Australian government likely to standardise on Drupal

Re:Australian government likely to standardise on Drupal by danso on Saturday May 10, 2014 @09:30AM (#7725317)

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-globa...

https://groups.drupal.org/node/194808

Viewing the source code of the current data.gov (view-source: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/

Here's the shit-show that was apparently Data.gov's Drupal installation: 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

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Re:Australian government likely to standardise on Drupal by fredsted on Saturday May 10, 2014 @09:49AM (#7725375)

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), a dedicated data searching engine. Probably better than Drupal for that purpose anyhow. Can't see how that is damning for drupal.

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Re:Australian government likely to standardise on Drupal by danso on Saturday May 10, 2014 @10:56AM (#7725611)

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

> 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?

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Re:Australian government likely to standardise on Drupal by fredsted on Saturday May 10, 2014 @11:45AM (#7725797)

Yes you are right about that, but I'm thinking that Drupal was the wrong backend for that system to begin with. If you're using the wrong tool, it's the makers of the system that are at fault, not Drupal. I mean Drupal is used by many popular sites with success, most are switching to Drupal, not from it. As you say, Drupal is a CMS system. It's not a data platform. Think newspapers vs data.gov. From my perspective you could make data.gov in Drupal no problem, but that doesn't mean you couldn't do it better, faster, easier with some more specialized software. CKAN does all these things Drupal does not (http://ckan.org/features/) that 99% using Drupal don't need. Looking at that it seems strange to me they chose Drupal to begin with.

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Re:Australian government likely to standardise on Drupal by danso on Saturday May 10, 2014 @12:16PM (#7725906)

Yes...you and I are in agreeance here...and to be fair to the government, I would argue 99% of clients don't exactly know what they need. I'm not arguing that Drupal is always wrong, or that it is inherently bad...I'm arguing that it provides too much for what users actually need...that it was dropped for Wordpress is an indication that they thought Drupal itself could be the data-handling platform. Hell, they probably don't even need WordPress and could probably do much of it in Jekyll or some other static deployment.

I used Drupal back in the 5.x days and thought it was pretty swell, but that was when I was a rookie developer who had almost no real full-stack dev experience. Now I can't think of a single use case in which Drupal's purported feature set is needed that would not be better fulfilled by just going to Django/Rails. The hackery that seemingly has to be done to meet clients' perceived needs almost eliminates whatever advantage Drupal in terms of a community of knowledgable developers to hire from. And I would question whether there are really more Drupal-only developers than Rails-only developers (certainly, there are way more Wordpress developers).

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