How to List Your Theme in HubSpot's Asset Marketplace - HubSpot Themes Challenge Workshop

All right, so thanks again for joining us. We're really excited to have you here and participating in the Themes Challenge today. We have a few things on the agenda. We're going to do a quick overview and meet the team who's going to be helping with the majority of the question and answer portion. We're going to do a quick overview of the Themes Challenge and a demo of how to submit your theme to the Marketplace. Then we'll get to the meat of the session which is that Q and A. We had some pre submitted questions, so thank you. If you submitted them, we'll be going through those and then if you have any additional questions, please feel free to throw them in the question and answer portion of the Zoom and throughout the overview and the demo, feel free to add them. We're not going to answer them throughout those sessions. We'll wait to the question and answer portion and then we'll wrap up at the end. And the call to action there is going to be join us for the rest of Developer Day, which is happening immediately after this session. So we're going to dive in and we're going to go around the horn and introduce ourselves quickly. My name is Victoria Elliott. Most people call me Tori. I'm a Product Manager on the CMS Assets and Domains team. I've been at HubSpot a little over a year and before that I'd been in the website space for a pretty long time. I am a convert from WordPress. I built hubs hundreds of WordPress sites and I'm now very happy to be building on the HubSpot CMS. Instead I've built the site for the oldest church in Boston and I recently launched my first CMS site on a Marketplace theme last week and it's amazing and I was super pleased with the experience.

Hi everyone, my name is Chris Conant. I am the tech lead on the Design Assets team. I've been with HubSpot for a little over six years, managed the Marketplace program for three years and I'm a strong moped enthusiast.

Hey, I'm AJ Laporte. I'm a senior CMS developer advocate here at HubSpot. I've been here for just over a year and prior to working at HubSpot I worked at a platinum partner agency.

Hello everyone, I'm Will. I'm a product manager at HubSpot that works on a few teams that work on building tools for developers. I've been at HubSpot for a little over four years and outside of work I love doing anything outside so, looking forward to talking with you all today.

Hi everyone. I'm John McLaren. I'm a senior CMS developer advocate on DevRel, and I've worked at HubSpot for about one year now. And one of the things that I actively work on is our developer Docs. Hi everyone.

Welcome. And I hope everyone is super excited about Developer Day. I know I am. So I'm a tech lead that works with Will and many others to make the system that we have and the tools that we have as strong as we can for developers. I've been at HubSpot about five years. I'm a musician turned developer. Welcome.

Great. Thanks everyone. Now that you've met all of us, let's jump into a quick overview of the Themes Challenge. Now, here at HubSpot, our mission is to help thousands of businesses grow better. And those businesses include all of you as members of our community and potential marketplace providers. We hope that by offering a marketplace that allows for the buying and selling of assets, we can not only fuel the growth of your business, but the growth of thousands of other customers. So when we launched CMS Hub back in April, a big part of that launch was a new asset. Themes and themes were really at the center of what we hope to achieve with this launch, which was creating a system that was super powerful for developers and really easy to use for content creators. At its core, themes are just a folder. They contain all of the files that you as developers create. But to an end user, this folder and files translates into this beautiful, easy to use editing experience. It gives them all the tools they need to build a really great website for their business that includes touching templates, modules, global content and global settings. And we know that themes were a pretty big change from how we used to do Things here at HubSpot. When creating websites on the CMS, they include new tools for developers like the CLI and local development. And we know change can be pretty hard. So given that, and given our mission to empower businesses to grow better, we decided to launch the Themes Challenge. This challenge not only provides a unique learning and networking opportunity for you all, there's also some pretty sweet prizes. You can see those along with a ton of other information on the DevPost site. Let's go ahead and actually open that up quick. I hope because all of you are here with us today. You have seen this, you have used it to register, but I really want to make sure that we just quickly run through the resources tab. There is a ton of amazing information here. I also do want to note that make sure you continue to check this out. Only the Resources tab, but the discussion and updates. This is going to be ever changing throughout the Themes challenge. So here on the Resources tab there is an overwhelming amount of information, right? But it's all really, really important. You have the Quick Start guide and the Marketplace requirements. This is something that Chris is going to get into a little bit here in a moment. You have some video courses. This is actually my favorite section here. This is a little less technical. This is a great area that has some fun posts about how to maximize score and also some creative ideas about how to position your themes as you think about creating them, not only for your business, but how to think about them in the broader ecosystem. Lastly, I just want to call out that we have some great links to some community resources down here. Kudos to all of you here today. You are a great reason why our community is so amazing. If you haven't actively checked out any of these, I urge you to do that. All right, so really quick, I'm just wrapping up the overview. I wanted to call out a few reminders and some considerations. One, ensure your theme is 2D drag and drop compatible. So if you have an existing template pack today and are considering converting that into a theme, I would highly recommend that you consider not only adding drag and drop areas to your template pack, but reworking the modules that you offer within that to make sure that they not only can be dragged up and down, but left to right. Second, don't forget about Marketing Hub. When we launch themes, we launch themes alongside the new cms. But Marketing Hub is our oldest hub. It is our most popular hub. Users in Marketing Hub want the new drag and drop experience, the new editor. So just don't write them off when you're creating this theme. Definitely consider the audience there. Third, consider listing your theme for free. Free themes are by far the most popular themes in the marketplace. They drive a ton of leads for those who choose to do them. So definitely consider it as you think about positioning and packaging your theme. And lastly, and this is by far the most important, submit your theme early. We cannot say this enough. Not only is there some sweet swag on the line if you do submit early, but it will make sure that it gets approved in time and that if it gets approved early, that just means that you're in the marketplace and that your theme is available to be purchased or downloaded, which I think is incentive enough. So again, feel free. If you have any questions about this portion, throw them in the Q and A and we'll get to them in a little bit. Now I'm going to turn it over to Chris for a demo.

