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

Wed Sep 23 07:34:24 EDT 2015

Jay,

This is a great start.

Monthly web pub meetups
An important first step would be for WebPub to go back to having monthly meetings. The lack of communication among yourselves has really hurt. And it prevents newcomers to MIT from finding out about WebPub in the first place. The meetings don’t have to be organized around a speaker. People should just make short 5-10 minute presentations to show anything new that they’re working on, and also to ask questions.

Finishing Drupal Cloud
Yesterday I posted two screencasts to walk people through building sites on Drupal Cloud. They’re not great but the nerd in me always finds it interesting to see how other people work.

Lesson 1
Creating a new content type (projects) and views.
https://youtu.be/Fu_MjGCNsJA

Lesson 2
Continuation of Lesson 1, showing some CSS theming with css injector module, and also Block management.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXwJrlKp9Rw

I planned to walk through the full site creation process, but now I’ve decided to make a short screencast to show what’s missing from Drupal Cloud. It would be so easy for IS&T to spend two weeks and finish this platform. Nothing would represent a security risk. And small fixes would make the difference between a 2009 platform that of limited use and a 2015 platform that’s robust and user-friendly.

Ed

On Sep 22, 2015, at 4:55 PM, Jay Sitter <jsitter at mit.edu<mailto:jsitter at mit.edu>> wrote:

Hi everyone,

It was great to see so many people interested in the state of web development at MIT coming out to talk. As Ed said, communication is key.

Also to repeat Ed, it seems like we were all coming from many different places, but I think there were some themes that we can extract from our discussion.

Before I go into more detail, though, I’d love to just get a general feel for how interested the people on this list are in getting together to think about how our development processes could be improved. A quick reply indicating your interest level would be appreciated!

My main takeaways from the discussion:

1) The help/Q&A community around Drupal Cloud and development in general could stand to be improved. Can this be addressed technologically (using something other than the Drupal Cloud forum), or is it a matter of spreading awareness of existing technologies and engendering a culture of reaching out for help and helping others?

2) A means for knowledge- and code-sharing could help everyone and prevent duplicated effort. For instance, one person who was in attendance is using Joomla for secure document sharing, since that isn’t provided by Drupal Cloud, and another person pointed out that this *can* be done in Drupal (though not in Drupal Cloud), relying on content_access and other module(s). More open and frequent communication among developers and webmasters in different departments could allow for serendipitous meetings like this, potentially leading to better, longer-term solutions to development challenges.

3) Drupal Cloud could use some better, more robust theming options. People seemed to like the idea of dragging content as presented in Ed’s Open Atrium demo; there’s a general agreement that the default themes aren’t as attractive as they could be, though they get the job done; and responsive design is definitely something that people would like to see.

4) How can we help prevent "code rot"?

There’s more to discuss, of course, but I think this is a good start.

More generally, is this kind of communication/collaboration something people on this list are interested in? Meeting on central campus every month is maybe something we could think about, where we could share our current projects, new things we’ve learned, ask for help with problems, etc.

Hope to hear from you!

Best,
Jay

--
Jay Sitter
Web Designer & Developer
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Office of Communications, Resource Development
(617) 715-5170
600 Memorial Drive, W98-352B
Cambridge, MA 02139-4822

On Sep 21, 2015, at 10:30 AM, Edmund Carlevale <ecarl at MIT.EDU<mailto:ecarl at MIT.EDU>> wrote:

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

"Re-Imagining Web Development @ MIT" - presentation outline
Posted by Ed Carlevale on September 21, 2015  [edit]
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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