AI module, so it can work with multiple AI image generation services.
    • What’s more, AI Media Image plugs into the Drupal core media system, so you can use the tool to generate images directly within the media library, including when you open it up in a modal to populate an entity reference field. This makes it significantly more intuitive to use this capability as part of a normal content creation flow.
    • There are a couple of things that may not be intuitive when you first start using AI Media Image. For example, by default it uses the prompt you used to create the image as the alt text that will be saved to the media library. That seems unexpected to me, but if the prompt exceeds the max alt text length of 255 characters then it will throw an error and then you can overwrite the value of the prompt field to contain proper alt text before saving the image to the media library. This is one of the open issues mentioned earlier and resolving it would really improving the experience of using this module
    • I got to play around with this module while preparing a demo for a session about AI I delivered with Mike Anello at Florida Drupalcamp on the weekend, so we’ll try to include a link in the notes so you can also watch for that recording and see this module in action