Talking Drupal #491 - OpenY

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