Thanks, Tori. How's everyone doing today? For those of you that don't know me, my name is Chris Conant and today I'm going to talk about how to set up a provider portal and submit your theme to the Marketplace. All right, so first thing I recommend doing is heading over to developers.HubSpot.com this website was revamped earlier this year and has a ton of new information. If you head over to the CMS reference docs, you'll see that there's a bunch of information on the building blocks of the CMS as well as Marketplace requirements and some tutorials. Starting in the Marketplace requirements, you'll see that there's an overview with a link to creating an Asset Marketplace provider account. If you haven't done so already, I recommend setting up your account. To do so, simply enter your information, you'll receive an email with a link to your portal and you're off and going. All right, so after you review all of the Marketplace requirements, you should definitely learn about all of the building blocks of the cms, specifically themes. Since this is what you're going to be submitting. HubSpot has created a CMS boilerplate that it performs incredibly and is super scalable for developers. You can find this right in GitHub and clone it to your local machine. Once you have it on your local machine, you want to go ahead and build out your theme with the design that you desire. And once you're feeling good about things, you're going to want to go ahead and upload it to your portal. To do so, you can head over to the CMS CLI docs and install the CLI package to your machine and then you want to authorize it to your portal init and auth right here. Once doing so, you should be able to. Sorry, I just have to move. You should be able to head over and simply upload. Once the upload is complete, you can head to your Design Manager and you'll see that the theme is available. Now, we understand that everyone doesn't happen to use local development, so we have also provided a way to easily create a theme inside the Design Manager and can either start blank or from the boilerplate. Once you've reviewed your theme inside Design Manager and everything looks good, you're going to want to go ahead and submit it. But first you have to set up your provider profile. To do so, you can just head to the Asset Marketplace tab Provider info and then enable it. You're going to want to go ahead and enter all of your company information as well as a brief description about your company. Additionally, you're going to want to connect to your payment gateway. We recommend Stripe but understand that not every country supports it, so we also support PayPal. Connecting Stripe should be very easy to do and will bring you right back to your portal. All right, now we can go ahead and list your product. To do so, you're going to navigate to listings and then create a listing. Since we want a theme, we go ahead and select theme and you'll see that the Marketplace theme is available. Sorry for doing things things live and sometimes they don't work out as expected. Sake of this just going to go ahead and update it to HubSpot. All right, once you select your theme, you can go ahead and add a little bit of information, including an example link. As of recent, you can no longer use the preview domain that comes from a template preview within the Design Manager. You're going to have to create a page with a demo to your site, select an industry that your theme may be a part of, as well as a marketing image and product detail images. I recommend product detail images being both images that depict what your theme looks like as well as the theme settings so customers can get an understanding of what options they may have. Once you've done so, you can go ahead and ensure that you've read the theme design guidelines, that you are the creator of your theme, and submit it for approval. Once submitted, the Marketplace team will review your theme and provide any feedback. If there are no issues, you're good to go ahead and publish your theme. That's all there is to submitting to the Marketplace. So at this point I believe we're opening it up to any questions. A.J. is that correct?

