[WebPub] Global Drupal sprint happening this weekend (Jan 30-31)

[Edmund Carlevale]

Dear WebPubbers, 

There’s a global Drupal sprint happening this weekend and I urge anyone who has a few hours to spare to participate. All skills are needed, including none whatsoever. Learn more and sign up here <http://d8sprint.drupalgardens.com/>  This is a perfect moment to plug into the local Drupal community because Drupal 8 has thrown the gates wide open, introducing so many new technologies that everyone is more or less starting from scratch. 

And the two-day sprint is being hosted by Genuine <https://www.wearegenuine.com/>, a booming development shop in Boston’s South End that is fun to visit in itself (and the new host of the monthly Boston Drupal Group meet-ups <https://groups.drupal.org/node/508178>).

When you look at Stanford’s Drupal github page <https://github.com/SU-SWS>, or UCal Berkeley’s Drupal Meetups <https://groups.drupal.org/berkeley>, you get an immediate sense of what our peers on the West Coast are doing. From Stanford, a fleet of modules and themes publicly available. From Berkeley, leadership in the local community. Not to run down the local team, but here in Boston the situation is very different. Open Scholar’s front-end is easily the best I’ve ever seen, and I’m certain ten more sites will be built with it by the time I get to the end of this sentence. It’s changing our understanding of academic web development. But Open Scholar’s code is like a glacier that has been rolling toward us since 2008. So many ideas that have been long since abandoned are still buried within it, so Harvard has to maintain the development on its own dime and time. Harvard can afford that but no one else can.

At the quiet other end of the spectrum, MIT has Drupal Cloud, a wonderfully maintainable distribution simply because it contains nothing but Drupal core and a handful of contrib modules. Hence MIT’s ongoing stampede to Wordpress.

What I’ve noticed in my own academic development is that websites are becoming more or less irrelevant, like printed telephone books. The front lines of communication have shifted to Facebook and Twitter and Linked-In and all the rest. But this is only temporary. As you have no doubt noticed yourselves, the money at Harvard and MIT has shifted to large-scale research centers. That was the building boom we just lived through, that that turned Cambridge and Somerville and Allston into a land of hoarding and skyscrapers. Now these block-sized building are most up and running, and the research centers in have an entirely different set of needs from the standard departments that we have been building sites for previously. They’re university-wide, first of all, and often multi-institutional, with complex reporting requirements, and even more complex sub-communities within them. But above all, because they are organized around new ideas, they have a need to communicate their work that traditional departments simply don’t have. These centers will transform academic web development. A lovely site that used to show news items and calendar events — creating and managing that will be a bullet item on an admin assistant’s job description. The new sites will need the functionality of a library, a press, and a room full of filing cabinets. It will need to have relationships with a fleet of other websites. About all, these sites will have to communicate in a way that academic sites simply have not tackled to date.

Which brings us back to the sprint this weekend. This is a global sprint happening around the world <https://groups.drupal.org/node/488988>, with a focus on migrating Drupal’s contrib modules to Drupal 8. Dip your toe in. Sign up here <http://d8sprint.drupalgardens.com/>. It’s the right moment.

Ed

Front-End Drupal Developer
MIT Drupal Group <http://drupalgroup.mit.edu/>







_________________________







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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