[WebPub] Today: "Re-Imagining Web Development at MIT" (3:30-4:40 pm, 10-250)

[Edmund Carlevale]

Hello,

I’ll be making my presentation later today, a more straightforward demo than I had originally intended but still hopefully useful. I just posted a blog post that outlines the talk. http://drupalgroup.mit.edu/. I hope you’ll be able to be there.

Regards,

Ed

Blog
[Ed Carlevale]
"Re-Imagining Web Development @ MIT" - presentation outline<http://drupalgroup.mit.edu/content/re-imagining-web-development-mit-presentation-outline>
Posted by Ed Carlevale<http://drupalgroup.mit.edu/users/ed-carlevale> on September 21, 2015  [edit]<http://drupalgroup.mit.edu/node/82/edit?destination=node/82>

I originally intended today's presentation as a review of where MIT is now in terms of web development, followed by a presentation of an alternative approach. But I can say really simply now where MIT is, leaving me to spend the bulk of my presentation showing something better.

Basically, MIT has two options for bringing in new websites: single-site single-client development, or Drupal Cloud.

The single-site approach is unmaintainable. The sites are built by an outside developer and handed over to their MIT client, usually a program's communication manager, to manage. The developer oftens works on a contract basis to maintain the site and make needed changes. And the communication's manager maintains the site. The essential flaw in this process is that new MIT sites reinvent the wheel over and over again, building the functionality (people, projects, publications, news events, blogs, media galleries), that should long ago have been packaged and made available to the MIT community in some sort of centralized process.

Drupal Cloud I discuss in the blog post from yesterday.

So what I'll be presenting today is my approach, which basically presents the concept of an MIT distribution, then demonstrates the power and functionality that it is possible to build on top of that basis.

1. Panopoly. I start by introducing Pantheon's Panopoly distribution, because it is becoming the standard base for most other distributions by virtue of its brilliant use of Panels and Panelizer.

2. Then I demo the Open Academy distribution, originally built by Chapter 3 for UC Berkeley (I believe), which is built on top of Panopoly and adds standard (ahem, Drupal Cloud) academic features like Publications, People, Events, and News.

3. And then I come to the primary thing I want to present, which is the Open Atrium distribution. Open Atrium builds on top of Panopoly, so it's basic structure should be very familiar. But it adds the most brilliant feature set and interface I've seen on any website. The distribution has been adopted by the United Nations as their primary platform, and that makes perfect sense to me.

Over the past year I've used Atrium as the basis of my own sites, and have added the features that I think belong on an MIT distribution, the most important of which is a documentation intranet. The fundamental flaw with nearly all web development is that there is no documentation, neither for users nor developers. Sites are built and handed off, but as soon as anyone from the original team leaves, the site becomes unmaintainable. Virtually every stand-alone site I’ve seen at MIT has gone through this life-cycle spiral.

The other key problem with our current approach is that so much effort is being wasted in recreating the wheel, in building functionality that should take an hour at most, not the entire development budget. So virtually every site at MIT is happy to post events, news items, and people, and call it a day. Some are more attractive than others, but their functionality and development is a direct version of their html base. Revolutions have happened in how sites are built, in what they do. But MIT has simply updated html to php. There is so much that could be happening with academic websites, especially in large research centers, and none of it is happening beyond decent looking sites that show events, people, and news items, and call it a day.

So the presentation today is about demo-ing a more efficient structure. It's not the manifesto I had in mind when I originally thought of this presentation. But I think it represents a better way forward.
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