Correct. Yes. So we have some questions that you guys have sent to us ahead of time, so we'll go ahead and go through those right now. Alrighty. So our first question comes in and it's can we use tools such as Sass, Gulp, webpack, Babel with our local development workflow and use the compiled code in the theme? I was really curious to know how this will work when the ThemeOverride CSS has Hubble in it. I'm not sure if this will compile. Gregory, did you want to take this one?

Yeah, sure. So this is a great question and thanks for submitting it. So first I would say that one thing to keep in mind with themes that are available on the Marketplace is that the Main way that customers will leverage that theme is as is. So when they purchase and install the theme, it will be made available in their account and they can create pages, tweak the settings of the theme, so on and so forth. But there are also folks that sometimes want to sort of dive into the code and tweak something and clone the theme. So it is worthwhile to consider that situation in terms of thinking about how to best code your theme. That said, I. I don't think there is any reason why you couldn't use the local dev workflow to generate your CSS from sass or generate JavaScript using webpack and Babel. If I were building a theme, I think I would likely do that. So, yeah, I think that's a good idea. One thing that I would recommend is to kind of consider how you might distribute the original source. Like maybe one of the purchasers wanted to make some tweaks, might be interesting to consider, like a mechanism for them to be able to get to get that original source if they wanted to make the tweaks, knowing that that does add a barrier to entry, but nonetheless. And then the question about Hubble. So as many of you know, CSS in HubSpot is more than just CSS. We support Hubble inside of the CSS and that's something that is used as part of the theme system to connect the fields and current values for those fields in the theme settings with the CSS that uses those settings. And with Sass, Hubble is not supported. We don't have something like Sass plus Hubble. So there are different ways to approach this. One solution is you can essentially kind of create a little extension of sas and I can dig up a link of how that would look. That would make it so that you can essentially generate the Hubble when the CSS is generated. Another approach would be just to keep that file that's using the theme settings separate and use Hubble in it. So there's a few different ways to approach it. And we're also always looking to improve things and make things more smoother. So, yeah, feel free to share any feedback you have too.

Thank you, Gregory. We'll move on to our next one. Can we add D and D areas to global partials? This would give content creators a lot of flexibility over headers and footers. Will, would you like to take this one?

Yeah, great question. And I also totally agree with you. This would give a lot of flexibility over headers and footers. So many, many of you have already played around with themes you might have noticed that right now, despite the fact that the body of the page can have sort of a drag and drop 2D editing experience in the editor, the global headers and footers of themes, you can only edit the values of modules as opposed to the layout or adding new modules to the layout. So we've definitely heard this pain point and it's something we've been actively working on. And so the team has been working really hard on adding support for D and D areas and global partials, whether it's headers or footers, but also maybe sidebars or anything else that's global for that matter. I actually got to use it yesterday for the first time and it was really awesome and worked just exactly how you would expect it to. So I don't have a definitive timeline on when this will be out, but definitely rest assured that the developer community will be the first to know. So definitely pay attention to the releases and updates room of the Developer Slack and we should hopefully be in touch soon about a beta for something like this.

Then our next question is how can I select a Design Manager permission? When I try and get a personal access key, it says that I don't have access. Will, do you want to take this one too?

Yeah. So you should be able to access the personal access key screen as long as you have access to the Design Manager permission. So for anyone who's not familiar, that permission lives under the Marketing tab of the user permission screen. And then the specific permission that correlates to the Design Manager is the edit code templates and modules permission. So if you have that permission, you should be able to go through the HS INIT authentication flow for the cli. If that's not working for some reason, definitely get in touch and we can help figure out why that's happening. You can feel free to just send me a direct message in Developer Slack or post in the local development room and someone can definitely help you get up and running with that local development workflow using a personal access key.

Our next question is, is it possible to submit multiple theme entries? For example, a free theme and a paid theme? Tori, do you want to take this one?

