[Eg-oversight-board] Status of Drupal Evergreen

[Steve Wills]

Lori,

Thanks so much for writing this up. I have ended up on a release that is refusing to release me, hence, missing todays meeting. I'll have more to say about this later this week. The theming effort will help for the lay folk. Jim and I still need a discussion about URLs, which have come up as a concern on a couple of occasions. It sounds as if eg13. might offer some of those solutions.

more soon,
Steve

-----Original Message-----
From: Lori Bowen Ayre [mailto:lori.ayre at galecia.com]
Sent: Wednesday, March 13, 2013 10:53 AM
To: 'eg-oversight-board'
Subject: [Eg-oversight-board] Status of Drupal Evergreen

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.


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Lori Bowen Ayre // 
Library Technology Consultant / The Galecia Group
(707) 763-6869 // Lori.Ayre at galecia.com

Availability: http://doodle.com/loriayre


Specializing in open source software solutions, RFID, filtering, 
workflow optimization, and materials handling 
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