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FCC.gov: A Modern Open Platform
An anonymous reader writes "FCC.gov just launched a public beta which aims to take the agency into the future. The $1.35 million site follows the WhiteHouse.gov lead to Drupal. Agency director Steven Van Roekel spoke with O'Reilly about the agency's push for an open platform: 'It's not breakthrough stuff, but it's breakthrough for government.'"
So now we can find out twice as fast that it costs $1 million to start a radio station!
There must be something compelling about Drupal, but I've found it really confusing and troublesome to work with as compared to, say, Wordpress. Why is it chosen for big projects like this?
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A brand new site would have been a golden opportunity to lock themselves into some sort of proprietary solution developed by an incompetent but well connected contractor, complete with an endless upgrade treadmill of licensing fees and restrictions.
Instead, they go with Drupal. Why does the FCC hate business so much?
Yours In Akademgorodok,
K. Trout.
Woot, the FCC is following this retarded "beta" website fad. Started with Google, and now EVERYONE has caught on--news sites, vendors' hardware driver sites, forums, etc. Yes, our site is in a constant state of development, so let's misuse the beta term.
But at least some people do realize what has been going on.
Ok, now who are you and what have you done with the FCC?! It certainly is unusual to hear of a government agency doing anything sane with technology, so kudos to the FCC! While Drupal has its detractors, it's a great platform if you know what you're doing. So I'm glad to see the FCC taking advantage of good OSS and thereby delivering a better product to the people at a lower overall cost. Sadly, the US government is not known for this sort of thing.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
There's vested interest to see it fail; all the current proprietary vendors will see to that. This is assuming everyone involved actually want this thing to work, and are not engaging in their own empire building. Sorry dudes (and dudettes) but this thing will go see cost overrun of epic proportion before finally been canceled.
I hope many more government agencies being following redesign, their sites are hurtful even with my contacts out. When I went to the current fcc.gov page it was "wow..." the "beta" site looks at least current and willingly viewable. Certainly won't hurt their abandonment rate! And yes I get the whole "don't judge a site by it's css" which is cute and all, but bad usability is just laziness. And design is certainly part of usability.
A government agency changes its website to the usual CMS/Jquery plugin with nice graphics interface that gets installed into most websites these days. How is this news?
I'd rather read about the efforts of the State Department, their website looks better imho, and they have pretty neat technology when it comes to visa applications. They have this image detection routine that will detect if you are wearing glasses, or if the picture has the wrong proportions based on the frame of your face and the frame of the image. They even have the barcode that you scan to get a mobile app. Wouldn't that be something worthy of this news site?
However it does depend heavily on 3:rd party modules and not all of them actually clean up the DB after you install them. I have an old site, upgraded from Drupal 4.X-something, and while upgrade path has been rough at times, I've always managed to get it to work. However my DB is now a mess of unused tables that I'm not sure if I can delete.
I've tried the module "backup and migrate" to move the tables I "think" I need to another site, but unfortunatly I haven't managed to get it to work yet. It's either move the "whole mess" or it won't work.
A shame that it isn't easier, although D7 is a great step forward.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
Ahh, it's been a few days since a Slashdot story mentioned Drupal.
What IS it with Drupal and Slashdot? It's only used by ~1% of websites, AFAIK.
Just because the U.S. is a republic does not mean it is not a democracy. Democracy/republic are not mutually exclusive.
I've done 2 (and a half) magazine sites writing fully custom CMS and am finishing a site with Drupal. Drupal can be pretty annoying but in the end you get caching for free which is a huge plus. Unlike Wordpress it's not for the "I just want to blog" crowd ("Born to Blog" might be a good t-shirt ...) and faced with another site that needs fully customizable pages, I'd only pick Drupal again if the budget was really low or if they were OK with it looking like Drupal's river of news. Next time out, Django.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
...by those who know what RF is. And not do something stupid like allocate broadband systems next to GPS spectrum.
mfwright@batnet.com
Personally, I do not like the idea of .gov sites using addthis.com to add/manage content to their site. There are plenty of scenarios where this can be abused by third party sites (see addthis.com "partners" page).
FCC.gov's privacy page does not clearly mention this, nor does it provide links to opt-out from advertising networks (yes, I know, another cookie to opt you out, but something is better than nothing: http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp
(yes, I submitted this information to them as well)
It is a noble effort to modernize things. I just hope they approach this with caution.
This sig can be distributed under the LGPL license
So this leaves me wondering what happened to the http://reboot.fcc.gov/ initiative announced back in January which was built using Liferay ( http://www.liferay.com/ )
Leave it to the US Government to spend $1.35 million deploying a website on a free, open-source platform. Hey, Uncle Sam - I'll do the same quality site for the bargain price of $500,000.
I would like to see some replies to this. As a ham radio operator, I have had PLENTY of issues as well.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fbeta.fcc.gov%2F&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0
but also
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fslashdot.org%2F&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0&user-agent=W3C_Validator%2F1.2
I just don't understand why. Can anybody explain?
This the FCC (YEA YEA boradcast flag, sell Verizon and ATT&T anything they want, he its not OTA but we can regulate ISPs because um...well we want too) we are talking about.
They actually did something supportive of open standards, and freedom for a change. I mean really its a shock that they new site is not being developed on Sharepoint! I almost spit my coffee out when when I read this! I mean they DID NOT PICK Sharepoint! Hope is alive!
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
So let me get this straight... the FCC... basically the watchdog of the communication world... put its site on Terramark's cloud... which was purchased by..... wait for it..... Verizon... the very people they watch. http://www.mbtmag.com/Content.aspx?id=2346
Am I lying when I tell you that im telling the truth? Or am I telling the truth when I say that Im lying?
It is a very costly CMS.
It has a very steep learning curve, and is minimally documented.
And then it's slow.
waste of $ even when free
barf.
$1.35 million for this? Seriously? Building a custom Drupal template is trivial. It's not a bad-looking site, but it's basically a homepage design and a single template for all other pages. And navigating the site I'm not seeing a significant amount of content, in fact, a decent amount of it links off to other government sites. And there are some odd, inconsistent navigational elements here and there. I'm curious to know who was responsible for the content load, FCC employees or the developer.
Regardless, the cost is outrageous. In my experience, it's not difficult to find a good-sized corporation would balking at paying $50,000 for a site like this. I expect the US government to overspend, but I would have put the cost at $200k - $300k. Spending over $1 million on this is just idiotic.
Quick, someone tell EMC and IBM that Documentum, eRoom, and FileNet aren't CMS.
Strange to exclude the two biggest players in the CMS space.
Though, I guess most of the things on the list are more keyed to web-publishing than content management.
Boy, are you retarded. Maybe they should commit you!
curl -I data.fcc.gov
The article makes it sound like Drupal is this great thing that's providing all this new data transparency. It appears that that APIs are actually written in Java. Big D only powers the pretty face.
Is modern supposed to imply a website designed to be 1024 pixels wide?