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Australian Government To Standardise On Drupal
angry tapir (1463043) writes "The Australian government is eyeing the introduction of a government-wide content-management system, with the preferred choice almost certain to be Drupal. Government documents indicate that part of the appeal is that Drupal modules can be easily shared between government agencies and with the public."
Because a drachma won't get you much!
Working with drupal is a nightmare. Drupal 8 is looking much better but all below are just terrible to work with.
That's all that's needed to be said, right?
Easy to learn (as long as you know programming) and ridiculously flexible and simple compared to Drupal, with the ability to scale up to more complex frameworks with apps. Pretty sure the Australian government is targeting this for more complex frameworks, instead of just blogs.
Django itself is more of an app development environment, although using it for blogging and such would be as simple as adding one of the existing blogging apps to it, or you could roll your own with a few lines of code.
The Django tutorial is great... so glad I found it after looking at Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, and other less popular ones.
Only requirements were:-
1) Free, since this government thinks they should get everything free while screwing over anyone in need...
2) Server must run off a 15Mb/1Mb internet connection since that's what the rest of us are doomed to...
"We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over." - Aneurin Bevan
I've been developing public and corporate web sites large and small since 1996 and I've not been able to work out why any major organisation would employ a developer who isn't
1) instantly repulsed by PHP, a play language whose increasing popularity says a lot about the change in quality of developers and little about the change in quality of the language;
2) capable of using the same old patterns for knocking out a decent, scalable framework for any web site requiring basic services (session management, authentication, article submission+publishing) in a weekend;
3) capable of writing better quality documentation to go along with it than any 3rd party open source project, which invariably omits the hundreds of gotchas one comes across.
At some point in the last decade it became fashionable to decide that not doing any work yourself, but restricting yourself to what others do for you, was a sign of competence. The third party stuff is tried, tested and secure, they said. You can rely on the third parties, they said. Nobody ever got fired from delegating to someone else. Well, this may be true if you're in no hurry to be productive, and if you enjoy homogenous ecosystems which are the target for every zero-day effort. But no enterprise should compromise on quality when it has the necessary resources to decide otherwise.
You use Linux on the servers because there's no way you could do better than the maturity, security and stability of Linux. You use Microsoft Office on the desktops because a couple hundred dollars is worth the best featured and the most familiar product. But any competent team can write a decent web framework.
Never used drupal nor wordpress
I stopped using CMS's a couple of years ago for anything important. A good python framework like Web2Py or Django, or even Rails (anything but PHP ffs), is easier to maintain than Drupal, Wordpress or any other CMS. And any back end development (even just templating) with a framework is miles ahead. It's amazing so many Drupal and CMS loyalists don't yet know what a proper framework is, or the power it can offer them! Web2Py is by far the easiest of the bunch. I challenge any CMS developer give it a go, and then go back to Drupal.
A lot of them currently use HP TRIM, hell I'd prefer Drupal 0.1 alpha over TRIM.
The Drupal project is one of the largest open source projects in the world. It's architected to be a flexible, secure, and very customizable platform which consists of thousands of different modules. It's more than a CMS... it's a platform for building your own custom CMS.
It is also a huge bucket of SHIT. They tried to make it a tool to do everything and in the end all they got was a god aweful mess, Also Secure is NOT one of its shining points, nearly every drupal site I have had to review was riddled with vulnerabilities, cross site scripting and aweful coding practises which seem to be fostered by the terrible development environment that is Drupal.
Secure?? you have got to be fucking joking. https://drupal.org/security that is not the record of a product with good security practises. The vulnerabilities in the core alone are bad enough, but add in all the vulnerabilities from common modules and you have a pigs breakfast.
one of the largest
So? The Soviet Union was one of the largest empires in the world. India has one of the largest populations in the world. What is the benefit of being the "largest" anything?
It's architected to be a flexible
Define "flexible", comparing and contrasting with the flexibility I gain with fifteen years of development experience a blank emacs window.
secure
NT 3.1 had a fairly decent security architecture. It wasn't secure, though.
very customizable
Define "very".
which consists of thousands of different modules
Fabulous! what every project wants - nay, needs - is to import THOUSANDS of different modules.
it's a platform for building your own custom CMS
Hm, wait a second, this is vague enough...
- flexible;
- very customizable;
- thousands of different modules;
- platform for building custom software;
From this - "GovCMS is intended to support more effective web channel delivery functions " it looks like they are talking about web sites - intranet and internet.
In Australian government the major CMS products in use are Sharepoint Documentum Drupal and Confluence
which consists of thousands of different modules
Fabulous! what every project wants - nay, needs - is to import THOUSANDS of different modules.
