6 ms·

Australian government likely to standardise on Drupal

19 points by drewjaja 12y ago

jqm 12y ago
FTA- ''' "GovCMS is intended to support more effective web channel delivery functions within Government, and enable agencies to redirect effort from non-core transactional activities, towards higher-value activities that are more aligned with core agency missions," a draft statement of requirements issued by AGIMO states. ''' It appears buzzword abuse is becoming an international problem across multiple industries and agencies. I recommend a UN task force to look into it and take the appropriate measures. Sanctions are defiantly in order, but at this point nothing should be off the table.
etfb 12y ago
The Australian government is particularly stupid at the moment. I leave as an exercise for the reader the question of whether this is example or counter-example of that.
- damian2000 12y ago
  But you'd imagine (or hope?) decisions like this aren't being made by any MPs, who probably know little about IT.
  - etfb 12y ago
    AGIMO is funny. It used to be part of the Department of Communications, then it got slurped up by Finance. The people in charge were career public servants, totally interchangeable with no real idea of what the org was doing. What they basically did was develop policy according to whatever the Minister said in Question Time, which frequently led to whole new projects being invented in a rush on a Thursday afternoon and made into unassailable policy by Monday. So in a sense, decision were being made by MPs. Though you're right, this doesn't seem to be suffering from the same problem.
- jacques_chester 12y ago
  Australian governments exhibit a constant level of stupidity; it's just that the focus on stupidity is shifted around depending on who is in power.
  - etfb 12y ago
    I'm calling that Chester's Law, and quoting you henceforth.
  - girvo 12y ago
    We have a surprisingly nice country, considering our governance over the years. I'm a bit worried 'bout the current mob, though, they seem determined to wreck things even more than previous governments. I think I preferred the previous mob: stabbing themselves in the back distracted them from stuffing things up!
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
vertex-four 12y ago
So basically, getting past the people who have no idea what they're talking about, the Australian Government wants some private company to sell them something similar to Gov.UK as a hosted service. Is that about right?
etfb 12y ago
I used to work for AGIMO, and I personally implemented the first version of australia.gov.au. Funny story: I got caught posting something on Slashdot that they interpreted as critical of their decision making (spoiler: it was, because their decision making was hideous), so they decided not to renew my contract. They still had me doing the australia.gov.au project though. I took what was, basically, a Photoshop document produced by some mob up in Brisbane, and turned it into something usable, accessible and extensible, with a strong focus on accessibility for visually impaired and disabled users and on old or non-desktop browsers. I had to fight every step of the way to fix the original Photoshop design to make it work, but I was vindicated when the site won awards... which were given to the mob in Brisbane. Meanwhile, they had a grand opening at Parliament House to which all the media were invited -- and I was very pointedly not invited, presumably because they were worried I'd say rude things about them (spoiler: I would have). Then the leader of the National Party chose that morning to resign, and nobody from the media came to the launch party because they were busy over the other side of the House interviewing him. So I felt a certain degree of whatever that German word is for "serves you right, you bastards". Meanwhile, australia.gov.au had a bunch of redesigns and is even better now, so the three guys they brought in to replace me obviously did good work...
- voltagex_ 12y ago
  Still in Canberra? I'd like to buy you a drink.
  - etfb 12y ago
    In Tassie now, happily running my own business and not dealing with cretinous managers. But thanks!
    - voltagex_ 12y ago
      Ah right. Tassie seems to be the place to go - NBN enabled too!
      - etfb 12y ago
majika 12y ago
The Australian Government CTO's blog post (on finance.gov.au - where else?): http://www.finance.gov.au/blog/2014/05/07/seeking-industry-comment-on-govcms-draft-statement-of-requirements/ http://www.finance.gov.au/blog/2014/05/07/seeking-industry-c... The draft Statement of Requirements for GovCMS: http://www.finance.gov.au/sites/default/files/GovCMS%20Statement%20of%20Requirements%20and%20Vendor%20Questions%20%28for%20public%20release%29%20-%205%200.pdf http://www.finance.gov.au/sites/default/files/GovCMS%20State... Some notable tidbits: - No analysis seems to have been done on the approach of hiring their own developers to develop a custom-yet-cohesive solution, a la Gov.uk. - The CTO says "Drupal appears to offer the best enterprise-level as shown by our previous extensive analysis". Can someone refer me to this extensive analysis? Have they considered the security risks of standardizing on a single platform? http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list.php?vendor_id=1367&product_id=&version_id=&page=1&hasexp=0&opdos=0&opec=0&opov=0&opcsrf=0&opgpriv=0&opsqli=0&opxss=0&opdirt=0&opmemc=0&ophttprs=0&opbyp=0&opfileinc=0&opginf=0&cvssscoremin=0&cvssscoremax=0&year=0&month=0&cweid=0&order=3&trc=251&sha=5baca71f3e0155964df6d2b1f631f68053857320 http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list.php?vendor_id=1... - "A solution hosted offshore would not be excluded from consideration" So, putting Australian Government infrastructure in the US is OK. Subject to US laws. Fantastic. - Does anyone know if the government intends to contribute to Drupal development? They say that they expect some "feature rich" sites to require custom modules, but what about Drupal itself?
