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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.'"
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?
HEY NOW
Wordpress is great for some jobs, Drupal is perfect for most others.
Let them live together in peace, there is no reason to start an Open Source Content Management System war.
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
Yeah, an Open Source Content Management System war would be almost as absurd as people fighting over text editors, or something like that.
It really depends on your needs.
http://www.cmsmatrix.org/matrix/cms-matrix Will allow you to compare CMSs. Drupal is a much more complex and flexable system then Wordpress. That comes at a cost in simplicity. I think the key here is "big projects like this"
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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
Because Drupal can scale and fit into most development life cycles. There are thousands of modules available so you don't have to re-invent the wheel. Views + CCK is a relatively easy way to build sql queries through a simple UI. Developer tools abound; drush, ctools, integration with firebug, devel, theme developer, etc. Lots of APIs to hook into almost anything Drupal does (node API, forms API, etc), and quick integration with 3rd party systems through services (XMLRPC, JSON, JSON-RPC, REST, SOAP, AMF, etc). Yes, it has a steep learning curve, but unlike Wordpress, Drupal is written for developers, not end users.
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
You may want to checkout installation profiles, this might be a good fit for you.
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
I am not just referring to Wordpress, however, and I find some other systems like Joomla equally disastrous. Yet plenty of smart people are choosing these systems every day.
I'm not trying to start a war, I genuinely think I am missing something. What makes Drupal perfect for those other jobs?
Wordpress is great if it suits your needs. I use it a lot. When a friend asks to install a website, I'm prepared to install it, but only Wordpress. It's simple to learn for them, and this keeps it simple for me as well.
Drupal has several advantages. It has version control, so you look back at older versions, and you can even publish different versions at the same time. Another great feature is rights control. You can give sections or pages or elements of pages rights, and limit what users can see or do depending on their user role. For big websites, drupal is better suited.
At work we use it. We have one base installation, and hundreds of sites use that same base. Per site you can change what you like. I believe Wordpress is multisite as well, but I don't know exactly what it offers.
Not a penny of that was actually spent on the open-source platform. That was labor costs (project planning, custom coding, design, testing, and many many layers of management, auditing, and bureaucratic oversight), and I'm sure a very healthy chunk was spent in the data center costs (dedicated machines, load balancing, content delivery networks). Of course since it's a Federal project, the data center is also required to go through all those same layers of management, auditing, and bureaucratic oversight.
All things considered, $1.35 million is pretty damn cheap for something of this scope produced by and for the Federal government. I've seen small companies drop anywhere from $25k to $100k on custom Drupal sites, and the NYTimes paywall was $40 million.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....