[Eg-oversight-board] Status of Drupal Evergreen

[Lori Bowen Ayre]

Hi All,
I apologize that I won't be able to make the meeting today.  Here's the
status of the Evergreen Web Team's drupalization effort.  Basically Jim has
provided the Evergreen community two options.  One is the site at
drupal.evergreen-ils.org which incorporates the basic architecture to
support the expanded concept of the website.  This version is based on the
surveys the Web Team did and the work on defining the information and
functionality needs of various personas in the Evergreen community.  But,
as you know, we've been having a hard time moving from our existing site to
this new site architecture.

So, Jim has now also built another Drupal site that is based on the exact
same architecture as the current site.  The thinking is that perhaps we
could make a less dramatic move and just get the site on Drupal for now and
then we could incorporate features that we feel are needed as we find
people who can get the work done.  Or we could eventually move to the other
site (or some variation thereof).  Either way, getting the site onto Drupal
provides us the ability to start moving to a more distributed system for
managing content because it lowers the threshold for contributing.  Also,
Drupal provides a lot more functionality options than the basic blog and
wiki technologies so we can move forward more easily if we can at least get
started.

The existing site, drupalized, can be seen at eg13.galecia.com.  It hasn't
been themed to match the existing site (colors, fonts, design) but we can
do that pretty quickly. I'm willing to have Jim continue work on this
version so we have something to show at the conference.  And, as I said
before, I'm happy to continue to provide hosting and support for the site
if that is of interest to the community. After the conference, I would need
Jim to move into a maintenance role and people from the Evergreen community
need to handle most of the content work.  But I'm hoping this site will
make it easier for people to find a place to grab hold of and we'll be able
to get a few more people involved.

For a bit more detail, here's Jim's description of the two sites:

1) drupal.evergreen-ils.org <- The original prototype site I set up for the
Web Team with lots of workflow and admin features set up for editing, user
feedback, etc. aimed at a collaborative migration/rebuild.

* I set up a gigantic mess of a navigation structure for it consisting of
the existing site's main menu as well as all the stuff
that the EG Web Team's "final" report recommended.

* Most of the actual *content* didn't exist and was just "Coming Soon"
pages -- the plan was to set up the nav structure
and then have the volunteer editors replace the "Coming Soon" pages with
refreshed and updated content page by page,
pruning and optimizing the structure and content as they went.


2) eg13.galecia.com <- Earlier this year we talked about EG and I suggested
a plan where I develop a clone of the
existing Evergreen site, basically replacing "custom PHP pages and a
Dokuwiki instance"  with a Drupal instance,
preserving as much content, navigation, and design as possible.  The plan
was to basically just make Drupal available as a
platform so other people besides devs could easily add content, and then
eventually new features and basic content
management features would be adopted by whoever is running the website.
 (Among other things, we could easily see
the many pages that are referenced by tons of users but haven't been
updated since 2011 or earlier.)

* I have all of the custom PHP pages recreated on this Drupal site and I've
got at least a dozen of the most popular
Dokuwiki pages integrated as well.  The plan was to just get as many of the
"most popularly viewed" wiki pages put in as
I could do.

* I have the entire menu/navigation structure recreated on this Drupal
site, and as I mentioned, I have a solution for
preserving/modifying the existing Dokuwiki URLs that may exist on the
Internet.

* This plan also included having Ian develop a quickie Drupal theme for
this new site that is basically a functional clone
of the existing EG-ILS theme.  This was to avoid the almost-certain
situation where folks get hung up on a trivial design
change instead of focusing on improving content, navigation, overall user
experience, or ease of administration.

Let me know your thoughts,

Lori


P.S. The eg13.galecia.com site is very slow this morning.  We may need to
reboot our development server.  And as before we can change the URL on this
site if this is a direction everyone agrees is the way to go.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Lori Bowen Ayre //
Library Technology Consultant / The Galecia Group
(707) 763-6869 // Lori.Ayre at galecia.com
Availability:  http://doodle.com/loriayre

<Lori.Ayre at galecia.com>Specializing in open source software solutions,
RFID, filtering,
workflow optimization, and materials handling
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