- XorNot 12y ago
  Sounds about right. The sad thing is the Australian government produces great in-house software when they do it - but for some reason "outsource it all" has taken hold all through the place lately.
danso 12y ago
I don't know if the U.S. federal gov can be said to have "standardized" on Drupal, but parts of it are still run on Drupal, including Whitehouse.gov. However, there used to be more U.S. Drupal sites, including Data.gov...there was even some hubabaloo about them releasing the source code: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/12/05/datagov-goes-global http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/12/05/datagov-goes-globa... https://groups.drupal.org/node/194808 https://groups.drupal.org/node/194808 Viewing the source code of the current data.gov (view-source:http://www.data.gov/ http://www.data.gov/), it looks like the moved it to WordPress. That's a pretty damning migration. Edit: The current repo for Data.gov can be found on Github - https://github.com/GSA/data.gov/ https://github.com/GSA/data.gov/ Here's the shit-show that was apparently Data.gov's Drupal installation: https://github.com/opengovplatform/ogpl-d7 https://github.com/opengovplatform/ogpl-d7 And quite humorously, it seems to be something that we're exporting to other governments, such as India https://github.com/opengovplatform/opengovplatform-beta https://github.com/opengovplatform/opengovplatform-beta
- fredsted 12y ago
  Looks like that site uses WordPress for the index site, but as soon as you make a search you are redirected to a site based on something called CKAN (http://ckan.org http://ckan.org), a dedicated data searching engine. Probably better than Drupal for that purpose anyhow. Can't see how that is damning for drupal.
  - danso 12y ago
    CKAN has been around for awhile AFAIK, back even in the Drupal 5.x days, there was a CKAN module for Drupal. From CKAN's webpage: http://ckan.org http://ckan.org > Strong integration with third-party CMS’s like Drupal and WordPress There was no explicit reason to switch front-end sites...But think about it...creating Data.gov was a large endeavor, but it's certainly not a mission critical one. Just a couple years after building that initiative from scratch, they throw out Drupal for WordPress instead of using their existing Drupal installation and installing CKAN modules. How does that not reflect badly on Drupal, which bills itself as a much more powerful, flexible CMS than your standard blog system?
jacques_chester 12y ago
It has been my experience that nobody takes AGIMO seriously. They do a lot of research, produce a lot of reports, publish a lot of "standards", and then everyone else just ignores them and stumbles on with whatever they were doing before. The people who are already married to some solution will remain married to their solution; they will successfully argue for exemptions. Those who are determined to use something else will use political capital to get another exemption. Those who are forced to make the switch will make the switch, but the old system will probably hang around for a long time, more than doubling the overall cost due to double-entry and errors. Some will make the transition, it will fail, then transition back. In the end the government standard will be taken up by a handful of sites, AGIMO or its heirs and successors will declare total success, the Minister will have been rotated to something else or kicked out at an election and nobody will give two hoots. Welcome to public sector computing! It's like enterprise, except even crazier.
mark_l_watson 12y ago
I have never used Drupal (I am not much into Python), but in general it makes lots of sense for governments to standardize on open source tools, including CMS. At least AFAIK, Drupal is fairly efficient. I would not be so enthusiastic about Wordpress.
- sniuff 12y ago
  I think Drupal is PHP
- etfb 12y ago
  sniuff is right, Drupal is all PHP, through and through. As for Wordpress's alleged speed problems, I haven't had any trouble. The speed of development for WP is way ahead of that for Drupal, in my experience at least, to the point where I just refuse to work on Drupal installations and convert them over to WP as a first step.
  - girvo 12y ago
    I worked for a mob that only used Drupal. I'm one of those weirdos that actually likes modern PHP, but I didn't last long there. In my opinion nearly anything else is preferable to clicking through that damned GUI to get it to do what I want without hacking the core or messing with those damned hooks. I mean, check our changes into git? Why would we want to do that? :<