Absolutely. So, because this is a contest first and foremost with local law, some areas we are limited to one per household law, so we are only going to allow one per person. And if you're working in a team, that means that you could have, if you have multiple entries, you could have every member of your team submit one. That being said, for free themes and paid themes, what I would Recommend for this scenario is submit your paid theme as your entry to the content, but also consider listing your free theme just by putting that through the Marketplace submission flow. That way you'll have both you can leverage. This is like a pretty successful tactic that other providers have leveraged where you have kind of your free trial theme. This allows end users to test it out and then upgrade into your paid theme.

Awesome. Thank you, Tori. And then on to our next question. How can I achieve the following responsive breakpoints? Adding classes or IDs to a drag and drop section, adding inline styles to a drag and drop section, and adding color attributes on the drag and drop module, whether in a loop or a repeater. John, do you want to take this one?

Certainly. So when it comes to the responsive breakpoints, good news is that we are actively testing a mobile breakpoint that will work with our D and D areas and in the editor, users will be able to specify styles and visibility for modules at that mobile breakpoint. When it comes to adding classes or IDs to D& D sections, currently that's not possible. We're investigating finding a solution that might look more like reusable sections that can solve for situations where you might have common appearances to sections and want to repurpose that. There's a current workaround if you need this sort of functionality. You could create multiple D and D areas in a page and add a class to the D and D area and then style that D and D area separate. And then when it comes to adding inline styles to D and D sections, if you look at our D and D section tag in the documentation, it'll show you the current styles that you can add. And they are not true inline styles. They are. They work like how module fields do when you're adding parameters. So there's a specified amount of styles that you can add. And then when it comes to adding color attributes on a D and D module in a loop or repeater, instead of completely vocally coding it out for you, I will post a link in the chat that shows what this looks like. But yes, it's totally possible and the color attributes are actually just color fields and you would, you would need the fields in your module.

It's okay. I'd like to add just a couple things related to this. One is the why, which is one of the things that we are really striving for is to create a truly like bulletproof, really great experience for the end user, the marketer that is creating pages day to day. And if we were to essentially incorporate Classes into give developers the ability to add a class to a section that makes it sort of more complicated for the marketer is is how we've been thinking about it, where you have this essentially hidden attribute that is not really present in the edit experience. And maybe we could add a field that would have it show up in the editor, but that would require sort of documentation or explanation. Like what classes could you put there? What do those classes mean, things like that. So that's some of the reasons why we've been hesitant to incorporate that. But I do understand that it does limit some of the things that developers can do. The other thing, kind of building on what John said about the add a class to a D and D area, there are also classes for sections, columns and rows to identify them. And so you could essentially have a class on a drag and drop area and then be able to style like all of the sections the same inside of that drag and drop area, which could be useful for some things.

Awesome. Thank you, Gregory. Thanks for adding on to that one. And thank you, John. So next we're going to move to the live QAs that you guys have been asking throughout this entire presentation that we're going through. So I'm going to go ahead and start with our first one here from Jacob and it's a four parter. So part one of it is can we get clarification on what the default modules that have to be supported are and what supporting those modules means?

I don't mind taking that just to clarify on that. Basically the concept of any marketplace asset is that it should just work out of the box and it should work with all of the assets that HubSpot provides and supports. So default modules, we're not necessarily looking for these overly styled default modules, but really that if any default module is dragged or used within a theme, that it should be styled enough that it looks presentable and is cohesive with the theme design.

And then the next part of the question is, can a theme that's been in the marketplace since before the themes challenge was announced be entered into the competition?

Yes, I can take this one. So if it is currently available for sale, it cannot. If it is waiting in the queue, you can opt in to have that one be considered. So please, if you have one that's kind of being waited to be reviewed and published, approved, just send us a note and we can make sure that that's considered your contest entry.

And then a follow up with that one. Is is it possible to win in more than one category?

I don't exactly remember. So I think what we'll do is we'll follow up on you with you. But I think no, but you can get. So you could win like best overall and then you could get one of the small prizes.

How it works.

And then the last part of the question is, is it against any of HubSpot's policies to share code between themes published from different Marketplace accounts? Like if my friend has their own Marketplace account and I want to give them some of my code, is that allowed? I can answer this one. So it's technically it is allowed. The problem with that is though is, as John just mentioned, originality is one of the things that we are scoring on and looking for. So if two themes that are submitted are very, very identical and similar, there's a good chance that one of them might win and the other one might not. So it is kind of a do at your own risk kind of thing. If you are going to start sharing some code and picking code out from different things to include into your own theme.