Yeah, and that's exactly how many modules are used in a typical Drupal site... why are people who truly know nothign about Drupal posting bad things about it..?
-Myke
Cheap hosting providers won't be serving anything important.
But why would the government of Australia use cheap shared hosting? The web server process on any VPS should be able to speak FastCGI or SCGI to your Python application server. Or is the problem that the vast majority of potential candidates for web developer positions have PHP experience because they learned web development while maintaining a portfolio of web applications on cheap shared hosting?
Making things up is fun and all, but PHP is the most popular language on the internet, and shows no signs of decreased usage whatsoever.
So in the light of actual data, your "strong opinion" that it's like COBOL and "on the way out", is fucking moronic.
There's plenty of valid reasons to criticize PHP, but this isn't one of them.
So in order of people who hate their jobs and life...
1) Exchange mail managers
2) Backup server managers
3) Drupal admins
That sound about right ?
Yeah I used my own hand-written framework too. Like a decade ago.
Every hand-rolled CMS/framework my company (and previous companies) has taken over has been a complete fucking nightmare. Every single one.
Your dismissal of the benefits of a standardized platform that you can actually hire experienced developers for is astounding.
"Australia Gov: It was a bad move to standardize on drupal." Let's see how long it takes.
why are people who truly know nothign about Drupal posting bad things about it..?
Because A.) it's the popular kid in class, B.) it's the kid in class that gets all the chicks, and C.) they just don't get it and never will.
People fear what they can't understand--so in many cases, they worry about their job security.
Yep, there is the "standard" Heh.. It is so flexable.... :p
You know, this could be a really good thing. Hire local firms to make modules for each department.
Tie everything to the user account or property record
Water/sewer department
Power/lights department
Phone / Internet / Cable department
Building department
Schools
Library
Public Works
Police/fire
Tax department
In one place, using one account, the user can log in, pay their bills, check kids homework, renew a library book. Its a powerful idea. Build the local economy, make life easier for the citizens, I think its a grat idea.
You do it first.
Far from being a standard, but consistently selected for technical capabilities, and for attending accessibility requirements among other criteria, Brazil federal and several other government branches have selected Plone, as one can see in nationwide portals such as "http://brasil.gov.br"
+pypy, nginx and/or wsgi, postgresql, zurb foundation (or bootstrap 3 if they really know/prefer it), jquery, D3, maybe something like angular.js down the road (go for easy as apposed to powerful).
Maybe some haskell or racket for backend stuff. All you need is a few good programmers for this. Stick to functional style. Worship the state.
The future will be more functional I think, however. In order to maximize utility the computer and it's master both need to understand the difference between state and function. And data types. And better development tools. Perhaps something more like nodebox / lighttable / sublime. But web2py built-in IDE and API interface are pretty bad ass though. Try it out.
This selection of tools is all about maximization of utility.
Drupal sites I run don't use thousands of modules. But they do use dozens, and I'm nervous as shit because there is really no way for me to evaluate the security of all that module code that's originated in god-knows-where.
SpyDock: Scientific Python in a Docker container
There is a burgeoning (maybe that's too strong) module certification effort now happening. Top Shelf Modules is one group; I think CommerceGuys does it for things in their catalog, there's another that I always forget. So, progress occurs.
Realize that there are still lots of vulnerabilities in core C libraries - not to mention that C is inherently unsafe and must be handled with care. Many of the vulnerabilities in Drupal, PHP and other tools are really just exposing the failings of C. But not to start a flame war... :)
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Beyond the mess of semi-maintained modules (not to mention the reluctance of many "maintainers" to admit design flaws as bugs), Drupal has one serious shortcoming for serious website development - the database. Without bringing up the performance issues you get when you've got 20 modules, each having to join in it's own set of tables to a basic Node query, it's still the weak spot for using Drupal for serious work.
Nearly everything, from content to configuration, is stored in the database. Migrating changes from development, through staging/testing instances and finally onto production servers is an error-prone nightmare. It doesn't matter if you're trying to do it by hand or using home-grown scripts to suck changes out of the DB and push them onto a new server, there's just too many places for something to get missed or for some reference to an auto-generated node ID to not mesh up between systems.
drupal is total crap - it really is. The code behind it is of the poorest quality, they will definitely regret the decision. I know it has a module for *everything* - but that is also it's hugest problem. I've worked on drupal sites with hundreds of modules... such a nightmare. It really isn't that hard to write a good web application - they should hire a couple of engineers and choose a solid framework like Zend to build software that does what they need it to do, make that open source and cultivate it over time into something good.