  - jacques_chester 12y ago
    > As for Wordpress's alleged speed problems, I haven't had any trouble. It does not support caching out of the box and MySQL has, for a long time, had poor behaviour for workloads involving tables with TEXT fields. By the way, learn about db-error.php. Might as well never have a problem in style.
  - mark_l_watson 12y ago
    Thanks for the correction!
fungi 12y ago
at least its not squiz
- etfb 12y ago
  Amen, brother! Or sister. Or eukaryotic organisms. Whatever. So what happened to Squiz? It was the godawful piece of shit that I criticised in the /. post that kinda-sorta lost me my job with AGIMO, so I wouldn't mind knowing how long it took for me to be proved right.
  - dwd 12y ago
    Pretty sure Squiz is still running a number of University sites which was always their core audience.
    - mpettitt 12y ago
      From using it on a daily basis, it's not even that great at uni websites. The killer failing as far as I'm concerned is the menu system - compared with WordPress or Drupal or any other content management system, it makes adding pages to menus such a chore...
    - mpettitt 12y ago
      From using it on a daily basis, it's not even that great at uni websites. The killer failing as far as I'm concerned is the menu system - compared with WordPress or Drupal or any other content management system, it makes adding pages to menus such a chore...
BorisMelnik 12y ago
Hmmm Auusies went with Drupal Germans with Linux I like this recent trend!
dwd 12y ago
> Our preference is for Software-as-a-Service on Public Cloud, using Open Source Drupal software. This is moronic. Why would you mandate using the most unusable CMS system from an end-user point of view when you are outsourcing the hosting and maintenance to a SAAS partner? I'm sure they could have cut a better deal with Sitecore which seems to power a lot of Government sites and is a far more coherent platform with a robust workflow and integration with Active Directory services.
hvs 12y ago
First, let me say I'm not a CMS zealot. I've implemented Drupal, Sitecore, Wordpress[1], and many others. I believe in using the right tool for the job based on time, price, and capability. That said, Drupal is, without a doubt, the most complicated, confusing, and counter-intuitive piece of crap I've ever used and/or implemented. I feel sorry for the users that I've been required to subject to that monstrosity. Anyone who looks at Drupal and thinks, "Yep, that's what I need for my site!" should be considered incompetent for whatever job they have. [1] Wordpress isn't really a CMS, but it is treated like one at many corporations.
noir_lord 12y ago
I worked with Drupal for 2 years (built a specific niche business social network on top of it) and it was the worst two years of my life as a programmer. I literally will not touch Drupal projects, I'll go back to working retail before I'd be a Drupal developer again, it is an unremittingly awful platform to work on. The front end experience is horrible (even with all the tweaks in the world), CCK/Views made it just about useful then they rolled that into core but only some of it, you can forget an upgrade path between major versions in any real world scenario, the hook system is just plain bonkers. I honestly don't know how it got a reputation as the goto open source enterprise CMS, Joomla must have been truly terrible for Drupal to be the preferred solution. In the time I spent beating that monstrosity into shape I could have built the same functionality in a fraction of the time using something like Symfony. This was in the days of the 6 to 7 rollover, things may have improved, frankly I've very carefully not looked.
- sickmate 12y ago
  With regards to Joomla, it really is terrible when it comes to security. Versions 1.5-2.5 have major vulnerabilities that allows anyone to create an admin user unless you disable account registration. Popular plugins like TinyMCE allowed unauthorised users to upload arbitrary files with a specially crafted request. There are also plenty of bots that scan for vulnerable Joomla installs as they do with Wordpress.
- rjknight 12y ago
  I'm afraid it's rather like anything else - Drupal works well for people who understand what it's good for. In particular, it's good for content management, where 'content' is loosely defined as 'stuff in a database that people want to edit and publish'. The 'bonkers' hook system is basically just aspect-oriented programming. It's not to everyone's taste but it's not as though you can't figure out how it works. It's just not a typical MVC web framework, and MVC web frameworks have mostly won (which is why Drupal 8 is going to be built around Symfony components, but that's another story). I dispute that an experienced Symfony dev could build the same functionality as an experienced Drupal dev in less time. You could skew the test either way by picking requirements that favour one platform over the other, but for most general case content management (including user-generated content) requirements you'll be able to do it quicker in Drupal, mostly because you won't have to write boring stuff like: * User management * Roles and permissions * Login, password reset, activation * Basic editorial UI * RSS feeds * Custom