Can I real quick. Sorry.

Absolutely.

Chris.

One other piece to that is you can share code, but if you try to purchase or download a theme from the Marketplace and use assets from that theme, we do have validation against that. So your friends would have to basically send you the code outside of the marketplace.

Perfect.

Good to know. Our next question comes from Andris. Is there a list or blog post about the most common mistakes people make when submitting a theme or module to the Marketplace? Does anybody know if we do have any of those resources? Because as far as I know, I don't believe we do have any blog or listing or any kind of summary page that gives that. But that's a great suggestion. We can definitely pull one together for you guys.

I would say review the Marketplace requirements page, make sure that you are meeting all those criteria. And I would also check the Theme Challenge website as we're updating that to make sure that all the information that we're frequently asked about shows up there.

Additionally, there is an FAQ section in the requirements.

Let's go with another one from Andreas. Given the amount of time of people who potentially participate right now, is it needed to send in the submission three, two weeks before the deadline to make sure that there's a chance to participate?

I can take this one. So I noted it earlier. I'm going to note it again and again and again. Submit often Submit or not submit often Submit early. Please, please, please, please, please. This is not only because of the amount of people involved. It's because if it's your first time submitting a theme, creating a theme for HubSpot, there will be some back and forth that's likely to happen. If you are a little bit more comfortable with themes, you probably could give yourself a little bit of a smaller window. But there's a lot of reasons to submit early, right? Not only the swag, but getting your theme live and available to customers is the biggest thing here, right? So yes, please submit early.

And then we have another question from Sherry. Do we need to be programmers or coders to build websites landing page templates for Marketplace? Do you have WYSIWYG builders for non coders?

I can answer that. I guess so. We are not accepting. We have another tool in the Design manager for drag and drop layouts which would fit that criteria. We are not accepting those types of templates for this challenge.

And then another one from Sherry is do we need to have a paid account to create or submit themes? I just have the free version. Chris, did you want to speak to that?

Sure thing. So we do provide free provider accounts. If you go to the Marketplace overview in the developer docs there's a link to create one. It is a specific type of account that allows you to submit to the Marketplace. The normal standard free account will not do so.

And then we have another question here from Frank. Do we need to connect Stripe if we are just submitting free themes?

That's a great question. Yes, we do require that you connect to either Stripe or PayPal even if you're just submitting free themes. That is a very good question that I don't really have the reasoning for, but it is a requirement currently.

Our next question is from Oswaldo. Can you show me an example of how to integrate SAS with HubSpot themes?

We don't have an official example I think is the answer, but I think there was also a question related to this in the developer Slack the other day. I think we are definitely considering putting something together because I think it would be valuable to everyone to have There is an issue and I can share it in the chat related to the local development tools for Gulp in particular, but feel free to follow along with that and hopefully sometime soon we'll have something for you that should help out.

And then our next question. John, I'm going to throw this one over to you. Is there any documentation about updating themes and what that looks like for users of the theme?

Yes. So when it comes to updating themes, if you go to our tutorials and guides section of the developers website, we have a How to upgrade your your site to use themes when it comes to submitting something for the this challenge, I would encourage you to instead of upgrading an existing existing setup that you have, I would encourage building new from the boilerplate or using that as a reference to to build something new. That way you can incorporate all of the powerful theme capabilities, having them all in mind right from the very beginning instead of retrofitting them.

And then our next question is from what if we don't create a theme in local dev? Instead we clone an existing HubSpot theme, make the tweaks to it, and then based on our own design, publish it to the marketplace? Will it get approved? Will it be eligible? Because they're facing issues with local development. So this kind of goes back to what Chris had mentioned previously and myself is will it get approved? Most likely not. If it's a direct clone, especially of one of our own themes, we are we do have checks in place for those kinds of things. Will it be eligible? Yes, but it probably won't get approved. So technically no. So it's kind of a yes no. So I would side on the caution of not directly cloning a HubSpot theme, making a couple of visual tweaks, and then trying to upload that one as your own if you were going that route. I'm not saying you are, I'm just saying if that was a common scenario, that might happen.

