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Created January 25, 2013 20:30
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Jan 25 WET Drupal Working Group notes

Jan 25 WET Drupal Working Group notes

Drupalcamp Ottawa!

  • http://drupalcampottawa.com/
  • Feb 22 and 23
  • Andrew Hoppin from NYS Senate (keynote)
  • Looking for panelists, speakers.
  • Expecting 200+ people on the Friday, (first day)

Chris from OPIN:

  • use deploy module (WillH interested in comparing notes)
  • use Solr for enterprise search (WillR - govt moving to search.gc.ca for multisite search)
  • PeterL: is there a search API plugin?
  • AndrewS: for now the Google Crawler is on autopilot; though Solr is good for facets, etc.
  • WillR: Solr will still be used for GETS tender search

MikeG from OpenConcept:

  • excited to be involved in U Ottawa
  • City of Calgary is considering Drupal
  • excited about D8 accessibility, new features; now is the time to contribute
  • Shared Services NEEDS TO BE offering SSH access to Drupal VMs; currently not
  • SteveOTT: NCC is considering upgrading to D7

Misc Conversation:

  • (Nancy Gagnon from PCO): is there anyone at Treasury Board pushing Drupal? Is Interwoven the most likely choice in their eyes? This is 100% political.
  • AndrewS: not enough; StatsCan CIO will bring this up at CIOC
  • Q(?): when is there a stable release for WET? That's our primary concern.
  • WillH: Sorry, need to get better at tagging. It's fairly stable now, and when when StatsCan launches next week, we'll tag.

AndrewS's Presentation (slides by Acquia): Achieving Leaner, More Agile Government

  • We'll get left behind if we dont act in the next month or two.
  • The first time CIOC heard about Drupal was this week.
  • There's a risk they will ignore the RFI and just renew.
  • Chris(phone): why dont we go to CIOC about this? I got a big mouth, so I can help. Why is Corrine Charette just hearing about Drupal now?
    • AndrewS: she needs to hear about it from TBS
    • Laurent (TBS): our intent was the RFI; Acquia presentation made a great impression, so that's a start.
    • RobinG: we need to get Modis + other big players to lobby as well. Govt worried about open source. Drupal cannot invoice the government.
    • AndrewS: these decisions are being made in the next few months. We've got to prove the business value to them.
  • Andrew ran through the 60 slides in 5 minutes. (will be distributed with minutes)
  • market size
  • google trends: Interwoven vs Drupal: http://dl-web.dropbox.com/u/29440342/screenshots/GPNYEP-2013.1.25-14.2.png
  • Acquia has a lot of momentum: #1 Forbes growing company
    • very flexible about their role
  • 25% of US Gov sites on Drupal
    • FEMA consolidated 3 domains into 1 Drupal site
  • US Gov Distribution: Openpublic, US equivalent to WET Distro
  • WET distro
  • Drupal embraces and extends open data / open standards: AD, LDAP, XMLRPC, JSON, Shib, CMIS, RDF, etc.
    • proprietary CMS seek lock-in
    • MikeG: Drupal was the first CMS to implement RDFa.
  • embraces authoring, responsive design (even admin), analytics & search integration, multichannel publishing
  • Scalable:
    • LAMP is proven
    • Warner Music Group's managed Drupal cloud handled 90M requests per day
    • Al Jazeera blogs regularly handles 20M requests per day
  • Slide with Acquia Drupal stack
    • WillH: make sure you also use APC, Varnish, Memcached ALWAYS
    • support hot failover, auto-scaling with peak load
    • leverages Amazon Web Services, so will need to replicate in Canada
  • Onboarding (migration challenges):
    • trusted codebase,
    • CDN,
    • determine load testing needs & metrics,
    • load balancing w/o sticky sessions
    • memcache "& high performance object stores"
    • ESI & ajax caching support
    • Readslaves
    • site audit (by Acquia)
    • WillH: be sure to use the migrate module, covers 90% of use cases in a few days of work
  • Acquia has a 30+ person security team, SECURITY IS THE PRIMARY PRIORITY
    • NancyG (PCO): this is the biggest hurdle for management
    • AndrewS: StatsCan is currently carrying out a Drupal Threat-Risk-Assesment, will share
    • WillH: try NewRelic's security scan, free with Acquia subscription
    • MikeG: security needs a "belt and suspenders attitude"
  • This slide deck will be distributed with minutes
  • Q(?): How will several companies submit a bid for the RFI? Will Acquia help?
    • AndrewS: They can either joint bid or just sub to their partners. At this point I'm worried whether an RFI will go out; they might skip both RFI and RFP to meet "agressive timelines" and to avoid procurement delays.
    • Chris(OPIN): private companies need to push for openness, via competition bureau.