content types * Wysiwyg editing (admittedly this can be a pain to configure) * Logging * Caching, including Varnish integration, Memcache etc. * Indexing of content into Solr/Elasticsearch And so on. Most of that stuff is plug and play, and if you're happy to accept the (very real and sometimes painful) limits that come with Drupal then you can almost always deliver functionality faster by using open source modules wisely. In general, I rarely agree with people who say "<popular piece of software/programming language/library> is an unusable piece of crap" because the evidence appears to suggest that other people are using it effectively. The fact that you didn't enjoy it doesn't automatically make it bad software (nor does it make you a bad developer for not enjoying it or figuring out how to use it effectively). Most successful systems do at least some things really well, even if they get a lot of other things badly wrong, and dismissing them makes it harder to learn from the things that they do well. For my part, I wouldn't exactly describe Drupal development as fun, compared to Ruby or Clojure. However, it can be scarily effective in the right hands.
dageshi 12y ago
Drupal is the Microsoft Excel of CMS, it's sufficiently powerful enough to store and present data for average users without them having to learn any programming.
SEJeff 12y ago
Not sure if anyone realizes this, but Drupal is what powers none other than whitehouse.gov. They even were kind enough to open source some of their tooling around Drupal. It is pretty neat stuff. https://github.com/WhiteHouse/fortyfour https://github.com/WhiteHouse/fortyfour http://whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/04/21/whitehousegov-releases-open-source-code http://whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/04/21/whitehousegov-releases...
- mikecb 12y ago
  It's probably the most used among Federal agencies, including top level departments: https://groups.drupal.org/government-sites#USA https://groups.drupal.org/government-sites#USA
stockli 12y ago
I'm always somewhat mystified regarding the abject hatred Drupal gets from the HN bunch... I understand a few points: 1. Perceived as overly complex. 2. Reliant on dev paradigms that originate from the PHP4 days, i.e. no OOP. 3. Performance can be a problem. 4. It's PHP, and old-school PHP at that. 5. Everything is done in the UI, and you can't ship DB-based config in code. 6. It's for people who don't know how to code. (I would argue this applies more to WP than Drupal) I get all of those points, and I agree with most of them. However, my shop uses Drupal for mid-size projects, and a little bit of WP for small ones. Here's how I see Drupal: 1. Integrated, relatively coherent API and model structure that modules can hook into. I.e. two modules don't need to explicitly know about each other for them to be used together. Thus, uncoordinated effort on disparate modules can be used together by site builders to create novel features. 2. Configuration is much less DB oriented than it was, and many things can be committed to git now. This is also continuing to improve over time, and Drupal 8 will be a major change in this regard. 3. Drupal when properly set up actually seems to provide a more consistent admin experience for users than WP does (in my experience, anyway). WP sites that use a lot of modules usually end up with the admin feeling like it was designed by many different people. Drupal used to be that way, but has greatly improved... 4. Performance with proper caching is actually pretty good. As always, you can use any good tool poorly and get poor results. 5. Drupal's codebase is extremely complex, and structured in a way that makes things very hard to debug sometimes (i.e. the hook system). Sometimes I want to do something that I consider very simple, and I can't do it without digging through the API for 4 hours trying to figure out how to do it. 6. And yes, PHP has problems. I don't like its API and that it tends to encourage poor coding practices, but as some recent threads on HN have pointed out, modern frameworks like Symfony are helping to put a cleaner face on PHP. And D8 uses Symfony. It seems like many of those that hate Drupal stopped using it in version 6, which definitely had many of the problems listed above, many of which have been addressed to some degree. Drupal 8 is based around Symfony components, which should greatly modernize the codebase, though that has been a very controversial move in the community. All of that said, Drupal still feels like the "least worst thing" for what we use it for, and I'd love to hear what people use instead of it for the types of projects we use Drupal for (custom e-commerce, large content sites with lots of different types of content, complex publishing workflows, etc). We've tried Joomla and WP at various points, and each felt like it had shortcomings for our use cases. And we don't usually get to work with huge budgets, so we have to deliver a lot of complexity for not a lot of $. Sorry, this got really long, and this thread seems a strange place to go into so much detail :). But I am genuinely interested in alternatives, and in what others are using when they just need to build a (complex) site for a customer who doesn't have the $ to start totally from scratch.