One other thing I'll just add is sometime over the summer, I don't remember when the days all run together now, but we added to the Design Manager the ability to create a theme inside of the Design Manager and to do so from the boilerplate if you haven't, if you missed that or something, just because the Design Manager does have a lot going on. If you go under the file menu inside of the Design Manager, you should see new theme and you can select from boilerplate in there and that can maybe help get started there.

And the other thing that I'll just quickly say is if you're having issues with local development and want to use that workflow, definitely feel free to get in touch through HubSpot support or the developer Slack and we can definitely help you get up and running with the CMS CLI tooling.

Our next question is considering the rules for the hackathon. It looks like the judges can rate themes only by looking at the theme images and videos without looking at the actual code and how the theme is built. Will you, after all, look under the hood to make sure that each theme meets the requirements. Absolutely. We are going to be looking under the hood. It may only appear that we can just judge it based upon what you normally see on like a marketplace listing page. But do not worry, we definitely have backend access to all of that and we will be looking deeper into the code as well.

And just as an example, some of the criteria for like one of them, one of the awards is for, I think it's most technical theme. Most of the criteria for that judging requires us to look at the code.

I see this question popping in here a couple of times. Does using CSS in modules affect Google page speed?

So any code you add to a website affects your page performance. But adding code inside of a module has a side benefit that your CSS will only get loaded on pages that actually have that module. In addition, that CSS will get cached individually. So say you load a homepage that has a module that's commonly used throughout the rest of your website, but obviously might have some unique modules. Well, all of the modules that are commonly used will get cached and then when you load the next page, say an about page on the site and those modules are loaded again, you'll actually have a huge performance benefit because all those files minus whatever is new for that page will be in the cache and there won't be a request made for it.

Yeah, I'll add a couple things as well. One of the things is the HubSpot CMS. One of the great benefits of it is it comes with a CDN built in and that CDN that we use is global for one. It also uses HTTP 2, which is a more recent version of HTTP that allows sort of this thing called multiplexing. Anyway, there's some technical stuff, but the idea is that even if you have multiple requests happening, they happen at the same time. They're not sort of in series, which diminishes some of the performance negatives of having essentially multiple link elements for your style sheets. The other thing is, I think the thing to watch out for is duplication of css. So having the same CSS in multiple places. So if somehow like through a build process or through includes you were including the same CSS in multiple modules, like then you're. You just have to be kind of mindful about the amount of CSS and whenever possible be really careful about duplication.

And this next one I'm just gonna. I'm gonna circle back to a question that Jacob had asked earlier regarding themes. And it's more about updating a theme in the future. So if you were to release a version 1.1 next year, could he push that out to current users for free?

I can grab that one if you'd like. The answer is yes. So one major difference with themes in the Marketplace versus other assets historically is that we deliver themes read only so that they can be seamlessly updated. To do so, if a customer purchased a theme, they would just go to their Marketplace management and they'd see that there's an update available and they can simply select the update button and it will update their existing theme. As a developer, you obviously want to be careful about making breaking changes, you know, deleting assets or theme fields or module fields so that you're not breaking a customer's existing content. We're still working through ways to support those breaking changes updates as well.

And then the next question comes from multiple people as well, and it's circling around HubDB. Can we create a theme with HubDB as a feature? And do we plan to accept HubDB in the marketplace anytime soon?

I can take that one as well, at least the first part of it. Currently, we do not support HubDB in the marketplace. The reason being that not all customers have access to HubDB and the marketplace. We're still working on how to serve up listings to a customer that will be supported within their portal. So there's a chance that a customer currently could purchase something with HubDB and then not be able to use it. We definitely do want to support it in the future. I just don't have a timeline on that.

Then.

Our next question is from Kieran. Is there a limit on custom modules in a theme?

I'll go ahead and take this one as well. For themes outside of the Marketplace. No, there is no limit in the Marketplace. We currently limit it at 50 modules. That number isn't necessarily set in stone moving forward, but as of right now, we have a limit of 50 modules in a theme.

All right, it looks like we're probably gonna have time for maybe two more questions here, so I'm gonna go with a question from Michael here. He's nearing a completion of a theme and he's found manually adding theme fields in JSON to be a really lengthy and laborious experience. Are there any plans for making this experience more developer friendly or tips on ways to make this experience better?

I can answer that. There's an official VS code extension, so if you're developing locally that extension, you can type field. And it will suggest all of the different field types. Then you can just hit tab and the JSON for that field type will appear the default JSON, and then you can modify from there. So, so that saves you a bit of time in say, referencing the docs and copying and pasting or manually typing it out. We'd love to hear your feedback if you have any further feedback on how we could make that even better.

