Georgia Tech Drupal News

Topics covered: C&M web assessment project; DrupalCon Denver; GT Drupal 7 install profile defaults.

I. Communication & Marketing: Web Assessment project

• C&M are spending the next 8 weeks or so finishing up phase 1 of a Web assessment project
  • It aims to lead to an underlying, best-practice-based web infrastructure for Tech:
    • in both C&M & OIT
    • inline with president's vision of "One Tech"
    • allowing for the distributed nature of the web at Tech
    • with specific strategies in web theming & installing, using Drupal (as georgia.gov does)
  • Will include later phases
    • for User Experience Design and Coding
    • with working groups of selected stakeholders (such as some from departments & OIT & etc.) 
    • may use outside, expert consultants, such as MediaCurrent, Acquia, Phase2, etc.
    • might use CiviCRM

II. DrupalCon Denver - March 2012

• Why DrupalCon? - Training!
  • Great conference each year in the Spring (also a Fall conference internationally) for Drupal
  • Good place to learn more about current trends in Drupal, as well as get training.
  • DrupalCamp is a much cheaper, local, version at which to do the same
  • In addition, a local Atlanta Drupal Group meets regularly and has archived videos of presentations.
• Brainstorm with Higher education colleagues @ DrupalCon Denver: Boulder & Portland
  • They've already gone through a web assessment of how to be "One University" using Drupal as infrastructure
  • Perhaps a lunch meeting with them to share ideas. If interested, contact Eric Huffman.
• Our thoughts on this assessment:
  • Make it easy for faculty/research groups/departments/schools to follow/use (in case they don't have a lot of Drupal or development expertise).
  • Schools care most about their homepage, so build in lots of coolness and flexibility here.
  • Certain units have similar needs that could be served by a specific installation profile. Ideas for specific types:
    • A faculty person's site
    • A research group or lab site (example content: faculty profiles, sponsors, publications, projects)

II. Drupal 7 Install profile defaults

• We formed a sub-group of developers and C&M staff to develop some common installation profiles for D6 & D7. Initial members include:
  • Alfred Bacon (lead, DLPE)
  • Adelle Frank (OIT)
  • Brian Danin (C&M)
  • Eric Huffman (C&M)
  • Arian Padron (Chemistry)
  • Lew Lefton (Mathematics)
  • Andrew Dugenske (Manufacturing Research Center)
  • Joanie Chembars (Architecture)
  • Raj Vuchatu (GTRI)
  • Thomas Becher (Sciences)
  • Yashodhan Chinchore (DLPE)
  • Moses Adrien (DLPE)
  • Rachel Ponder (ECE)
• In the short-term, this group will use DLPE's (now re-titled Professional Education) git & redmine server, kindly hosted by Alfred Bacon.
• In order to to respect the resource commitments of Alfred and DLPE, access to this server will be limited by invitation only, and the development will focus only on common installation profiles, features and themes for GT, created by a small group of developers and communications staff.
• The ownership of these Installation profiles will live with Communications & Marketing, and will be shared with the GT community through this site (drupal.gatech.edu).
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III. Other updates

• There may be a unified way of handling Faculty/Scholar profiles coming down the pipes.
  • Leadership, perhaps, from Office of Research/GTRI
  • Might use Symplectic backend and VIVO frontend software (could integrate with drupal's OpenScholar, perhaps)
  • Could make it easier for us to give all sites detailed, centralized information on faculty.

Meeting Attendees: 9.

Topics covered: Backups in web hosting; regular meeting time (but none in March); local Dev environment on laptop; git & D7 profile; C&M updates.

I. Scheduled backups in Web Hosting

• It's easy to do and, can save you if you accidentally delete, for instance, your database. Some people keep only the latest 2 weeks of their nightly backups.
• Some people configure the Backup & Migrate module to do this for their databases (and FTP it or send it to a private directory). The Demo module was also mentioned.
• It was suggested that web hosting be set to do this automatically, as a sensible default setting.
• The question was asked of Scheduled backups: do they lock table rows before creating a backup?

II. Regular meeting time for this group

• The group decided to meet with the following schedule:
  • DATE: 3rd Friday of every month
  • TIME: 10:00am
  • LOCATION: West Architecture Building, Room 260
    (Google map of grey building) 
• There's a lovely cafe with food from Highland Bakery on the first floor (which only takes Buzz Card or cash).
• Our room has a projector for our laptops, so we'll be set to fiddle with Drupal together.

III. DrupalCon Denver 2012

• There is no meeting in March (as many people will be at DrupalCon Denver). But we will meet in April and the DrupalCon attendees will fill us in on interesting tidbits from the conference.

IV. Local Dev environment on Laptop

• Easiest way to develop quickly (with no lag between server and your development machine), is Aquia's Dev Desktop, downloadable at: https://network.acquia.com/downloads/7.x  Tips for making this better:
  • You can have more than one site running (or even more than one version of Drupal) at the same time.
  • The Aquia dev control panel will quickly create another site for you at the click of a button, as well as letting you easily find phpmyadmin for your databases, and etc.
  • You can go into the file system and delete all the extra modules Aquia puts into THEIR default installation, to avoid module confusion and conflicts.
• XAMPP is another good option, if you want more control over your Dev environment and you test software and code that is not Drupal: http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html  Brian knows some great ways to set this up, if you need tips.

V. Git & Drupal 7 installation profile

• Alfred and Adelle are going to talk, along with Lew, about what a default Drupal 7 installation for GT could/should contain.  Ideas floated include:
  • Mercury blocks (news/events)
  • LDAP (a number of people have this working in Drupal 6)
  • People
  • CAS
  • Footer, Gold bar links & main menu
  • WYSIWYG
• There is currently no git repository that is GT-wide, though, of course, there is much interest. (Matt Todd, at Git, was a recent GT graduate). A number of places are running their own, though, including:
  • College of Computing
  • DLPE
  • Others?

VI. Communications & Marketing

• Brian will set up an IRC channel for GT drupal developers, so we can try it out and see if it helps us communicate better in between meetings.
• Communications and Marketing is currently undergoing a comprehensive and campus-wide web assessment, and is in the exploratory stages of a Georgia Tech web redesign.
• Communications and Marketing currently only supports Drupal 6, because there are still too many bugs and time-consuming issues with Drupal 7 (it's not quite ready for prime time in their opinion). They are exploring Drupal 7 and developing a strategy for an upgrade process that will likely be covered during the aforementioned web redesign.

Meeting Attendees: approximately 10.