19 points by drewjaja 12y ago

jqm 12y ago

FTA- ''' "GovCMS is intended to support more effective web channel delivery functions within Government, and enable agencies to redirect effort from non-core transactional activities, towards higher-value activities that are more aligned with core agency missions," a draft statement of requirements issued by AGIMO states. ''' It appears buzzword abuse is becoming an international problem across multiple industries and agencies. I recommend a UN task force to look into it and take the appropriate measures. Sanctions are defiantly in order, but at this point nothing should be off the table.

etfb 12y ago

The Australian government is particularly stupid at the moment. I leave as an exercise for the reader the question of whether this is example or counter-example of that.

damian2000 12y ago
But you'd imagine (or hope?) decisions like this aren't being made by any MPs, who probably know little about IT.
- etfb 12y ago
  AGIMO is funny. It used to be part of the Department of Communications, then it got slurped up by Finance. The people in charge were career public servants, totally interchangeable with no real idea of what the org was doing. What they basically did was develop policy according to whatever the Minister said in Question Time, which frequently led to whole new projects being invented in a rush on a Thursday afternoon and made into unassailable policy by Monday. So in a sense, decision were being made by MPs. Though you're right, this doesn't seem to be suffering from the same problem.
jacques_chester 12y ago
Australian governments exhibit a constant level of stupidity; it's just that the focus on stupidity is shifted around depending on who is in power.
- etfb 12y ago
  I'm calling that Chester's Law, and quoting you henceforth.
- girvo 12y ago
  We have a surprisingly nice country, considering our governance over the years. I'm a bit worried 'bout the current mob, though, they seem determined to wreck things even more than previous governments. I think I preferred the previous mob: stabbing themselves in the back distracted them from stuffing things up!
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

vertex-four 12y ago

So basically, getting past the people who have no idea what they're talking about, the Australian Government wants some private company to sell them something similar to Gov.UK as a hosted service. Is that about right?

etfb 12y ago

I used to work for AGIMO, and I personally implemented the first version of australia.gov.au. Funny story: I got caught posting something on Slashdot that they interpreted as critical of their decision making (spoiler: it was, because their decision making was hideous), so they decided not to renew my contract. They still had me doing the australia.gov.au project though. I took what was, basically, a Photoshop document produced by some mob up in Brisbane, and turned it into something usable, accessible and extensible, with a strong focus on accessibility for visually impaired and disabled users and on old or non-desktop browsers. I had to fight every step of the way to fix the original Photoshop design to make it work, but I was vindicated when the site won awards... which were given to the mob in Brisbane. Meanwhile, they had a grand opening at Parliament House to which all the media were invited -- and I was very pointedly not invited, presumably because they were worried I'd say rude things about them (spoiler: I would have). Then the leader of the National Party chose that morning to resign, and nobody from the media came to the launch party because they were busy over the other side of the House interviewing him. So I felt a certain degree of whatever that German word is for "serves you right, you bastards". Meanwhile, australia.gov.au had a bunch of redesigns and is even better now, so the three guys they brought in to replace me obviously did good work...

voltagex_ 12y ago
Still in Canberra? I'd like to buy you a drink.
- etfb 12y ago
  In Tassie now, happily running my own business and not dealing with cretinous managers. But thanks!
  - voltagex_ 12y ago
    Ah right. Tassie seems to be the place to go - NBN enabled too!
    - etfb 12y ago

majika 12y ago

The Australian Government CTO's blog post (on finance.gov.au - where else?): http://www.finance.gov.au/blog/2014/05/07/seeking-industry-comment-on-govcms-draft-statement-of-requirements/ http://www.finance.gov.au/blog/2014/05/07/seeking-industry-c... The draft Statement of Requirements for GovCMS: http://www.finance.gov.au/sites/default/files/GovCMS%20Statement%20of%20Requirements%20and%20Vendor%20Questions%20%28for%20public%20release%29%20-%205%200.pdf http://www.finance.gov.au/sites/default/files/GovCMS%20State... Some notable tidbits: - No analysis seems to have been done on the approach of hiring their own developers to develop a custom-yet-cohesive solution, a la Gov.uk. - The CTO says "Drupal appears to offer the best enterprise-level as shown by our previous extensive analysis". Can someone refer me to this extensive analysis? Have they considered the security risks of standardizing on a single platform? http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list.php?vendor_id=1367&product_id=&version_id=&page=1&hasexp=0&opdos=0&opec=0&opov=0&opcsrf=0&opgpriv=0&opsqli=0&opxss=0&opdirt=0&opmemc=0&ophttprs=0&opbyp=0&opfileinc=0&opginf=0&cvssscoremin=0&cvssscoremax=0&year=0&month=0&cweid=0&order=3&trc=251&sha=5baca71f3e0155964df6d2b1f631f68053857320 http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list.php?vendor_id=1... - "A solution hosted offshore would not be excluded from consideration" So, putting Australian Government infrastructure in the US is OK. Subject to US laws. Fantastic. - Does anyone know if the government intends to contribute to Drupal development? They say that they expect some "feature rich" sites to require custom modules, but what about Drupal itself?