Another question we have here is from Serhat. Can I ask you to elaborate on how you think a theme is defined to be unique? To be more specific, considering that the design of the website itself is unique and the theme is providing the related field controllers for editors to adjust, what else is there to think about in order to make a theme unique?

I can take this one at a high level. I would say that I think we've been using the word unique a lot, but I would recommend everybody check out the post on the developer blog how to maximize your score in HubSpot's theme challenge. That's really going to break down at a pretty granular level. The categories that we're looking for and while unique is kind of like sums up a few of them, this will give you exactly what we're looking for in each of those categories. I'm going to go ahead and post that in the chat now, but I would recommend this is probably where you'll want to look to see how to best position your theme.

And then let's see Here we have one from Rob in the Rules it says we have to create a simple screen recording video that explains your themes, features and functionality through a comprehensive demonstration. Do you have any examples of these? Me personally, I would say if you're going to be creating this explainer video, think of it as when you're pitching a website build to a client or a customer, right? So if you're trying to pitch, for instance, the HubSpot CMS, you're going to give them a demo of a site and you're going to run through all of the things in that site that make it what it is and make it why you want them to jump on or choose you. Same as if you're presenting a case study to somebody. You're going to show them aspects of a website of things that you've built to kind of show them the full features of things that you're capable of or that the theme is capable of. So I would say try and do the recording as if you're trying to make a sales pitch to somebody to clearly explain to them the benefits of going with this particular theme. Question from Frank Will you also look at the development process as ours is quite unique. Unfortunately we're not going to be looking at how you've built it and your processes that you're doing more so the asset that's been submitted.

But I think if you have a pretty cool development process and you're interested in getting feedback or sharing it or helping other developers in the community have a similar workflow, if you figured out a really good one, it'd be really.

Cool to share it.

Whether it's an open source project or working with John and AJ to get a blog post written or developer documentation on it. We'd love to see what your development process looks like and how we can make it better.

And just to go off Will, I love seeing people's developer processes. I love to see how every everybody's process is different and I love seeing them personally. So definitely as well said share those out. We would love to know them. Let's see from Anders Will the Design Manager ever support DD areas?

Anders, I'm not totally positive what your question is getting at in particular. Maybe just to sort of reiterate right now the sort of directions we're going with themes is coded files with D and D areas in them. That allows developers to work locally or use modern frameworks or build tools like a lot of people have been asking about today. And that D and D area syntax is what enables the marketer to have that drag and drop experience within the code editor. So it's sort of separating out the developer and the marketer Persona into their own tools. So right now where we're putting sort of our energy is ease of use and simplicity for the marketer and the page editor and sophistication empower through code in the developer layer of things.

Perfect. And he responded with gotcha. Awesome.

Thank you Will. One other thing I can just add to that, and this is very just a thought, not something that in any way we have any plans to do officially or anything like that, but one thing that we talked about in the past is providing sort of more developer tools in the editing experience. So if you could imagine you create like a very simple template that just has a single D and D area tag in it and then you could go into the editor and play around with putting modules and building that way and then essentially having a way to copy the code. And anyway like if someone was really feeling ambitious you could probably do it today through a Chrome extension and some cleverness, but I'm not sure I would recommend it but but nonetheless, like I am curious to hear if that's something people would find valuable. And anyway, so maybe it's something we can discuss more for folks that are hanging out for Developer Day, or feel free to reach out to Spiral or others. And John and aj, if you think that that's a great idea.

We're running about like two minutes over time, but I do want to give you guys time to be able to like, get coffee, take a bathroom break, whatever you need to do. Because Developer Day is starting in like five minutes, so get really excited for it. The leftover questions that are not on it or that are answered currently, we are going to go through them. We will get answers for you guys. It's not like we're just going to leave you, like, out to dry. We would never do that to you. Feel free to also hop into our Developer Slack if you're in there. We have a channel devoted specifically to Developer Day, so feel free to hop in there and discuss. And likewise, if you guys have any future questions, please don't hesitate to reach out to us, especially in the Developer Slack.

We're all in there.

We may not answer you right away, but we definitely see you. So thank you guys for coming to this today and we hope to see you at Developer Day.