Will Hearn: Update on StatsCan work on WET Distro

  • removed "Default Content" module, replaced with Migrate module (please extend our migration code)
    • We import WET documentation as sample content, and clean it up
    • wetkit_migrate_link.inc fixes link URLs on import time; uses CSS3 selectors
    • supports Rollback & Import, etc.
  • ctools widget to scrape external HTML pages & clean them up
    • cached locally
  • Demo of caption file upload integration with WET HTML5 video player
  • added l10n_update, l10n_client modules
    • Q:(NancyG,PCO): side-by-side editor support?
    • A: not integrated yet, but very close!
  • added a11n tweaks to admin (En/Fr buttons)
  • added path_breadcrumbs modules
  • adding D8-style inline editing support, based on CKEditor
    • already have a patch for publishing workflow integration
  • Testing: integrating with SauceLabs.com visual test builder
    • saucelabs.com is free if you're willing to open-source your tests
  • Q: Any pre-built package plans?
    • need help with whitelist process for Drupal.org packaging process
    • current Chef build exists, but fairly minimal
    • Steve(OTT): Patrick Connolly / MyPlanetDigital is working on finding a SaaS provider, to replicate Acquia stack in Canada
    • Chris(OPIN): we're also working on that.
    • WillRoboly: IRCAN/HRE is working on this too

AndrewS: how to increase collaboration (pull requests) on GitHub?

  • Jacques Blier: move to drupal.org?
    • We will mirror on Drupal.org, maintain those issue queue too.
  • MikeG: need to enact culture change about contribution, and dedicate resources
  • Chris: concern about statscan vs WET dev priority
    • WillH: we actually have a sub-distro for statscan for custom modules; eg sub-theme
  • Laurent: WET core has the same problem;
    • TBS cant seem to get people to take over
    • Communication/docs needs to be improved:
      • people need to follow day-to-day project to contribute
      • nontechnical people can help here
  • Steve(OTT): other govt distributions (agov, openplans) overlap; need to look outside the federal level
  • Alex(EvolvingWeb):
    • standard open-source problem
    • need to figure out a way to attract open-source competent developers;
    • Laurent: just organized a code sprint
  • How to learn how to lobby for Drupal?
    • RobinG: lobbying vs advocacy; need to register; takes money (eg GTEC)
    • AndrewS: how about getting testimonials about Interwoven satisfaction
    • Nancy Gagnon:
      • I paid a consultant to study Interwoven satisfaction, can share
      • senior managers dont care about WET, they care about security vs open source
      • need to sell Drupal = security in their head!
    • Laurent: we want to be the good option, not the less bad option
    • Chris(OPIN): let's do a marketing committee
    • Joseph: there's an Interwoven WET group, actually. And Interwoven is here to stay, eg DFAIT is 100% microsoft.
    • WillH: when StatsCan launches, Drupal will be #1 CMS by content count
    • MikeG: microsoft sponsors Drupal, IBM sells it abroad; we should buy an ad in Govt executive newsletter
    • MikeG + Chris_OPIN will take initiative at starting mailing list for this marketing discussion

Laurent on WET 3.1

  • jQuery mobile for everything, to support touch events (see wet-core's experimental branch)
  • overhauling examples HTML
  • estimated to released around April
  • upgrading to jQuery 2, separate IE7/IE8-specific code (via auto build)
  • new WET theme ("neutral"), less GoC-specific look (not a base theme)

Will Roboly on BAS

  • Buyandsell.gc.ca (BAS) is being audited for a11n, but it's a collection of sites so in QA limbo.
  • expect D7 upgrade to launch in March
  • March 2014 - tentatively releasing GETS on Drupal (MERX successor), already have a demo
  • Predated WET-DRUPAL but might re-architect to use it (new idea: no custom code!)
  • Our new model uses PhpQuery as a templating system to avoid hacking WET HTML at all. (jQuery style transforms)
  • MikeG: share some code dammit!

Steve OTT wrapup:

  • next meeting: end of Feb/early march
  • we should consider using Google Groups for mailing list
  • Hope to see you at Drupalcamp
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