XorNot 12y ago
Sounds about right. The sad thing is the Australian government produces great in-house software when they do it - but for some reason "outsource it all" has taken hold all through the place lately.

danso 12y ago

I don't know if the U.S. federal gov can be said to have "standardized" on Drupal, but parts of it are still run on Drupal, including Whitehouse.gov. However, there used to be more U.S. Drupal sites, including Data.gov...there was even some hubabaloo about them releasing the source code: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/12/05/datagov-goes-global http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/12/05/datagov-goes-globa... https://groups.drupal.org/node/194808 https://groups.drupal.org/node/194808 Viewing the source code of the current data.gov (view-source:http://www.data.gov/ http://www.data.gov/), it looks like the moved it to WordPress. That's a pretty damning migration. Edit: The current repo for Data.gov can be found on Github - https://github.com/GSA/data.gov/ https://github.com/GSA/data.gov/ Here's the shit-show that was apparently Data.gov's Drupal installation: https://github.com/opengovplatform/ogpl-d7 https://github.com/opengovplatform/ogpl-d7 And quite humorously, it seems to be something that we're exporting to other governments, such as India https://github.com/opengovplatform/opengovplatform-beta https://github.com/opengovplatform/opengovplatform-beta

fredsted 12y ago
Looks like that site uses WordPress for the index site, but as soon as you make a search you are redirected to a site based on something called CKAN (http://ckan.org http://ckan.org), a dedicated data searching engine. Probably better than Drupal for that purpose anyhow. Can't see how that is damning for drupal.
- danso 12y ago
  CKAN has been around for awhile AFAIK, back even in the Drupal 5.x days, there was a CKAN module for Drupal. From CKAN's webpage: http://ckan.org http://ckan.org > Strong integration with third-party CMS’s like Drupal and WordPress There was no explicit reason to switch front-end sites...But think about it...creating Data.gov was a large endeavor, but it's certainly not a mission critical one. Just a couple years after building that initiative from scratch, they throw out Drupal for WordPress instead of using their existing Drupal installation and installing CKAN modules. How does that not reflect badly on Drupal, which bills itself as a much more powerful, flexible CMS than your standard blog system?

jacques_chester 12y ago

It has been my experience that nobody takes AGIMO seriously. They do a lot of research, produce a lot of reports, publish a lot of "standards", and then everyone else just ignores them and stumbles on with whatever they were doing before. The people who are already married to some solution will remain married to their solution; they will successfully argue for exemptions. Those who are determined to use something else will use political capital to get another exemption. Those who are forced to make the switch will make the switch, but the old system will probably hang around for a long time, more than doubling the overall cost due to double-entry and errors. Some will make the transition, it will fail, then transition back. In the end the government standard will be taken up by a handful of sites, AGIMO or its heirs and successors will declare total success, the Minister will have been rotated to something else or kicked out at an election and nobody will give two hoots. Welcome to public sector computing! It's like enterprise, except even crazier.

mark_l_watson 12y ago

I have never used Drupal (I am not much into Python), but in general it makes lots of sense for governments to standardize on open source tools, including CMS. At least AFAIK, Drupal is fairly efficient. I would not be so enthusiastic about Wordpress.

