[WebPub] Drupal 8 and MIT: Revised presentation: Open Scholar @MIT

[Edmund Carlevale]

This is a long email, and the short version is: I started working with Harvard’s Open Scholar distribution over the weekend and strongly feel nothing in Drupal 8 will match its functionality for a couple of years. So my presentation will now focus on that functionality and potential deployment scenarios at MIT.

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Dear Web-Pubbers,

It’s been an interesting weekend.

I was installing Harvard’s Open Scholar distribution so that I could demo that as part of my presentation today <http://events.mit.edu/event.html?id=16472903&date=2015/10/5> (3-4pm, Bldg 3-370 <http://whereis.mit.edu/?go=3> , and from that point on I fell down a rabbit hole as I was exploring Open Scholar. I’d looked at Open Scholar a year ago, but clearly I didn’t have enough knowledge then to accurately judge it. I’ve spent the past year building my own academic distribution, and I think it’s pretty good. But not in ten years would I have been able to come up with something like Open Scholar. I’m dead certain it will become the standard platform in academic development, as Princeton’s <https://openscholar.princeton.edu/> and Berkeley’s adoption of it suggests.

I think Open Scholar in and of itself delivers the best Drupal website I’ve seen, but I would approach its deployment in a different way than Harvard or Princeton has done. Open Scholar is capable of delivering hundreds of websites with each instance of Open Scholar, and these hundreds of websites can each be of a different kind (departmental sites, research groups, research centers, faculty profiles, etc) and design. This is viable if you have a very large support structure in place, and top tier hosting. But I propose much smaller clusters, even perhaps just a single website per installation. Those websites would still deliver extraordinarily powerful functionality, far more powerful than any website I’ve seen at MIT. Yet the maintainability of each individual website, or clusters of websites, would soar, because very suddenly there is a community that can work together in some collegial way.

Two more pieces to this story.

As it happens, the lead developer for Open Scholar, Ferdi Alimahdi, is now working as the Director of Engineering at the MIT Office of Digital Learning. I strongly urge the MIT Community to reach out to him and engage him as a consultant, or simply ask his advice — not in regard to Open Scholar necessarily, but definitely in regard to MIT’s Drupal Cloud platform.

Again, as it happens, The Drupal Cloud sent me a Drupal Cloud site last week, because I needed to move it to external hosting. And this was my first look at the code and how Drupal Cloud was put together.  My heart goes out to the IS&T maintainers who have been working with this platform since the developer who built it left MIT several years. To say that it’s unprofessional, that it shows no understanding of Drupal development whatsoever, is only to say the facts. You can look and see how it was put together and understand immediately why the platform has been frozen, why there is no documentation, and all the rest. I originally intended, as part of my presentation, to rebuild the Drupal Cloud site that was sent me and show how easy it would be to restructure it, add a handful of needed modules, and create a set of features so that the platform would be useful to the MIT community. I got halfway through that, then was waylaid by Open Scholar. I don’t know Ferdi and haven’t met him, but again, I urge MIT to solicit his opinion, as the Drupal Cloud team, through no fault of their own whatsoever, needs good advice of how to move forward. They are planning to start writing documentation, but their plans for adding modules or any features are vague, and looking at the code I completely understand why.

As for Drupal 8, Open Scholar makes it less urgent for me. The major change that’s coming with Drupal 8 has very little to do with the front-end, the part of a website that most Web-Pubbers have to do with. But it has everything to do with Drupal's back-end, in that it introduces new frameworks (symfony2 is the big one) that open up Drupal to a far wider range of possibilities, primarily through various web services. But there are so many exciting possibilities already up and running in Open Scholar (with web monkey, disqus, event management, and an incredibly cool way to manage profile and research group websites), that I feel there is already enough for us to begin to integrate. And it will be at least a year, and possibly two, before Drupal 8 can equal Open Scholar’s interface, and I frankly don’t see how anything else will improve on it.

So there is a lot to talk about. Drupal has become the dominant platform in academia, and finding the best way to manage that at MIT is a critical discussion. Before I realized what Open Scholar delivers, I had been planning to present simply the pathway that I feel we should be moving along. But Open Scholar moves that discussion much further forward and lands us in a place where I didn’t anticipate being for at  least a year.

All of which is to say, I am still planning to give my presentation today, and am working now on the material  <http://drupalgroup.mit.edu/os-mit/discussions/basic-overview-proposed-open-scholar-deployment-mit>, but I wanted to let you know that this is not the presentation you were likely expecting.

Best,

Ed Carlevale
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Ed Carlevale
Communications
Front-End Web Development

MIT Energy Club <http://mitenergyclub.org/>
MIT Drupal Group <http://drupalgroup.mit.edu/>
MIT Energy Conference <http://mitenergyconference.org/>
Clean Energy Prize <http://cep.mit.edu/>

MIT Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems <http://canes.mit.edu/>
	
Penny Chisholm Research <http://chisholmlab.mit.edu/>
Martin Polz Research <http://polzlab.mit.edu/>
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