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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."
Working with drupal is a nightmare. Drupal 8 is looking much better but all below are just terrible to work with.
As opposed to what? WordPress? Joomla? Drupal does have a steeper learning curve than some of the other open source CMS's but it has more flexibility, and if you're going to standardize on one, that flexibility is important. I'm curious to know if you have a specific alternative in mind.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
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.
Disclaimer: Website developer that has used Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress, not liking any of them.
I find that Silverstripe to be a pretty neat CMS for developers and clients. Find it much easier to work with than the other major players like you listed.
The New Zealand Government actually use Silverstripe themselves and they seem to be pretty happy.
Seriously though, it is actually enjoyable to work with for the variety of projects I have used it for. In time like the others, it might reach a point that it is no longer fantastic to work with and at that point, I will find the next system to adopt.
Coding a custom CMS is a start. Programming web-based systems isn't that hard. I do it for a living, but I use Wordpress or Joomla when the customer wants it. Generally a custom CMS offers better flexibility - if you have a competent web staff that knows how to code, you can get something slick finished pretty quickly.
There's a lot of fear mongering when it comes to picking CMSes in the first place. Generally you will see people that aren't qualified to make decisions force technical staff members into a corner to "standardize" things, pissing everyone off equally. These types of decisions, in my opinion, should be left to the individual web teams that serve these separate units of government throughout the country. They have to use it every day - let them decide.
It doesn't sound like the Australian Government even knows what it needs a CMS for. At the end of the day, KISS is the best practice to follow. They're just webpages after all. You don't need a CMS that has 26,000 modules (point was made in the article) to plop up a website with a slideshow, a bunch of PDF files, an event listing, different pages full of text. You only need to determine what you want your website to do and let the technical staff make the best choice. One CMS to rule them all is quite stupid in this case, because they think they're solving a problem that doesn't really exist. They also think there will be some kind of magical collaboration that will save everyone money.
http://agov.com.au/features - Half of the features on this page are purely fluff, pointless, or outright misleading:
1.) Reponsive design - Responsive design is tied to the template and CSS - not the fucking CMS. ... image sliders. Really now? This is a reason? Every Australian Government website must have this eh?
2.) Event management - every CMS out there features some kind of event management plugin, or you can just code one yourself. This isn't a good reason to "standardize" on. Again, let the web team working on the site pick the best option.
3.) Feature carousel - They're
4.) Rich content editing - Good, finally they found one reason to standardize their CMS onto every agency - because this is such a huge problem with CMSes - wait, what? No, it's not.
You know, there's more to this than the stuff I managed to quickly slap together at 3:30 AM.
My viewpoint is the following:
Making blanket assumptions on how things are used and forcing decisions across an entire Government will only lead to unhappy workers, stifling of innovation, and harm to other great CMSes and developers out there.
That said, if every agency felt that Drupal was their best option... so be it.
3.) Feature carousel - They're ... image sliders. Really now? This is a reason? Every Australian Government website must have this eh?
Yeah, I know what you mean.
Should I use a carousel?
Coding a custom CMS is a start. Programming web-based systems isn't that hard. I do it for a living, but I use Wordpress or Joomla when the customer wants it.
I'm a consultant, and you're not thinking this through. You shouldn't start writing a new CMS from scratch whenever you start a new project. When I start a new project, say for a moderately complex web site, I go back to the beginning and design a new CPU. The new system that the CPU will fit into has to be designed, built and tested, and then a new OS written and debugged. Next a new communications protocol has to be designed, written and tested. Finally, a new set of applications written for the new OS, and then, finally, a web site.
This approach is the only reasonable way to turn a three month contract into a 15-year failed project. You've grasped the basic consulting creed of re-inventing the wheel at every opportunity, but you're not going far enough.
Work like no one is watching. Dance like you've never been hurt. Make love like you don't need the money.
Silverstripe is great, I've used it quite a bit and it does stand head & shoulders above the competition. But, possibly this is because it's written in PHP, it's dog-slow. Odd that the four comments above are all AC...