sniuff 12y ago
I think Drupal is PHP
etfb 12y ago
sniuff is right, Drupal is all PHP, through and through. As for Wordpress's alleged speed problems, I haven't had any trouble. The speed of development for WP is way ahead of that for Drupal, in my experience at least, to the point where I just refuse to work on Drupal installations and convert them over to WP as a first step.
- girvo 12y ago
  I worked for a mob that only used Drupal. I'm one of those weirdos that actually likes modern PHP, but I didn't last long there. In my opinion nearly anything else is preferable to clicking through that damned GUI to get it to do what I want without hacking the core or messing with those damned hooks. I mean, check our changes into git? Why would we want to do that? :<
- jacques_chester 12y ago
  > As for Wordpress's alleged speed problems, I haven't had any trouble. It does not support caching out of the box and MySQL has, for a long time, had poor behaviour for workloads involving tables with TEXT fields. By the way, learn about db-error.php. Might as well never have a problem in style.
- mark_l_watson 12y ago
  Thanks for the correction!

fungi 12y ago

at least its not squiz

etfb 12y ago
Amen, brother! Or sister. Or eukaryotic organisms. Whatever. So what happened to Squiz? It was the godawful piece of shit that I criticised in the /. post that kinda-sorta lost me my job with AGIMO, so I wouldn't mind knowing how long it took for me to be proved right.
- dwd 12y ago
  Pretty sure Squiz is still running a number of University sites which was always their core audience.
  - mpettitt 12y ago
    From using it on a daily basis, it's not even that great at uni websites. The killer failing as far as I'm concerned is the menu system - compared with WordPress or Drupal or any other content management system, it makes adding pages to menus such a chore...
  - mpettitt 12y ago
    From using it on a daily basis, it's not even that great at uni websites. The killer failing as far as I'm concerned is the menu system - compared with WordPress or Drupal or any other content management system, it makes adding pages to menus such a chore...

BorisMelnik 12y ago

Hmmm Auusies went with Drupal Germans with Linux I like this recent trend!

dwd 12y ago

> Our preference is for Software-as-a-Service on Public Cloud, using Open Source Drupal software. This is moronic. Why would you mandate using the most unusable CMS system from an end-user point of view when you are outsourcing the hosting and maintenance to a SAAS partner? I'm sure they could have cut a better deal with Sitecore which seems to power a lot of Government sites and is a far more coherent platform with a robust workflow and integration with Active Directory services.

hvs 12y ago

First, let me say I'm not a CMS zealot. I've implemented Drupal, Sitecore, Wordpress[1], and many others. I believe in using the right tool for the job based on time, price, and capability. That said, Drupal is, without a doubt, the most complicated, confusing, and counter-intuitive piece of crap I've ever used and/or implemented. I feel sorry for the users that I've been required to subject to that monstrosity. Anyone who looks at Drupal and thinks, "Yep, that's what I need for my site!" should be considered incompetent for whatever job they have. [1] Wordpress isn't really a CMS, but it is treated like one at many corporations.

noir_lord 12y ago

I worked with Drupal for 2 years (built a specific niche business social network on top of it) and it was the worst two years of my life as a programmer. I literally will not touch Drupal projects, I'll go back to working retail before I'd be a Drupal developer again, it is an unremittingly awful platform to work on. The front end experience is horrible (even with all the tweaks in the world), CCK/Views made it just about useful then they rolled that into core but only some of it, you can forget an upgrade path between major versions in any real world scenario, the hook system is just plain bonkers. I honestly don't know how it got a reputation as the goto open source enterprise CMS, Joomla must have been truly terrible for Drupal to be the preferred solution. In the time I spent beating that monstrosity into shape I could have built the same functionality in a fraction of the time using something like Symfony. This was in the days of the 6 to 7 rollover, things may have improved, frankly I've very carefully not looked.

sickmate 12y ago
With regards to Joomla, it really is terrible when it comes to security. Versions 1.5-2.5 have major vulnerabilities that allows anyone to create an admin user unless you disable account registration. Popular plugins like TinyMCE allowed unauthorised users to upload arbitrary files with a specially crafted request. There are also plenty of bots that scan for vulnerable Joomla installs as they do with Wordpress.
rjknight 12y ago
I'm afraid it's rather like anything else - Drupal works well for people who understand what it's good for. In particular, it's good for content management, where 'content' is loosely defined as 'stuff in a database that people want to edit and publish'. The 'bonkers' hook system is basically just aspect-oriented programming. It's not to everyone's taste but it's not as though you can't figure out how it works. It's just not a typical MVC web framework, and MVC web frameworks have mostly won (which is why Drupal 8 is going to be built around Symfony components, but that's another story). I dispute that an experienced Symfony dev could build the same functionality as an experienced Drupal dev in less time. You could skew the test either way by picking requirements that favour one platform over the other, but for most general case content management (including user-generated content) requirements you'll be able to do it quicker in Drupal, mostly because you won't have to write boring stuff like: * User management * Roles and permissions * Login, password reset, activation * Basic editorial UI * RSS feeds * Custom content types * Wysiwyg editing (admittedly this can be a pain to configure) * Logging * Caching, including Varnish integration, Memcache etc. * Indexing of content into Solr/Elasticsearch And so on. Most of that stuff is plug and play, and if you're happy to accept the (very real and sometimes painful) limits that come with Drupal then you can almost always deliver functionality faster by using open source modules wisely. In general, I rarely agree with people who say "<popular piece of software/programming language/library> is an unusable piece of crap" because the evidence appears to suggest that other people are using it effectively. The fact that you didn't enjoy it doesn't automatically make it bad software (nor does it make you a bad developer for not enjoying it or figuring out how to use it effectively). Most successful systems do at least some things really well, even if they get a lot of other things badly wrong, and dismissing them makes it harder to learn from the things that they do well. For my part, I wouldn't exactly describe Drupal development as fun, compared to Ruby or Clojure. However, it can be scarily effective in the right hands.

dageshi 12y ago

Drupal is the Microsoft Excel of CMS, it's sufficiently powerful enough to store and present data for average users without them having to learn any programming.

SEJeff 12y ago

Not sure if anyone realizes this, but Drupal is what powers none other than whitehouse.gov. They even were kind enough to open source some of their tooling around Drupal. It is pretty neat stuff. https://github.com/WhiteHouse/fortyfour https://github.com/WhiteHouse/fortyfour http://whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/04/21/whitehousegov-releases-open-source-code http://whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/04/21/whitehousegov-releases...

mikecb 12y ago
It's probably the most used among Federal agencies, including top level departments: https://groups.drupal.org/government-sites#USA https://groups.drupal.org/government-sites#USA

stockli 12y ago

I'm always somewhat mystified regarding the abject hatred Drupal gets from the HN bunch... I understand a few points: 1. Perceived as overly complex. 2. Reliant on dev paradigms that originate from the PHP4 days, i.e. no OOP. 3. Performance can be a problem. 4. It's PHP, and old-school PHP at that. 5. Everything is done in the UI, and you can't ship DB-based config in code. 6. It's for people who don't know how to code. (I would argue this applies more to WP than Drupal) I get all of those points, and I agree with most of them. However, my shop uses Drupal for mid-size projects, and a little bit of WP for small ones. Here's how I see Drupal: 1. Integrated, relatively coherent API and model structure that modules can hook into. I.e. two modules don't need to explicitly know about each other for them to be used together. Thus, uncoordinated effort on disparate modules can be used together by site builders to create novel features. 2. Configuration is much less DB oriented than it was, and many things can be committed to git now. This is also continuing to improve over time, and Drupal 8 will be a major change in this regard. 3. Drupal when properly set up actually seems to provide a more consistent admin experience for users than WP does (in my experience, anyway). WP sites that use a lot of modules usually end up with the admin feeling like it was designed by many different people. Drupal used to be that way, but has greatly improved... 4. Performance with proper caching is actually pretty good. As always, you can use any good tool poorly and get poor results. 5. Drupal's codebase is extremely complex, and structured in a way that makes things very hard to debug sometimes (i.e. the hook system). Sometimes I want to do something that I consider very simple, and I can't do it without digging through the API for 4 hours trying to figure out how to do it. 6. And yes, PHP has problems. I don't like its API and that it tends to encourage poor coding practices, but as some recent threads on HN have pointed out, modern frameworks like Symfony are helping to put a cleaner face on PHP. And D8 uses Symfony. It seems like many of those that hate Drupal stopped using it in version 6, which definitely had many of the problems listed above, many of which have been addressed to some degree. Drupal 8 is based around Symfony components, which should greatly modernize the codebase, though that has been a very controversial move in the community. All of that said, Drupal still feels like the "least worst thing" for what we use it for, and I'd love to hear what people use instead of it for the types of projects we use Drupal for (custom e-commerce, large content sites with lots of different types of content, complex publishing workflows, etc). We've tried Joomla and WP at various points, and each felt like it had shortcomings for our use cases. And we don't usually get to work with huge budgets, so we have to deliver a lot of complexity for not a lot of $. Sorry, this got really long, and this thread seems a strange place to go into so much detail :). But I am genuinely interested in alternatives, and in what others are using when they just need to build a (complex) site for a customer who doesn't have the $ to start totally from scratch.